Location, Location, Location

Location is a key part of any story.  Just think about Harry Potter; by the time you’ve finished the first book you feel like you’ve had a guided tour around Hogwarts and slept in the Gryffindor common room (or your House of choice).  If Hogwarts was set in a modern building in the centre of a bustling city the whole story would take on a completely different feel (and perhaps wouldn’t be the phenomenon it is).

Tales of Atlantis: The Dawning of a New Age is set on (spoiler alert) Atlantis.  When it comes to thinking about where Atlantis should be located in the story (bearing in mind that it is set in modern times on Earth) it creates a number of problems.  Atlantis has to feel real - like Hogwarts or Narnia – and that means staying true to Plato’s original description (otherwise it’s just another fantasy world masquerading as the famous lost island).  But where on Earth do you stick it?    

The concept of Atlantis was first introduced in Plato’s dialogues Timaeus and Critias.  They are only a few pages long, yet they provide such a detailed and vivid description of Atlantis that for thousands of years people have strongly believed that it existed (including the Nazis, but we won’t get into that here) and have theorised about its whereabouts (and have, in some cases, spent a lifetime in pursuit of it).  Not surprisingly, the number of locations suggested for the famous lost city/island/continent is vast and varied; you could stick a pin anywhere on a globe and someone somewhere will have produced a report outlining “overwhelming” evidence as to why that particular location must be Atlantis (and someone somewhere has pointed out why that theory cannot be true).

One individual who spent a large part of his life trying to prove that Plato’s account of Atlantis is factual was former U.S. Congressman Ignatius Donnelly.  His well-crafted theories and arguments are set out in his 1882 work entitled “Atlantis: the Antediluvian World”.  Whilst some of his theories have now been discredited, others have been repeated and considered in subsequent work by modern scholars and are persuasive.  Donnelly believed that a great island nation known as Atlantis existed in the Atlantic Ocean many moons ago.  Atlantians flourished and colonised most of the rest of the world enabling other civilisations to form and grow (essentially taking mankind from a barbarian state of existence to a more formalised and civilised one).  There was then a terrible catastrophe, pursuant to which Atlantis sunk to the bottom of the ocean.  Donnelly’s theory ties in nicely with Plato’s description, but the fact that most of the Atlantic Ocean floor has now been mapped puts a bit of a spanner in the works.

Many others have also hypothesised that Atlantis sits at the bottom of the ocean waiting to be discovered, although the precise location is rarely agreed upon.  For example, Charles Berlitz argued that Atlantis is located in the vicinity of the infamous Bermuda Triangle in his 1974 book “The Bermuda Triangle” (although his theories are somewhat lacking in evidence and have been largely debunked).  Robert Sarmast, an American architect, argued in his book that Atlantis sits at the bottom of the Mediterranean near Cyprus.  He cites images of man-made structures which he found using sonar data of the sea bottom as evidence for this.  According to Sarmast, the Mediterranean was dry (or mostly dry) and was then flooded by the Atlantic Ocean as a result of the opening of the Strait of Gibralter due to tectonic uplift.  I should point out that his theory is at odds with mainstream oceanographers, geologists and paleontologists (so take it with a pinch of salt is what I’m saying).  I could go on with other similar theories…but I know you have better things to be doing.       

I like some of Donnelly’s theories; they provide a lot of concepts which, for someone writing fiction, you can run with.  But setting Atlantis under the sea doesn’t work for my narrative as this would make it either destroyed (like in David Gibbins’ “Atlantis” and Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea”) or a fantasy world, like that ruled by Namor, the Sub-Mariner in the Marvel universe (or Aquaman if you prefer DC), and my Atlantis is neither of those.  A civilization still thrives on my Atlantis (although it’s been cut off from the rest of the world for thousands of years) and the inhabitants are human like you and I; therefore the island has to be above the water…hmmm.

One theory which has been put forward in a number of books (including Rose and Rand Flem-Ath’s “When the Sky Fell”, Colin Wilson’s “The Atlantis Blueprint” and Graham Hancock’s “Fingerprints of the Gods”) is that Antarctica was Atlantis when it was ice free.  However, whilst their arguments are well thought out and - if you squint a little bit - convincing, unless and until someone decides to do some digging for physical evidence on Antarctica it’s difficult to explore that hypothesis any further (and it’s quite a way to go with a metal detector).

Crete and other parts of the Aegean have also been cited as a possible location for Atlantis by a number of theorists.  This is based on the fact that a once powerful Minoan civilisation existed in that area which possessed advanced knowledge and skills and then suddenly disappeared.  They argue that the eruption of Thera (which was purportedly four times as powerful as Krakatoa) and the tsunamis that followed destroyed this ancient civilisation, although there are a number of flaws with this argument, including the timing of the events and the fact that the Minoan civilisation continued for several generations after the catastrophe.  

The above is just a brief snapshot of some of the theories put forward.  Therefore, and not surprisingly, setting the location for Atlantis has been a tricky challenge (people will be arguing about it ‘til kingdom come); especially in the Big Brother world we live in.  But there are places that even Google cannot gain access to.  Places like Hogwarts and Narnia, Wonderland and the Emerald City, Neverland and Gotham.  So, what is my location for Atlantis?  I’m not going to tell you - you’ll have to read the book.  My main focus though has been bringing it to life and making it accessible and believable, and I have a lot of theories to work off.  To paraphrase Billy Joel, I didn’t start the fire; I do, however, intend to add some logs to it.   

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