The Sunken World

I always think of Stanton A. Coblentz stories in conjunction with Frank R. Paul illustrations. Of course, there were other artists who illustrated Coblentz stories in the twenties and thirties: Hans Wesso, Leo Morey, Hugh Mackay, and the ubiquitous "unsigned illustrator." But Paul was the best of them. He illustrated a _lot_ of Coblentz's stories, and he was like Coblentz in many ways. His people were often stiff and artificial, but he was great with machines and aliens and alien landscapes. _The Sunken World_ was Stanton Coblentz's first published story, a novella in the Summer, 1928 issue of _Amazing Stories Quarterly_. (It was _not_ a 1927 serial as the publisher claims in his foreward.) It was illustrated by Frank R. Paul. The Lost Continent Library edition is essentially a reproduction of the 1948 Fantasy Book edition, which updates the action to World War II instead of World War I. It is illustrated, not by Paul, but by Charles E. McCurdy. McCurdy's illustrations are handsome woodcuts, generous in number. Of course neither the art by Paul nor McCurdy is a match for the art in Atlantis itself: For one nurtured on modern art, these busts and marbles were as oil paintings would be after sketches in black and white. There was none of that snowy coldness or bronzen severity of hue so common in sculpture today, but all the statues had been skillfully tinted with the complexion of life. Such was the versimilitude that several times I gave a start of surprise when what I took to be a man proved to be only a stone image. I was interested, also, to note that none of the sculptured features had that peculiar hardness and selfish keenness so common among men I had known; all seemed suffused with a clear and tranquil spirituality... (26) Similarly, the architecture in Atlantis is impressive. The streets are wide and spacious, the area between the buildings is landscaped, and the buildings are awesome: In architecture [the palace] was dissimilar to anything we had ever observed before; although five hundred feet in length, it was as much like a great statue as like a building. Its form was that of a woman, who reclined at full legth, her breast to the ground, her elevated head propped meditatively upon one palm; and it had been planned with such subtlety and skill, such consumate attention to the details of the woman's position and form and to the beatific and yet lifelike expression of the face, that Rawlson and I could only pause and stare... (30) Nor are these the only signs of great art in Atlantis. There are vividly realistic murals of undersea caverns and ancient destruction, a recreation of stars in a planetarium, beautiful mosaics, a spectacular historical pageant celebrating the deliberate sinking of Atlantis, and a lost epic by Homer. (Homer is regarded as a great poet who has been superceeded by more recent literary geniuses in Atlantis.) As you may have gathered, Coblentz had rather old-fashioned tastes. He was a traditionalist poet who deplored modern poets (like e.e.cummings) and modern art. Well, art must advance, and Coblentz's battle was a losing one. But if you are going to be old-fashioned, there are worse things to admire than Greek Idealism. It certainly makes sense to have it as the basis for a long lost utopia. Coblentz does fairly well with his aesthetic descriptions of Atlantis. But is the novel itself any good? I believe that the answer is a qualified "yes." The reason is the type of novel that Coblentz tackles here. In many of his later novels, he created anti-utopias that were ridiculous mirror images of our own world. This resulted in settings that were ultimately unbelievable and in satire that was silly and heavy-handed. But _The Sunken World_ is a utopian novel in which his society compares (on the balance) favorably against our own world. The setting is a bit more realistic, and his satiric points are a bit more subtle. Here is a Stanton Coblentz novel that is worth your time. _Addendum_: The back cover states that the book contains "an original foreward by Forrest J. Ackerman." No such foreward is included.

wish he wrote more