Plato’s Atlantis Wasn’t a Story. It Was a Warning.
Why Plato’s Atlantis’s real history is stranger than any fantasy — and what it has to do with four teenagers in the American Southwest.
Timaeus and Critias, composed around 360 BCE. He described a naval superpower that vanished “in a single day and night of misfortune” into the Atlantic Ocean. He gave it a location (beyond the Pillars of Hercules, now called the Strait of Gibraltar), a timeline (nine thousand years before his own era), and a cause: the Atlanteans had come to want more than they had. Territory. Power. Dominion. The gods saw it coming and judged them.
Scholars have been arguing for two thousand years about whether Plato’s Atlantis represents a sunken civilization, a moral allegory, or something stranger than either. I spent a long time in that argument. Then I stopped trying to win it and started writing a novel instead.
The Part That Gets Overlooked
Most people know the catastrophe. What fewer people know is what Plato said about the Atlanteans before it happened — not just the destruction, but the civilization.
He described them as descendants of Poseidon, their city built in concentric rings of land and water. They were masterful engineers, navigators, and lawmakers. For generations, he wrote, they were noble and wise. Then the divine part of their nature “began to fade away.” The human part took over. They started acquiring more islands, more territory, more influence over neighboring peoples.
Plato’s Critias stops mid-sentence, right before we hear how Zeus responded. It’s one of the most tantalizing unfinished moments in ancient literature. We’ll never know whether Plato ran out of time, or whether he stopped on purpose — whether the real point was the warning, not the verdict.
I find that gap interesting.
Why This, Why Now
Echo of Atlantis isn’t about a lost city. It’s about a lost idea — the idea that human beings are capable of something better, and that we keep forgetting it and having to relearn it, lifetime after lifetime.
Four teenagers at a hidden academy in the American Southwest are about to discover they’re inside that cycle. Kelly Brightwater can teleport, and she can’t always control where she lands. Her twin, Kyle, keeps having visions he can’t shut off — he woke up three nights last week with someone else’s memory in his hands. Alejandro Núñez moved a pencil with his mind during his awakening and hasn’t stopped thinking about what that means. Isabella Greenhill reads thoughts, and the worst part isn’t what she hears — it’s that she wants to keep listening.
None of them chose any of this.
That’s the part I keep returning to. The mythology of Atlantis isn’t about a lost continent on a map. It’s about what happens when power outpaces wisdom — and whether it’s possible to learn from that before the clock runs out again.
The Research Rabbit Hole
Writing this series sent me down some genuinely strange corridors.
I went back to Plato’s original dialogues in multiple translations, because they disagree on details that matter. I read Edgar Cayce’s sessions on Atlantis — the sleeping prophet who described it with a specificity that still raises eyebrows, including the technology, the factions, and the catastrophic misuse of energy. I dug into the Hopi and Pueblo traditions of the American Southwest: their stories of destroyed previous worlds, survivors carrying sacred knowledge forward, and star clans guiding people through transitions between ages. I traced telluric current theory. I read about ley lines, the Akashic Records, dimensional physics, and Plato’s cosmology in Timaeus — the part nobody quotes, where he describes the cosmos as nested spheres, each a distinct plane of existence.
Some of it went directly into the series. Some of it I borrowed the shape of. All of it changed how I think about history — what we actually know versus what we’ve decided not to ask.
One Thing Before You Read
If you pick up Echo of Atlantis and something stops you mid-page — makes you reach for your phone and look it up — good. That’s intentional. The mythology in this series is grounded in traditions that have survived for thousands of years, because some ideas are too stubborn to die. I’ve bent and shaped them into fiction, but the bones are real.
The four students at Kachina Academy are not just characters. They’re a question the series asks over and over, from six different angles: what does it actually take to be ready?
Plato left his sentence unfinished.
I’m trying to finish it.
Echo of Atlantis, Part 1 launches 21 June 2026. Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and wherever you buy your books.