Atlantis
In the aftermath of Ignatius Donnelly's enormously popular Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), a number of novelists chose Atlantis as the setting for their fictions. Parry's book shows the influence of Donnelly: he pictures the ancient Phoenicians, the Aztecs, and the Incas as offshoots of Atlantean civilization.
These Atlantis novels were often adventure tales and romances that were set in the ancient world, like C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne's The Lost Continent (1899); yet others, like Arthur Conan Doyle's The Maracot Deep (1929), take place in the modern world and involve the survival of Atlantis through the intervening millennia. Parry took the latter approach; his Atlantis has persisted as a submarine city for thousands of years. Over recent centuries, it has rejected its ancient and traditional monarchy for "Social Democracy."
Parry's primary goal, however, is not in crafting a tightly-organized fiction, in the way a science-fiction writer might do; he does not even attempt to provide a plausible explanation for the survival of Atlantis. Neither does he try to explain how his modern American protagonist can speak and read the same language as the Atlanteans. Parry's focus is on the polemical and satirical goals of his book.
Read more about this topic: The Scarlet Empire
Famous quotes containing the word atlantis:
“Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.”
—Edward Dahlberg (1900–1977)