Ryan M. Patrick

Now that I’m finally going to release The Europan Deception (my sci-fi thriller set 200 years in the future) next year – unless the Pentagon pre-publication review takes too long – I wanted to write a bit on the ancient legend that underpins the entire series of 8 planned books.

Atlantis first appears in Plato’s works Timaeus and Critias, as a foil for his ideal state of Athens. It is mentioned as a powerful empire to the west that attempts to conquer Greece, but falls out of favor with the gods and is sunk under the ocean.

In his work, Plato has detailed descriptions of the continent from a statesman named Solon who translated Egyptian records of Atlantis. It was supposedly technologically advanced and able to conquer many of the ancient Greeks’ neighbors but were unable to conquer Athens.

Modern historians believe that Atlantis is fiction, rather than fact, and they’re probably right. Still, I became interested in the topic when I came across this book at my grandfather’s house when I was in 4th or 5th grade.

Atlantis was only mentioned in passing, but it caught my attention and I checked out some books from the Chester County Library and became absolutely enthralled. How could an entire continent be lost? Even if it was a fictional account – which it probably was – the idea of lost lands and civilizations fascinated me. These ideas were reinforced by some of my media choices over the next few years, namely Stargate (which covered Atlantis in later seasons),

Indiana Jones

and the Clive Cussler novels

The TV Tropes page Advanced Ancient Humans spells this out pretty well, and it’s a huge factor in a lot of my books.

When I read Robert Ludlum’s novels, mostly while I was in high school, the idea of ancient conspiracies coalesced with legends of Atlantis – along with the idea of survivors from Atlantis from the aforementioned Cussler book seeding the great civilizations of prehistory with technological knowledge – into what became the main plot for what is now my Dark Galaxy series, the first book of which is The Europan Deception. The main character, whose name has changed a dozen times over the years, must fight back against the evil remnants of Atlantean civilization and their quest for world and galactic domination.

But that’s not quite enough for a story. I don’t like antagonists being evil for the sake of being evil, and galactic domination is a tired trope. I needed something more.

When I played Mass Effect 3 in 2012, I was incredibly disappointed by its story. It appeared to be a large departure from the first two games – my two favorite of all time – and didn’t line up thematically or logically with them. Later, I learned that it wasn’t the original story planned – it was supposed to focus on dark energy and matter, with the Reapers (the series’ primary antagonists) trying to save the universe from its eventual destruction. I’m an engineer, not a physics guy, but that really stuck with me. The Atlanteans would take the actions they would take throughout the series to help save the galaxy, and the protagonist would have to find another way that didn’t result in autocratic control of human space.

Of course, there’s a million more twists and turns coming, and that only scratches the surface of what I have planned. Atlantis was real, it was incredibly advanced, and the survivors have been plotting and scheming for millennia after its destruction. It’s been done before, namely in A.G. Riddle’s Atlantis series, but I think my spin on it – especially what I have planned for later books – will be incredibly unique, yet play into the same tropes of my favorite stories over the years.

The Europan Deception is currently with my beta readers and while it only scratches the surface of the Atlantean conspiracy. It may appear to be a sci-fi espionage thriller, set in a realistic setting less than two centuries in the future, but underneath the surface are ancient enemies ready to overthrow the established order and send the galaxy into chaos. Stay tuned for a cover (the one on my website is a placeholder) and release date hopefully some time early next year!