The first science fiction I read as a school boy was The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the illustrious detective Sherlock Holmes. In this novel, published in 1912, dinosaurs that strode the Earth some 170 million years ago are alive and well deep in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. The novel also features the striking appearance of the paleontologist Professor Challenger, who risks his professional reputation by setting off on an expedition and returning with a captured pterodactyl to make a public announcement of the ‘lost world's’ existence in England.

The term ‘science fiction’ itself was coined in 1851 by the English bookseller and author William Wilson. The term dates to 1926 when Luxembourger-American inventor Hugo Gernsback published the world's first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. It might therefore be somewhat problematic to refer to The Lost World, which came out prior to the formation of the genre, as ‘sci-fi.’ However, by the time I read this work in a juvenile edition in the early 1960s, it had already been adapted twice to film. It is notable that the first issue of Japan's first magazine dedicated to speculative and science fiction novels, SF Magazine, the February 1960 issue, was already on the market at the end of December 1959. I must have read it in elementary school around 1963, by which point it had not been crowned as a classic, The Lost World was nevertheless considered science fiction. For someone like me, born in 1955, one year after the official debut of Japan's first monster movie Gojira (the original Japanese title for Godzilla), the rampaging monsters, which had already been made into a series by Maruyama films, closely resembled Doyle's dinosaurs. Hence, I did not perceive much difference between classic science fiction and monster movies. I already belonged to the new generation captivated by Kingu Kongu tai Gojira (King Kong vs. Godzilla, 1962) and San daikaiju: Chikyu saidai no kessen (Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster, 1964), which came out after Gojira.

Similarly, starting with Osamu Tezuka's manga character Ambassador Atom in 1951, or The Mighty Atom (renamed Astroboy in the United States), the most popular episode in the series for this next generation was The Greatest Robot on Earth (1965). It resembled monster movies and helped establish Atom himself as a global standard.