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} }) </script> </div> </form> </fieldset> <article class="entryArticle content STeditorial"> <header class="entryHeader icon-theme"> <h1 class="entryTitle">Atlantis </h1> </header><p class='tagLine'>Entry updated 25 January 2021. Tagged: Theme.</p><div class="browsingBtns"> <span> <input class="button PNI previous" type="button" onclick="window.location.href='/next.php?id=p&entry=atlantis'" value="Prev" /> </span> <span> <input class="button PNI next" type="button" onclick="window.location.href='/next.php?&entry=atlantis'" value="Next" /> </span> <span> <input class="button PNI incoming" type="button" onclick="window.location.href='/incoming.php?entry=atlantis'" value="About This Entry" title="What links to the entry; contributor initials explained; how to cite; other information" /> </span> </div><p style='float:right; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:10px; position: relative; top: 3px;'> <a href='/gallery.php?id=DeCamp-LostContinents.jpg' target='_blank'> <img src='https://x.sf-encyclopedia.com/gal/thumbs/DeCamp-LostContinents.jpg' alt='pic'></a></p> <p>The legend of Atlantis, an advanced civilization on a continent (or large <a href="/entry/islands">Island</a>) in the middle of the Atlantic which was overwhelmed by some geological cataclysm, has its earliest extant source in <a href="/entry/plato">Plato</a>'s dialogues <i>Timaeus</i> and <i>Critias</i> (<i>circa</i> 350 BCE). The legend can be seen as a parable of the Fall of Man, and writers who have since embroidered the story have generally shown less interest in the cataclysm itself than in the attributes of the prelapsarian Atlanteans, who have often been given moral and scientific powers surpassing those of mere modern humans. Francis <a href="/entry/bacon_francis">Bacon</a>'s <i>New Atlantis</i> (bound in with <i>Sylva Sylvarum</i> <b>1626</b>; <b>1627</b> chap) portrays Atlantean survivors as the founders of a scientific utopia in North America. However, it was not until Ignatius <a href="/entry/donnelly_ignatius">Donnelly</a> published his <i>Atlantis: The Antediluvian World</i> (<b>1882</b>) that the lost continent became a great popular myth. Donnelly's monomaniacal work contained much impressive learning and professed to be nonfiction. Unlike Plato and Bacon, who had treated Atlantis as an exemplary parable, Donnelly was convinced that the continent had existed and had been the source of all civilization. In fact, Donnelly's was a mythopoeic book of considerable power, arguably ancestral to all the <a href="/entry/pseudoscience">Pseudoscience</a> texts of the twentieth century, and the inspiration for many works of fiction.</p> <p>Atlantis had already been used in sf by Jules <a href="/entry/verne_jules">Verne</a>. His <i>Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea</i> (<b>1870</b>; trans <b>1873</b>) contains a brief but effective scene in which Captain Nemo and the narrator explore the tumbled ruins of an Atlantean city. Some of the fiction inspired by the theories of the Theosophists (see <a href="/entry/theosophy">Theosophy</a>) and spiritualists was less restrained – e.g., <i>A Dweller on Two Planets</i> (<b>1894</b>) by <a href="/entry/phylos_the_thibetan">Phylos the Thibetan</a> (Frederick Spencer Oliver), in which the hero "remembers" his previous incarnation as a ruler of Atlantis. Other writers used Atlantis more as a setting for rousing adventure, one of the best examples being <i>The Lost Continent</i> (<b>1900</b>) by C J Cutcliffe <a href="/entry/hyne_c_j_cutcliffe">Hyne</a>, a first-person narrative "framed" by the discovery of an ancient manuscript in the Canaries. David M <a href="/entry/parry_david_maclean">Parry</a>'s <i>The Scarlet Empire</i> (<b>1906</b>), on the other hand, is set in the present (it depicts Atlantis preserved under a huge watertight dome, an image which has since become a comic-strip cliché) and intended as a <a href="/entry/satire">Satire</a> of socialism. (Other stories about a surviving Atlantis are listed in <a href="/entry/under_the_sea">Under the Sea</a>.)</p> <p>One of the most successful of all Atlantean romances, filmed four times (see <i>Die</i> <a href="/entry/herrin_von_atlantis_die">Herrin von Atlantis</a>), was Pierre <a href="/entry/benoit_pierre">Benoit</a>'s <i>L'Atlantide</i> (<b>1919</b>; trans as <i>Atlantida</i> <b>1920</b>; vt <i>The Queen of Atlantis</i>) which concerns the present-day discovery of Atlantis in the Sahara. Benoit was accused of plagiarizing H Rider <a href="/entry/haggard_h_rider">Haggard</a>'s <i>The Yellow God</i> (<b>1908</b>) for many of the details of his story. In fact, the latter was not an Atlantean romance, and nor was Haggard's <i>When the World Shook</i> (<b>1919</b>), set in Polynesia, although it has been so described. Arthur Conan <a href="/entry/doyle_arthur_conan">Doyle</a> produced one Atlantis story, "The Maracot Deep", to be found in <i>The Maracot Deep</i> (coll <b>1929</b>), which is marred as sf by a large admixture of spiritualism. Stanton A <a href="/entry/coblentz_stanton_a">Coblentz</a>'s <i>The Sunken World</i> (Summer 1928 <a href="/entry/amazing_stories_quarterly">Amazing Stories Quarterly</a>; rev <b>1949</b>) has much in common with Parry's <i>The Scarlet Empire</i>: it involves the contemporary discovery of a domed undersea <a href="/entry/cities">City</a>, and the purpose of the story is largely satirical. Dennis <a href="/entry/wheatley_dennis">Wheatley</a>'s <i>They Found Atlantis</i> (<b>1936</b>) contains more of the same, but without the satire.</p> <p>The heyday of Atlantean fiction was 1885-1930. Often a subgenre of the <a href="/entry/lost_worlds">Lost-World</a> story, sometimes of the <a href="/entry/utopias">Utopian</a> story, sometimes both, it was perhaps most often the vehicle for occultist speculation about spiritual powers, and therefore only marginally sf. Atlantis rises and falls <i>twice</i> in Ira C <a href="/entry/fuller_ira_c">Fuller</a>'s anonymously published <i>The Mysteries of the Formation of the Earth, the Rising and Sinking of Continents, the Introduction of Man and His Destiny Revealed, in God's Own Way and Time</i> (<b>1899</b>).</p> <p>Incidental use of the Atlantis motif by S P <a href="/entry/meek_s_p">Meek</a> and many others became common in US <a href="/entry/magazines">Magazine</a> sf. Even E E <a href="/entry/smith_e_e">Smith</a>'s <a href="/entry/far_future">Far-Future</a> <b>Lensman</b> <a href="/entry/space_opera">Space Opera</a> sequence devotes a chapter of back-story to "The Fall of Atlantis" in the novel version of <i>Triplanetary</i> (January-April 1934 <a href="/entry/amazing">Amazing</a>; rev to fit the series <b>1948</b>). Many stories are set in other mythical lands cognate with Atlantis – Mu, Lemuria, Hyperborea, Ultima Thule, etc. Fantasy writers who have used such settings include Lin <a href="/entry/carter_lin">Carter</a>, Avram <a href="/entry/davidson_avram">Davidson</a>, L Sprague <a href="/entry/de_camp_l_sprague">de Camp</a>, Robert E <a href="/entry/howard_robert_e">Howard</a>, Henry <a href="/entry/kuttner_henry">Kuttner</a> and Clark Ashton <a href="/entry/smith_clark_ashton">Smith</a>. Two sf/historical novels, <i>Stonehenge</i> (<b>1972</b>) by Harry <a href="/entry/harrison_harry">Harrison</a> and Leon <a href="/entry/stover_leon_e">Stover</a> and <i>The Dancer from Atlantis</i> (<b>1971</b>) by Poul <a href="/entry/anderson_poul">Anderson</a>, fit Atlantis into the Mycenean Greek world.</p> <p>Several UK writers continued the pursuit of Atlantis. Francis <a href="/entry/ashton_francis_leslie">Ashton</a>'s <i>The Breaking of the Seals</i> (<b>1946</b>) and its follow-up, <i>Alas, That Great City</i> (<b>1948</b>), are old-fashioned romances in which the heroes are cast backwards in time by mystical means. In Pelham <a href="/entry/groom_pelham">Groom</a>'s <i>The Purple Twilight</i> (<b>1948</b>), Martians destroy Atlantis in self-defence, later almost destroying themselves by nuclear <a href="/entry/war">War</a>. John Cowper <a href="/entry/powys_john_cowper">Powys</a>'s <i>Atlantis</i> (<b>1954</b>) is an eccentric philosophical novel in which the aged Odysseus visits the drowned Atlantis <i>en route</i> from Ithaca to the USA.</p> <p>However, for post-World War Two readers Atlantis seems to have lost its spell-binding quality, and the later twentieth-century films in which it has appeared, such as <a href="/entry/atlantis_the_lost_continent">Atlantis, the Lost Continent</a> (<i>1960</i>) and <i>Warlords of Atlantis</i> (<i>1978</i>), have had little to recommend them – though more than the dire television series <i>The</i> <a href="/entry/man_from_atlantis_the">Man from Atlantis</a> (<i>1977-1978</i>), which features a hero with webbed hands. An Atlantean series by Jane <a href="/entry/gaskell_jane">Gaskell</a>, colourful and inventive, but written in a highly emotive prose, is the <b>Cija</b> sequence: <i>The Serpent</i> (<b>1963</b>; vt 2vols <i>The Serpent</i> <b>1975</b> and <i>The Dragon</i> <b>1975</b>), <i>Atlan</i> (<b>1965</b>), <i>The City</i> (<b>1966</b>) and <i>Some Summer Lands</i> (<b>1977</b>). These form the autobiography of a princess of Atlantis, contain a considerable amount of sexual fantasy, and are closer to popular romance than to sf proper. Taylor <a href="/entry/caldwell_taylor">Caldwell</a>'s <i>The Romance of Atlantis</i> (<b>1975</b>; published version written with Jess Stearn), is based, she claimed, on childhood dreams of her previous incarnation as an Atlantean empress. A very symbolic Atlantis arises again from the waves in Ursula K <a href="/entry/le_guin_ursula_k">Le Guin</a>'s <i>The New Atlantis</i> (in <i>The New Atlantis</i>, anth <b>1975</b>, ed Robert <a href="/entry/silverberg_robert">Silverberg</a>; <b>1989</b> chap dos) as a <a href="/entry/dystopias">Dystopian</a> USA begins to sink.</p> <p>Where Le Guin's story gave new metaphoric life to Atlantis, most of the sunken continent's few appearances in the 1980s were romantic melodramas whose view of Atlantis was on the whole traditional. One of these was Marion Zimmer <a href="/entry/bradley_marion_zimmer">Bradley</a>'s <b>Atlantis Chronicles</b>: <i>Web of Light</i> (<b>1982</b>) and <i>Web of Darkness</i> (<b>1984</b>), both assembled as <i>Web of Darkness</i> (omni <b>1985</b>; vt <i>The Fall of Atlantis</i> <b>1987</b>). These fantasies about Atlantean conflicts between forces of light and darkness had their origin in a long, unpublished romance Bradley wrote as a teenager, and indeed their subject matter seems more appropriate to the 1940s than the 1980s. David A <a href="/entry/gemmell_david_a">Gemmell</a>'s lively <a href="/entry/post-holocaust">Post-Holocaust</a> <b>Sipstrassi</b> series of science-fantasy novels features stones of healing and/or destruction whose source is Atlantis; Atlantis itself plays a prominent role (through gateways between past and future) in the fourth of the series, <i>The Last Guardian</i> (<b>1989</b>) – a complex plan to save its destruction through changing history comes to nothing, though it does produce Noah.</p> <p>In the twenty-first century, Disney offered an animated film treatment somewhat in the Verne tradition with <a href="/entry/atlantis_the_lost_empire">Atlantis: The Lost Empire</a> (<i>2001</i>). The <a href="/entry/stargate_sg-1">Stargate SG-1</a> (<i>1997-2007</i>) spinoff series <a href="/entry/stargate_atlantis">Stargate: Atlantis</a> (<i>2004-2009</i>) recklessly reimagined Atlantis as a mobile <a href="/entry/space_habitats">Space Habitat</a> or <a href="/entry/world_ships">World Ship</a> once stationed on Earth but long since moved far off in space. Rather similarly, "Camlantis" in Stephen <a href="/entry/hunt_stephen">Hunt</a>'s <i>The Kingdom Beyond the Waves</i> (<b>2008</b>) is a lost aerial <a href="/entry/cities">City</a>. Many years earlier, halfway through the twentieth century, Isaac <a href="/entry/asimov_isaac">Asimov</a> postulated another aerial Atlantis whose destruction provides the excuse for a feeble pun (see <a href="/entry/feghoots">Feghoots</a>) in "Shah Guido G" (November 1951 <i>Marvel Science Fiction</i>).</p> <p>Several relevant stories are collected in <i>Isaac Asimov's Magical Worlds of Fantasy #9: Atlantis</i> (anth <b>1987</b>) edited by Isaac <a href="/entry/asimov_isaac">Asimov</a>, Martin H <a href="/entry/greenberg_martin_h">Greenberg</a> and Charles G <a href="/entry/waugh_charles_g">Waugh</a>. A good nonfiction work on the subject is <i>Lost Continents: The Atlantis Theme in History, Science and Literature</i> (<b>1954</b>; rev <b>1970</b>) by L Sprague <a href="/entry/de_camp_l_sprague">de Camp</a>. Henry M Eichner's <i>Atlantean Chronicles</i> (<b>1971</b>) is a bibliography with level-headed annotations. Other rational books on the subject are few and far between, but <i>The End of Atlantis</i> (<b>1969</b>) by J V Luce and <i>The Search for Lost Worlds</i> (<b>1975</b>) by James Wellard are useful and entertaining. H R Stahel's <i>Atlantis Illustrated</i> (graph <b>1982</b>) is an entirely hypothetical reconstruction of Atlantis based remotely on Plato's description. Colin <a href="/entry/wilson_colin">Wilson</a>'s <i>From Atlantis to the Sphinx: Recovering the Lost Wisdom of the Ancient World</i> (<b>1996</b>) locates its titular "lost wisdom" in cultures like Atlantis, before issues of fertility (and male control over reproduction) began to shape human civilizations. [DP/PN/DRL]</p> <p><b>see also:</b> <a href="/entry/elements">Elements</a>; <a href="/entry/paranoia">Paranoia</a>; <a href="/entry/sweden">Sweden</a>.</p> <p><b>further reading</b></p> <ul class="x"> <li>L Sprague <a href="/entry/de_camp_l_sprague">de Camp</a>. <em><a href="/sfeshop.php?field-keywords=Lands+Beyond&field-author=De+Camp+L+Sprague" class="link-amazon" target="_blank">Lands Beyond</a></em> (New York: Rinehart and Company, <b>1952</b>) with Willy <a href="/entry/ley_willy">Ley</a> [nonfiction: hb/Charles Skaggs]</li> <li>L Sprague <a href="/entry/de_camp_l_sprague">de Camp</a>. <em><a href="/sfeshop.php?field-keywords=Lost+Continents+The+Atlantis+Theme+in+History&field-author=De+Camp+L+Sprague" class="link-amazon" target="_blank">Lost Continents: The Atlantis Theme in History, Science, and Literature</a></em> (New York: Gnome Press, <b>1954</b>) [nonfiction: coll: one essay on Atlantis: hb/Ric <a href="/entry/binkley_ric">Binkley</a>]</li> <li>J V Luce. <em><a href="/sfeshop.php?field-keywords=The+End+of+Atlantis+New+Aspects+of+Antiquity&field-author=J+V+Luce" class="link-amazon" target="_blank">The End of Atlantis: New Aspects of Antiquity</a></em> (London: Thames and Hudson, <b>1969</b>) [nonfiction: hb/]</li> <li>Henry M Eichner. <em><a href="/sfeshop.php?field-keywords=Atlantean+Chronicles&field-author=Henry+M+Eichner" class="link-amazon" target="_blank">Atlantean Chronicles</a></em> (Alhambra, California: Fantasy Publishing Company, <b>1971</b>) [nonfiction: illus/various: hb/Henry M Eichner]</li> <li>James Wellard. <em><a href="/sfeshop.php?field-keywords=The+Search+for+Lost+Worlds+An+Exploration+of+the&field-author=James+Wellard" class="link-amazon" target="_blank">The Search for Lost Worlds: An Exploration of the Lands of Myth and Legend, Including Atlantis, Sheba, and Avalon</a></em> (London: Pan Books, <b>1975</b>) [nonfiction: pb/]</li> <li>H R Stahel. <em><a href="/sfeshop.php?field-keywords=Atlantis+Illustrated&field-author=H+R+Stahel" class="link-amazon" target="_blank">Atlantis Illustrated</a></em> (New York: Grosset and Dunlap Publishers, <b>1982</b>) [graph: introduction by Isaac <a href="/entry/asimov_isaac">Asimov</a>: illus/pb/H R Stahel]</li> <li>Isaac <a href="/entry/asimov_isaac">Asimov</a>, Martin H <a href="/entry/greenberg_martin_h">Greenberg</a> and Charles G <a href="/entry/waugh_charles_g">Waugh</a>, editors. <em><a href="/sfeshop.php?field-keywords=Isaac+Asimov+Magical+Worlds+of+Fantasy+%239&field-author=Asimov+Isaac" class="link-amazon" target="_blank">Isaac Asimov's Magical Worlds of Fantasy #9: Atlantis</a></em> (New York: New American Library, <b>1987</b>) [anth: <b>Magical Worlds of Fantasy</b>: pb/J K <a href="/entry/potter_j_k">Potter</a>]</li> <li>Geoffrey Ashe. <em><a href="/sfeshop.php?field-keywords=Atlantis+Lost+Lands+Ancient+Wisdom&field-author=Geoffrey+Ashe" class="link-amazon" target="_blank">Atlantis: Lost Lands, Ancient Wisdom</a></em> (London: Thames and Hudson, <b>1992</b>) [nonfiction: pb/]</li> </ul> <p><b>previous versions of this entry</b></p> <ul><li><a href='https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/atlantis' target='_blank'>Internet Archive</a></li></ul><br /><br /></article></div> <div class="sideBarsWrapper"> <div class="sideBarsColsWrapper clearfix"> <div class="column sideBar12 clearfix"> <div class="columnForm"><aside id="blogFeed" class="widget"> <div class="content STeditorial clearfix"> <h2>Recently visited entries<span style="background:url(/images/thingSFE2.png) !important"></span></h2><ul style='width: 50%; 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