This is a concept with a lot of potential.  The idea is that a big hunk of North America, essentially over to a little past the Appalachian Mountains, has broken off and become a large island.  At some point along the way it has apparently been largely submerged or in some made uninhabitable by land animals.  As a result it has been repopulated from the sea and has no native land mammals.  The native ecology is composed mainly of birds and lizards.  Atlantis is kind of like New Zealand written large.  There are no native mammal predators, so their place has been taken by large, aggressive eagles (not flightless) in the north, and predatory lizards in the south.  The place of ground-living mammals is taken by large Moa-like birds—dumb and initially very easy to kill.

 
Atlantis is discovered by Breton fishermen in the 1400s, and British fishermen follow in their footsteps.  Eventually Britain, France, and Spain all found colonies on Atlantis.

 
Not a bad background.  Realistically, human beings as we know them probably would not exist given such a dramatic change in the configuration of the earth, and the chances of recognizable France, England, and Spain developing along with Atlantis are essentially non-existent.  That's okay.  This is a work of fiction, not a lab experiment, and I am willing to suspend disbelief as long as the story is good.

 
Is the story good?  Well, actually there are several loosely connected stories from various time-periods in the settlement of Atlantis.  Some of them are pretty good, and none of them are awful.  Overall, I get the feeling that most of the stories are a little too small for the concept.  Again, they aren't bad, but they are a bit overshadowed.  I thought that the earlier stories were better.  A couple of later ones could have been set pretty much anywhere—a generic battle against pirates, and a replay of the French and Indian war with a few interesting twists tossed in.

 So how good of a job of world—or in this case island—building did the author do?  Pretty good, actually.  Turtledove has done his homework on how ecologies develop on islands and he creates a good, plausible world, which is also fun to roam in.
 

I do have some problems with the plausibility of there being no mammals at all on the island.  This is not a volcanic island, and would almost certainly have been attached to North America, Europe, or both at some point.  Unless it separated from the main continents very early it would have had some kind of mammal at some time.  Even New Zealand had land mammals at one time—actually very primitive mammals near the boundary between mammals and reptiles, but that's another issue for another time. 

So Atlantis would have had mammals, but lost them someway.  If they survived the end of the dinosaurs, which they probably would have, then what would have killed them?  Atlantis, ironically, appears to be too big and too high to have been entirely or mostly submerged.  It's too big for a random bad year to have killed off all of the mammals, and probably was throughout its history.  Oh well, an ecology without land mammals is cool, so I can suspend disbelief on that too.
 

I have one other problem with the ecology of Atlantis: the absence of large ground-living predators in the northern part of it.  Nature doesn't like vacuums, especially big ones, and this is a big one.  I suspect that Atlantis would end up with either large flightless predatory birds or cold-adapted predatory lizards of some sort, if not both.  Given enough time and enough room both would probably develop.  Again, this is not a deal-breaker for me.  An ecology with man-killer eagles in it is cool enough that I'm willing to suspend belief.
 

So, what do I think of the book overall?  I'm glad I bought it.  It's solid alternate history with a good, well-described setting.  I don't classify it as a must-read, or something I'll read over and over again, but it is worth reading.

Revised on Feb 4, 2012.

More Stuff For POD Members Only

What you see here is a truncated on-line version of a larger zine that I contribute to POD, the alternate history APA.  POD members get to look forward to more fun stuff.