User blog comment:Historygeek1/Continuation of Atlantis/@comment-21519-20100714235033

Since this discussion ended it had occurred to me that Atlantis cannot go on paralleling American history, even roughly, for much longer than it has. (Yes, it grew less and less parallel as it went on, with parallelism peaking in USA and perhaps "NR" before it, then growing much, much looser in LA.) Atlantis is so much smaller than the USA, there just isn't room for the kind of phenomena which drove American economic growth in the late nineteenth century. There's not enough room for endless farmland generating enough food to support dozens of densely-populated major manufacturing centers, and there's certainly not room for space-inefficient industries like cattle ranching to take off on a large scale. There's not a frontier for previously unsuccessful people to try their hand at taming; that was something you saw in the 17th- and 18th-century stories. The lack of a Pacific coast denies Atlantis access to Asian markets unless they use profit-shrinking Terranovan middle men, and it's not even large enough to sit athwart the Europe-Terranova trade routes, so there's a real possibility they'll be locked out of the emerging global economy altogether; in fact, in LA that was already starting to come to pass. And Atlantis just doesn't have the resources to make itself a superpower at any point in the future, unless they turn to imperialism like the UK did; in LA and the novellas they hadn't yet, and by then the ship must have sailed on that option. When they tried to play hardball in Terranova they got their asses kicked, though they seem to have gotten lucky in that Britain was too worried about France to put the hurt on them and let them get away with status quo ante bellum.

At best Atlantis might eventually be able to turn itself into Taiwan or Malaysia: a previously semicolonial backwater that's somehow managed to attract industries that don't rely on drawing heavily from its limited natural resources, and which provide opportunities for rapid GDP growth, provided the Atlanteans remember what side of their bread is buttered and do whatever they must to remain on good terms with more important trading partners.

So paralleling American economic, military, or political history is largely out, and as for social history, the fact that they've got de jure racial equality over a century before the real USA did suggests things won't stay parallelism-friendly there, either. So an Atlantis story set after 1900 or so would pretty much guarantee some sort of original story. Maybe that's why HT's done.