"Yes, wonderful things!"

So someone over at ApolloHoax* made an interesting suggestion.



Accept that Atlantis (or substitute the pseudo-historical claptrap of your choice) could only be real in an alternate universe. Set the story there, at the moment it becomes impossible to hide the difference.

See, there was a time when we believed the Greeks arose out of more-or-less thin air. Then Sir Arthur Evans uncovered the Minoans. There was a time the Hittites were a name from the Bible and represented a people from much further south -- not the powerful empire we now know them to be.

Now, sure, neither of these examples had science in advance of our own, or came from space, or even had magical powers. But from the point of view of the era that discovered them they are still pretty spectacular, surprising, paradigm-changing.

So set a story...heck, set a series...in that era where lost cities and forgotten peoples are still possible. Were still, in our universe, being discovered. An era that is already exciting with the real history of the excavations at Mycenae and Knossos and the opening of Tut's tomb, the cracking of Egyptian Hieroglyphics and Assyrian Cuneiform and ancient Babylonian.

And put in things that are just a little bigger and a little weirder than anything the real world threw up. And live with the consequences. Show the footprint anything resembling Atlantis would have left in the historic record. Show how electric lights in Luxor would have been archaeologically discernible, perhaps as early as by Napoleon's crew. And show how these discoveries change the world of the story, until by the second or third discovery you are clearly living in an alternate world.



(The biggest problem I have with this concept is most of the well-known ideas are such claptrap. They just don't work in any universe. Some of the older stuff -- your King Arthurs and Trojan Wars and so forth, are fine, although they tend a little too much towards gods and magic and those are just too damn game-changing. The latest crop are too tiny and disconnected; a single spark plug or whatever, hardly a fleshed-out culture or intriguing history to build on. And it still doesn't quite take away from the ethical problem. Sure, you could show all the ways in which if a Solutrean Migration was real, it would have a footprint and we'd all know about it. But you've still added detail and support to something some rather vile people want to believe in.)




 *It's not what you think it is. Or rather, it was but it isn't now. The site was started by someone who thought the Moon Landings were fake. He took a long deep look at the science and himself and changed his mind. Now it is a rather casual hang-out of space history buffs.