Atlan
Atlan (also known as The Atlan Saga) is a series of British fantasy novels written by Jane Gaskell and originally published in the 1960s. The books take place in a prehistoric civilization--"before the continents had changed," state some of the back cover descriptions. Gaskell's intent seems to have been to combine every prehistoric myth into one lengthy narrative.
Princess Cija, the heroine, begins the series as a naive seventeen-year-old kept sheltered in her royal tower. Her mother, known only as the Dictatress, has forced her to remain ignorant of the outside world, to the point that she thinks that men have gone extinct. She's certainly unaware of the war between the Northern and Southern armies going on around her. When the half-man, half-reptile General Zerd arrives to invade Cija's home country, the Dictatress offers him her daughter in marriage after instructing her to kill him. Zerd takes Cija prisoner, and there begin some intercontinental adventures that change the princess irrevocably....
Though obscure today and not without flaws, Atlan is notable for being one of the earliest post-Tolkien fantasy series not to resemble The Lord of the Rings. It's also probably the only series that can be accurately described as a Gothic Jungle Opera, being influenced by Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, the works of Rider Haggard, the Tarzan series, old Gothic novels, and obsolete anthropological studies. If nothing else, this series is unique; nothing quite like it has been seen before or since.
In order, the books are:
- The Serpent
- The Dragon
- Atlan
- The City
- Some Summer Lands
For tropes specific to individual installments, visit their respective work pages.
- All Men Are Rapists: Not literally every man in the series is a rapist, but Cija's suspicions of the men she meets on her travels are often well-founded. She spares the reader the details.
- Brainless Beauty: Cija, initially.
- Brother-Sister Incest
- Camp Gay: In The Serpent, Cija encounters Lel, an effeminate boy who describes himself as "wishing [he] had been born a girl." Before the reader can assume that Gaskell included an impressively early example of a transsexual character in a fantasy novel, Lel appears as the catamite to a decadent aristocrat from a court full of "woman-hating men."
- Classical Anti-Hero: Cija begins as a pitifully weak heroine and improves as she grows older.
- Disappeared Dad: Cija grew up without a father, but she eventually finds him. The results are not heartwarming.
- Damsel in Distress and The Ingenue: Cija absolutely fits the definition (see One-Gender Race below).
- Gratuitous Rape: Every now and then.
- Half-Human Hybrid: General Zerd. His daughter Seka is three-fourths human.
- Infant Immortality: Possibly averted in Atlan, in which Cija's son Nal wanders off in the middle of an earthquake.
- Interspecies Romance: Zerd was born by a reptile mother to a human father. Zerd's marriage to Cija also counts, despite the lack of actual romance in their relationship.
- In The City, Cija wanders into a grove inhabited by apes, where she becomes a bull ape's paramour. He goes so far as to impregnate her, which she strangely welcomes.
- When Cija finds her father in a temple, she notices that he has married an alligator.
- Jungle Opera: The Serpent, The Dragon, and The City.
- Keep Circulating the Tapes: These novels were last printed in the 1980s.
- Lost World: The setting as a whole qualifies, but the titular Atlan (short for Atlantis) merits this term especially, being shielded by a force field and accessible only via an underwater tunnel.
- Obfuscating Stupidity: The Dictatress urges Cija to use this tactic on her enemies. It works entirely too well.
- One-Gender Race: As a child, Cija was taught that the human race consisted entirely of women who reproduced by laying eggs. Learning that the storybook and romance creatures called men actually exist surprises her.
- Royals Who Actually Do Something
- Science Marches On: Both The Serpent and The Dragon conclude with bibliographies of discredited reference works (specifically, Robert Graves's The White Goddess and James Churchward's The Lost Continent of Mu).
- Sex Slave: After running from Zerd's castle, Cija gets kidnapped and sold into slavery at a brothel, but she escapes before being forced into any more sex acts.