Fish Dreams

Two ways of telling the "Seven Against Atlantis" story. One is the military fiction route, which often includes the engineer-hero trope. The underlying trick is some technological advance that destabilizes the power balance of the Ancient World. The cat does not go back in the bag; the Hellenes can reverse-engineer the Atlantean tech or come up with their own super-science but basically society changes.

I readily admit it's a fun challenge to come up with something which an otherwise Bronze Age society could employ but that ends up making them look like cover artist versions of Atlantis complete with rayguns and flying cars and, if at all possible, glowing crystals. Always with the crystals.

The polar opposite is Atlantis has something...high technology, alien technology, magic tech (aka crystal vibration crap) but on the side of the Hellenes is they are legendary. Demigods like Achilles. And real gods in the wings.

See, in the first case it is basically an alternate history. Start with a realistic Bronze Age, properly researched and all, then add new technology and stir. In the second case it is what is called a Constructed World; a world of myths and legends come to life, which only tangentially resembles the real world.

It becomes in short a story of battling tropes, a mixing of myths modern and old, with recognizable New Age crystal magic running headlong into recognizable characters from Greek (and other!) mythology.

And yeah. It's also a heck of a lot easier to research.



On the flip side, thinking about this is also telling me I probably have enough to start into the original story. I don't need a perfect plot. I don't need to solve the mystery of the Sea People or explain the Bronze Age Collapse. I've got enough to support a story with the character arcs of the "Minoan" weaver, the Athenian mercenary, and the Egyptian scribe.