lost world

plural lost worlds

1. attributiveoftenAn unknown world out of time, place, or both, the topic of a subgenre of fantasy or science fiction.

   1 more example

   Developed by such popular writers as Arthur Conan Doyle, H. Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Abraham Merrit, the lost world novel presents small, encapsulated worlds, inhabited by the living fossils of some prehistoric culture, often with dinosaurs or other extinct beasts thrown in for good measure.

   2014, Elana Gomel, Narrative Space and Time: Representing Impossible Topologies in Literature, Routledge, →ISBN

2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see lost, world.

   What I’m describing, of course, is a lost world, glimpsed only through history books or the memories of old people.

   2023 July 21, Caitlin Flanagan, “America’s Corporate Tragedy”, in The Atlantic