Table of Contents
Novel. It is an adventure thriller. It belongs to Clive Cussler’s series about Dirk Pitt.
I have not read the book. This is not a chapter-by-chapter reading. The outline below comes from Penguin Random House, from Kirkus Reviews, and from a library catalogue.
What the book is
The title is Atlantis Found.
Clive Cussler is the author. Dirk Pitt is his series hero, a marine explorer. Kirkus calls this Pitt’s first undersea adventure after Flood Tide (1997).
G. P. Putnam’s Sons published the hardcover in New York. Kirkus gives the publication date as 6 December 1999. The ISBN-10 on that review is 0-399-14588-5, which is the ISBN-13 9780399145889. A Brigham Young University catalogue record agrees on the publisher, the year, and that ISBN-10. It describes 534 pages, with illustrations and maps.
Kirkus prints a page count of 544. I have not seen the book. I report both numbers.
Penguin Random House still sells a later paperback, ISBN 9780425177174. I use that page for the publisher’s description of the story. The description is of this novel, not of a different plot.
The Atlantis idea
Kirkus gives the backstory in one line of the review. A comet wipes out nearly all human life 7,000 years ago. It shifts the tectonic plates. It brings on what the review calls a second ice age. Atlantis sinks in Antarctica. Dirk Pitt later finds the lost island again.
That is the novel’s prehistory, as a reviewer states it. It is not a geological paper. I do not take 7,000 years, or an Antarctic sinking, as a result proven by this book.
The modern plot treats the same people as a highly advanced seafaring culture whose relics are still being found. Another group already knows about those relics. They try to keep the rest of the world from knowing.
Antarctica is the place Kirkus names for the sinking. The publisher’s description of the present-day hunt does not repeat that place. It stays with the relics and with the people who want them hidden. I keep both statements, and I do not merge them into a map the publisher did not draw.
The plot as the publisher and Kirkus describe it
I am not following chapters. This is the public frame.
A group of anthropologists finds strange inscriptions on the wall of a Colorado mine. An explosion traps them underground. Dirk Pitt is there. He starts a rescue.
He is then asked to lead a research crew for the National Underwater and Marine Agency, to study the finds. The publisher’s wording is “the U.S. National Underwater and Marine Agency.” In the novel, that is the body Pitt works with.
His ship is attacked and nearly sunk. The attacker is a vessel that, in the publisher’s words, should have died 56 years before. Someone else wants the relics of that old sea culture kept in the dark. They are willing to kill for that.
Kirkus adds a second line of plot. Undercover Nazis reappear, hoping to establish a Fourth Reich. The review also says the book is full of sea lore, some of it imaginary, and that the characters are hard to believe. It still expects Cussler’s readers to enjoy the speed of the story.
I am not laying out battles, ships, or the ending. Those are inside the novel.
My view
I file this as fiction that uses a familiar Atlantis claim as a motor. An advanced sea people, a disaster in deep time, and a hideout in Antarctica also appear in non-fiction speculation. Cussler is not making that case. He is writing a chase.
The comet date is a good example of the difference. Kirkus says the novel begins with a comet 7,000 years ago. I can record that this is the story’s clock. I cannot record it as the date of a real impact, or of a real sinking, on the strength of a thriller.
The Nazi plot is also fiction in this telling. A Fourth Reich riding on Atlantean knowledge is a villain plan. It is a common one in adventure novels of this kind. It is not a document.
What I mark for a reader of this site is the setting. If you meet an Antarctic Atlantis in Cussler, you are inside a novel. Wilson and Flem-Ath offer that same homeland as history in The Atlantis Blueprint. A novel and a speculative history book are not witnesses for each other.
I have not read Cussler’s book. I cannot score the prose. Kirkus already did, and it was blunt about the sentences and about the people. The story shape is still clear from the outside.
Sources
I used these public sources. I did not use the text of the book.