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| Cover artist uncredited |
Film This!
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| Cover artist uncredited |
| LORDS OF ATLANTIS Wallace West New York: Airmont Books, October 1963 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 ? | ||||
| ASIN: B00005XO3O | 128pp. | SC | $0.40 | |
"Hermes to his friend Teraf—greetings and health. *
* * "We are established, as perhaps you have heard, on Mount Olympus, not far from Athens. We landed there safely just before the power failed. Your old capital was completely destroyed by the flood and the earthquakes and storms which followed. A new Athens has been built by refugees farther up in the mountains, but it is a sorry place made up mostly of stone huts and a few tottering temples. Perhaps in time . . . "Heracles has built a palace of sorts on top of Olympus where it is easy to defend. Marble and all that, but no running water or electricity. Cockroaches in the kitchens! Bugs in the bedrooms! Terrible. In fact, I can't stand the place and am living in the proverbial vine-covered cottage half a league to the south. Have a wife now . . . a little girl from Attica. You'd like her." – Page 125 |
As you may have surmised, this is a reimagining of the legend of Atlantis. It draws on the myths we all grew up with, as well as literature such as Plato's Timeaus and Critias, the Bible, and others. However it places them in a science-fiction context. The basis of the tale is that when Mars began turning inhospitable, the Martians established themselves on Earth, forming an empire that spanned Egypt, Greece, and in fact the whole world.
The empire was sustained by superior science. There was regular commerce between the two planets, and promising students from the colonies went to study on Mars. Life was improved for the many on Earth, but there was resentment and unrest: the usual dissatisfaction of ambitious men hungry to make greater names for themselves. Such men united in a plot and managed to bring the empire down in dramatic fashion, leaving its leaders marooned in various relatively primitive encampments here and there.
(There's an unrelated calamity that prevents help arriving from Mars. To me it seemed contrived; but I'm willing to suspend my disbelief on this point, as the plot wouldn't work without it.)
Like The Memory Bank, this is a very enjoyable adventure: filled with intrigues, subterfuges, pitched battles, and some humor. The names of the pantheon of Greek gods are all worked in somehow, but with sly alterations. Hermes, for example, is a newspaper reporter. Then there's that last desperate migration before everything comes crashing down, when nothing seems funny any more. Full marks.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.