Atlantis (Science Fiction Book) Essay, Research Paper
Book Title: Atlantis
Author: Greg Donegan
Pages: 345
Setting: The book had four time periods in it. It started in the Cambodian jungles in the year 800 A.D. Then it goes to the Bermuda Triangle in the year 1945. After that, we go ahead in time back to Cambodia in 1968. Finally, to the present, where most of the story takes place.
Characters
Protagonist: He is Eric Dane, an ex-special ops during the Vietnam War. He has a special power where he can “feel” certain things like upcoming danger and communicating telepathically.
Antagonist: This is a mysterious green mist. It is located at three main spots: the Bermuda Triangle, the Devil’s Sea in Japan, and in the jungles of Cambodia.
Major Characters: Eric Dane, Forman, Flaherty, Lawrence Freed, Beastly, Sin Fen, Ariana Michelete, Paul Michelet, and Patricia Conners.
Plot
Describe the plot: A strange mist has been in the Cambodian jungles for many years and nobody knows what it is. All they know is if something goes in, it never comes out. In present day, a plane of a corporation’s wealthy owner goes down, with his daughter onboard. He assembles a team led by the one man that has made it out alive, Eric Dane, and they head into it. Meanwhile, the mist is growing rapidly. They have to rescue the daughter and try to stop the mist from expanding all over the world.
Describe the plot in detail: The story starts in the ancient city of Angkor Kol Ker. The water around the city has evaporated because of a drought and everybody is evacuating because the mist is coming. Fifty warriors have stayed behind but they don’t last long.
Then it goes to 1945. The US is setting up an experiment with the Bermuda Triangle and the mist in the Cambodian jungles with a man named Forman in control. Something goes wrong and the plane in Cambodia and the submarine named the Scorpion in the Triangle disappear.
Later, in 1968, Eric Dane leads a squad of commandos into The Cambodian jungles. They find the ruins of Angkor Kol Ker and the mist. They try to fight off the beings in the mist, but all, including the leader, Flahertly, is taken away except Dane.
In the present, it starts off on the Lady Gayle, the plane Michelete Technologies owns. The head person on it is Ariana Michelete, the company president’s daughter. They are over Cambodia scouting for possible oil sites or diamond mines. The pilot sees a strange mist and suddenly, the plane goes out of control. They lose contact with headquarters in California and presumed down.
Patricia Conners is at her desk controlling a satellite when she gets a phone call telling her to go over southwest Asia and take pictures of it with the satellite. She does so and looks at them. There is a big black spot in the middle of all the photos.
Dane works with his dog, Chelsea, finding trapped people in wrecked buildings. They have a kind of link between themselves. Just then, Lawrence Freed, a man that works for Michelete Tech., comes up to him and asks Dane to come with him to Calif. for another job. At first, Dane doesn’t want to go, but after awhile, he agrees.
Once at the Michelete HQ, he talks with Freed, Paul Michelete, and professor Beastly, who was an expert on ancient cultures. They explained to Dane that they needed him to go into the mist and bring back Ariana. After some discussion, he agreed.
Meanwhile, Ariana and her crew were stirring inside the plane. All except the pilots and a crewman had made it. But the weird thing about it was the top of the cockpit was cut clean off and one of the pilots was gone. When they entered it, one of the other crew was caught in a yellow beam of light and brought out of the plane and into the mist. One by one, the crew gets killed until only Ariana and three others are left.
At the same time, the group led by Michelete arrives at an airport in Cambodia. When they go to pick up their weapons, Dane senses an ambush. The others shrug it off and are startled when they do get ambushed. After they fight off the attackers, they go to a plane waiting to drop them off into the jungle. This is where they meet Sin Fen. She works for Foreman and explains to Dane his powers and how to use them. She can also communicate with him telepathically.
Patricia Conners is still trying to figure out what the black spot is on all of the photos and why they are getting bigger. She gets a call from the person she was supposed to send them to. Its Forman. She tells him that if the spots grow like they are now, they will cover the earth within two days. She talks him into using a different kind of satellite to look into it. While it is looking into the dark spot, it was suddenly destroyed without warning.
As Dane and his team dropped into Cambodia, Ariana and the others watched as one of the yellow beams tapped into the supercomputer onboard. From the radios, they kept getting Morse code messages. The messages were saying to go to a specific place in the jungle. They decided to try it out. They wanted to stop this so they decided to blow the plane up. They took C4 and put it on the fuel tanks, lit the fuse, and ran out of the plane.
By then, Dane’s group had found some ruins. They too were receiving Morse messages from an unknown source. Finally, he revealed his identity. He was Flahertly. He instructed them to the same spot the other party was going. On the way, they found a bunch of bones. The hired help, a group of Canadians, saw this and said they would go no further. After arguing with them, Freed let them go their own way. They didn’t get too far before the creatures appeared and killed them.
Describe the climax in detail: Dane, Freed, and Beastly reached the point Flahertly told them to go, city of Angkor Kol Ker, just as Ariana and the one other surviving member of the crew, Carpenter, did. All of a sudden, a black hole appeared in mid air and Flahertly came out, not looking a day older than when Dane had last seen him in 1968. He told them about how there were two forces in the mist. One was trying to come to earth and dominate it and the other that was trying to stop it. At the center of the city was a big structure with a giant yellow beam going out from the top. Flahertly said that they had to destroy that to stop the evil force from invading. Just then Flahertly disappears into the black circle again and the team is left with the problem of how to destroy the structure. All of a sudden, Sin Fen contacts Dane and tells him to use a satellite to destroy it.
Conners is instructed to make a collision course with the middle of the black spot by Foreman. After some protest, she does. As the satellite gets close, Dane takes over the controls with his mind and directs it to the structure. It collides and destroys it.
Describe the conclusion in detail: After the structure is destroyed, the beam goes away and the mists all over the world begin to shrink. A black circle just like the one Flahertly came out of appeared by the team. They all decided to jump in and were transported to a metal room. There they figured out that they were on the Scorpion. It had reappeared in the Bermuda Triangle. After, they all met up with Foreman. He showed them some new pictures. They were of a large black sphere. Dane came to the conclusion that these got through the gates and were preparing to attack Earth again.
Point of View
The point of view that the author used: Third-person point of view
Theme
The theme is that no matter how powerful man thinks he is, there are certain things that he can’t understand and hope to control