• Five Works Inspired by the Legend of Atlantis

    From James Nicoll@21:1/5 to All on Fri Aug 16 14:11:09 2024
    Five Works Inspired by the Legend of Atlantis

    The Lost City of Atlantis has been inspiring wacky theories and speculative fiction ever since Plato made it up.

    https://reactormag.com/five-works-inspired-by-the-legend-of-atlantis/
    --
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  • From Garrett Wollman@21:1/5 to James Nicoll on Fri Aug 16 15:48:12 2024
    In article <v9nmlt$t7b$1@reader1.panix.com>,
    James Nicoll <jdnicoll@panix.com> wrote:
    Five Works Inspired by the Legend of Atlantis

    The Lost City of Atlantis has been inspiring wacky theories and speculative >fiction ever since Plato made it up.

    https://reactormag.com/five-works-inspired-by-the-legend-of-atlantis/

    I have actually read the Norton!

    The library I grew up in seemed to have had, at some point before I
    started going there, a librarian who considered all SF to be
    "juvenile". As a result, *all* of Norton's SF was still shelved in
    the YA section twenty years later. (If my fallible memory isn't
    acting up, they seemed to have stopped buying Norton some time in the
    early 1970s.) I have strong memories of reading OPERATION TIME SEARCH
    but could never remember the title. (I also read MOON OF THREE RINGS
    and EXILES OF THE STARS, and probably some others that didn't make as
    distinct an impression on me. There was a whole shelf of Norton, and
    I don't know why I glommed onto these three titles in particular.)

    -GAWollman

    --
    Garrett A. Wollman | "Act to avoid constraining the future; if you can, wollman@bimajority.org| act to remove constraint from the future. This is Opinions not shared by| a thing you can do, are able to do, to do together."
    my employers. | - Graydon Saunders, _A Succession of Bad Days_ (2015)

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  • From Ted Nolan @21:1/5 to Garrett Wollman on Fri Aug 16 16:19:53 2024
    In article <v9nsbs$1484$3@usenet.csail.mit.edu>,
    Garrett Wollman <wollman@hergotha.csail.mit.edu> wrote:
    In article <v9nmlt$t7b$1@reader1.panix.com>,
    James Nicoll <jdnicoll@panix.com> wrote:
    Five Works Inspired by the Legend of Atlantis

    The Lost City of Atlantis has been inspiring wacky theories and speculative >>fiction ever since Plato made it up.

    https://reactormag.com/five-works-inspired-by-the-legend-of-atlantis/

    I have actually read the Norton!

    The library I grew up in seemed to have had, at some point before I
    started going there, a librarian who considered all SF to be
    "juvenile". As a result, *all* of Norton's SF was still shelved in
    the YA section twenty years later. (If my fallible memory isn't
    acting up, they seemed to have stopped buying Norton some time in the
    early 1970s.) I have strong memories of reading OPERATION TIME SEARCH
    but could never remember the title. (I also read MOON OF THREE RINGS
    and EXILES OF THE STARS, and probably some others that didn't make as >distinct an impression on me. There was a whole shelf of Norton, and
    I don't know why I glommed onto these three titles in particular.)

    -GAWollman

    Pretty much all Norton *is* YA, or acceptable as YA. Did she ever
    write a sex scene? (Maybe in Witchworld, which I saw as "romancey"
    and never got into?)
    --
    columbiaclosings.com
    What's not in Columbia anymore..

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  • From Don@21:1/5 to James Nicoll on Fri Aug 16 17:00:02 2024
    James Nicoll wrote:
    Five Works Inspired by the Legend of Atlantis

    The Lost City of Atlantis has been inspiring wacky theories and speculative fiction ever since Plato made it up.

    https://reactormag.com/five-works-inspired-by-the-legend-of-atlantis/

    "The earliest mentions of fabled lost Atlantis were, as you know, in
    two essays by Plato, Timaeus and Critias." ...

    "I didn’t even mention the role Atlantis played in the Perry Rhodan
    novels"

    Thank you for enlightening me to Atlantis' Platonic origins. It ought to
    prove useful in the future.

    My inner pedant petitions me to play. Francis "Shakespeare" Bacon's
    _New Atlantis_ is located in the Pacific, proximally preceding Perry's
    place called "Lemuria:"

    <http://lemuria.net/>

    _Black Tuesday_ (Mayer) puts Atlantis back where it belongs: in the
    Atlantic.

    Danke,

    --
    Don.......My cat's )\._.,--....,'``. https://crcomp.net/reviews.php telltale tall tail /, _.. \ _\ (`._ ,. Walk humbly with thy God.
    tells tall tales.. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.' Make 1984 fiction again.

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  • From Garrett Wollman@21:1/5 to Michael F. Stemper on Sat Aug 17 18:10:33 2024
    In article <v9q6sr$1tjk4$1@dont-email.me>,
    Michael F. Stemper <michael.stemper@gmail.com> wrote:
    On 16/08/2024 10.48, Garrett Wollman wrote:

    The library I grew up in seemed to have had, at some point before I
    started going there, a librarian who considered all SF to be
    "juvenile". As a result, *all* of Norton's SF was still shelved in
    the YA section twenty years later.

    Interesting. Your library had a YA section? Mine only had a children's >section, and an adult section. The children's section had nursery rhymes
    up through Freddy the Pig and Doctor Dolittle.

    There was a "children's library" which took up one floor of the old
    Carnegie building, and an "adult library" which was all of the new
    wing that opened in 1981. Inside the children's library there was an
    open area down the middle, leading to the librarians' desk and behind
    them the former main entrance (now an emergency exit). On the left
    side was what we'd now call "middle grades" and below, everything from
    picture books to Encyclopedia Brown, and on the right side was
    actually labeled "Young Adult", with big sectionos of packaged series
    (Hardy Boys, Three Investigators, etc.) and the rest either Dewey (for
    the non-fiction) or alpha by author (for the fiction). In the center
    aisle, in addition to the card catalogs, were display shelves of new
    books along with some children's reference books (encyclopedias,
    Something About the Author, dictionaries). It's been 40 years but I
    could walk in there tomorrow and point out nearly everything I've just mentioned -- except of course that everything has changed.

    My brain wants me to believe that Diane Duane and Robin McKinley were
    shelved in the same place, which obviously doesn't make sense
    alphabetically. I am not sure if more modern YA fantasy got its own
    subsection -- it was, after all, forty years ago. They don't seem to
    publish a map showing the current layout of the building, and it's a
    five-hour drive so I won't be making a detailed comparison.

    I forget at what point I was allowed to use the "adult library". It
    must have been some time in 5th or 6th grade because I remember doing
    a 6th-grade book report on the first volume of Asimov's autobiography,
    which I would have had to go to the adult side to read. I never read
    any of Asimov's juveniles; I'm pretty sure my gateway to Asimov was
    through his F&SF science essay collections.

    -GAWollman

    --
    Garrett A. Wollman | "Act to avoid constraining the future; if you can, wollman@bimajority.org| act to remove constraint from the future. This is Opinions not shared by| a thing you can do, are able to do, to do together."
    my employers. | - Graydon Saunders, _A Succession of Bad Days_ (2015)

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  • From Ahasuerus@21:1/5 to Michael F. Stemper on Sat Aug 17 14:12:37 2024
    On 8/17/2024 9:00 AM, Michael F. Stemper wrote:
    [snip]
    Although, if a library had a young adult section, that would, in my
    opinion, be the proper place for Norton. I've read at least forty of
    her novels, and every one of them seems like young adult (or "juveniles"
    as they used to be called).

    Most of her books were a good match for teen readers, but some were a
    better fit for elementary school kids. The "Magic" series ( https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?4687) and the "Star Ka'at" (https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?1461) series are two of the better
    known examples, but there were others, e.g. _Seven Spells to Sunday_ and
    _Ten Mile Treasure_.

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  • From Christian Weisgerber@21:1/5 to James Nicoll on Mon Aug 19 14:25:00 2024
    On 2024-08-16, James Nicoll <jdnicoll@panix.com> wrote:

    Five Works Inspired by the Legend of Atlantis https://reactormag.com/five-works-inspired-by-the-legend-of-atlantis/

    As others have mentioned, Atlantis makes an appearance in
    _Perry Rhodan_, where it is destroyed by alien action some 10,000
    years ago. The authors later introduce another lost continent,
    Lemuria, located in the Pacific and hosting a space-faring human
    civilization before it was also destroyed, by alien action, some
    50,000 years ago.

    Rainer M. Schröder's German juvenile _Unheimliche Gegner der vierten
    Art_ (1978) is effectively an unauthorized sequel to _Close Encounters
    of the Third Kind_. I had a big light bulb moment when I saw the
    movie for the first time a few years after I had read the book.
    The humans that are whisked away by the spindly aliens eventually
    learn that the aliens aren't that alien: They're really an intelligent
    species from Earth and conveniently long-lived survivors from the
    sunken continent of Atlantis.

    Like UFOs and psychics, Atlantis was a staple of the 1960s and 1970s pseudoscience ciruit. I don't recall what von Däniken spun from it,
    but he must have used it in his writings.

    [The Dancer From Atlantis]
    | A malfunctioning time machine clearly out of warranty scoops up
    | American Duncan Reid, Kievan Russian Oleg, Hun Uldin, and Minoan Erissa
    | from their native eras,

    I think that's a "Kievan Rus" or "Kyivan Rus". Sorry for being
    such a stickler, but people are dying over this as we speak. Also,
    historical linguists want to know what language Uldin speaks. Is
    Erissa Greek or pre-Greek Minoan? In the latter case, historical
    linguists REALLY want to squeeze her for her language.

    --
    Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de

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