Book Review: Atlantis Found by Clive Cussler

Atlantis Found by Clive Cussler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Dangers from the ancient past and the 20th Centuries come together to bring humanity on the verge of doomsday. Atlantis Found is the fifteenth book of Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt series that finds Dirk and his friends and associates at NUMA stumbling upon a 60-year old plan inspired by hatred and an ancient catastrophe just months from challenging the world.

In 7120 BC, a comet hit North America, abruptly ending an advanced civilization. In AD 1858, a whaling vessel discovers a 1770s merchant ship frozen in Antarctic ice; included on this ship is a polished obsidian skull. In the present (2001), a group of U.S. scientists discover a mysterious underground chamber in a Colorado mine, including a polished obsidian skull. They are attacked with a deliberate avalanche and cave-in resulting in the mine flooding, but Dirk Pitt arrives from diving in another mine as part of an emergency rescue though the group is almost killed again by the saboteurs. Pitt obtains the Antarctic skull from a descendant of the whaling ship’s captain along with a copy of the merchant’s logbook. The information amassed and analyzed by NUMA leads Pitt to Antarctica to look for the merchant ship in the ice while Al Giordino and Rudi Gunn head to a remote island where the merchant ship found the skull. Both expeditions succeed—Giordino and Gunn finding a chamber and well-preserved mummies—only for each to be attacked by the same group that attacked the scientists in Colorado as Pitt’s group narrowly escapes being destroyed by a German U-boat missing since 1945 while Al and Rudi take out a commando team. Diving into the U-boat, Pitt finds a female officer and brings her to the surface. Upon Pitt’s return to Washington D.C., he stumbles upon a report from Admiral Sandecker’s office and is able to apprehend the woman who appears to be identical to the sub officer Pitt recovered, but is later genetically proven to be a cousin though modified and mostly inbred though known as members of the Nazi escapee Wolf family that owns the Argentinean corporation, Destiny Enterprises a legal front for the Fourth Empire Holdings from Nazi Germany. After examining the skulls, inscriptions from them and the chambers which they work to translate, and various artifacts that show a different geographical look to the Earth the NUMA results are startling. The chambers turn out to be the work of a civilization calling themselves the Amenes, a nation of seafarers and wise men who discovered and traded with most of the world. The comet from the beginning of the book caused a worldwide disaster that wiped out most of their civilization. It also had a twin, which returned to space. The few Amenes that survived built the chambers to pass on information of the twin comets return and the catastrophe. This information is given to an observatory to be checked but it turns out to be incorrect but the Wolfs appear to either be planning it or took inspiration from the catastrophe to bring about a re-creating of civilization in the Nazi image. Pitt and Giordino infiltrate a Destiny Enterprises facility that harbors four superships not only to scout but rescue one of the scientists from Colorado. They then meet Destiny CEO Karl Wolf who implies that the disaster will happen in days, which makes NUMA and the military scramble to figure out how when they realize that Destiny has a sea mining facility in Antarctica next to the Ross Ice Shelf that uses nanotechnology. Computer projections show that if the Shelf breaks off it will unbalance the planet—as the comet did—wiping out nearly all of humanity that is unprepared. The U.S. military task force of special forces from all branches attack the facility, but it’s Pitt and Giordino’s unplanned intervention that is able to turn the tide in battle resulting in the holding off of doomsday and the deaths of Karl and his relatives.

Unlike Flood Tide, the whole treasure story arc and main story arc were intertwined throughout the book allowing both to be settled in the final pages instead at two different points. Yet, it felt that Cussler was mixing and matching previous plot elements from earlier installments in creating this particular book with a family running a underground criminal empire with tentacles in governments around the world (Treasure and Inca Gold) being the most prominent. One of the biggest narrative miscues was the sole reliance of a special forces assault in Antarctica to stop the Wolf’s designs when an airstrike against the four superships should have been done as well—regardless of the risk to women and children due to the fact that Wolf wanted to kill 7 billion people that included women and children—thus forcing the Wolfs into a zero-sum game. Dirk was a little less superhuman in this book unlike the previous installment and while interested in the main female lead this book, got stunned in the end when she suddenly hooked up with Al out of nowhere but somewhat forced Dirk to consider once against marriage to his on-and-off girlfriend Loren Smith. The inclusion of the comet strike and the catastrophic tectonic plate shifts as the result are among the first “fringe” theories that Cussler would include in his book, although the comet/asteroid strike theory in Canada during the last Ice Age now does have more evidence backing it up in reality it had the opposite affect of prolonging the Ice Age instead of ending it like in the book while the global tectonic plate shift as a result of the comet and or the Ross Ice Shelf unbalancing the Earth are too farfetched for even some daring geologists to accept.

Atlantis Found is a good book narratively that has some unfortunately underwhelming supporting features that downgrades its quality. While one of the better books of the series, some of the choices Clive Cussler are a bit worrying for future installments.

View all my reviews