Some years ago, an acquaintance put a book in my hands. It was old. The pages had gone yellow at the edges, the way paper does when it has outlived everyone who first read it. An original edition, published in 1905. I remember the feeling before I ever opened it: read this now. I don't say that kind of thing often. I'm telling you what happened.
The book was A Dweller on Two Planets, or The Dividing of the Way. Its title page makes a claim I want to state plainly, because there is no way to ease into it. The manuscript was set down in the 1880s by Frederick S. Oliver, a young man of about eighteen, who insisted he was not its author. He called himself the amanuensis. The true author, he said, was a being called Phylos the Thibetan, the soul of a man named Zailm of Caiphul, who had lived more than twelve thousand years ago in Atlantis, and who dictated his own story through the boy's pen.
Anyone can put a claim like that on a title page. I began reading as a skeptic, and I am not going to spend this essay talking you out of skepticism. Skepticism is the correct starting position. It was mine.
It took me five readings to get through this book properly. I mean that literally. The English is the English of the late 1800s, ornate and winding, and the voice is that of a very young writer carrying very old material. The first read was survival. The second was orientation. Somewhere around the third, the style stopped fighting me and the architecture underneath it came into view. By the fifth, I could no longer pretend I was reading for research.
Here is what I found in there, and none of it requires believing a word of the title page.
A civilization at its absolute height. Caiphul, capital of Atlantis, rendered not as decoration but as a working world: its politics, its classes, its faith, its ambitions. Descriptions of technology that did not exist in the 1880s and would not exist for decades, written with the casual confidence of someone describing household appliances. And running underneath all of it, a moral architecture any novelist would envy: the story of what a civilization does when its power outruns its wisdom, told through one man's ambition, his rise, his failures, and what those failures cost him.
The subtitle is The Dividing of the Way. That is the book's true subject. Not lost continents. Choice.
The lesson I carried out of it fits in one sentence: no civilization survives losing its moral compass. Ours included. A book set twelve thousand years in the past, written more than a century ago, and it reads like a warning addressed to this Tuesday.
Now the part I hesitate to tell, and will tell anyway, exactly as it happened. Years before any of this, when I was a younger man working in this industry, I told friends more than once that I felt I needed to make a film about Atlantis. I could not have told you why. The pull was simply there. When the book was handed to me all those years later, I had no idea it had anything to do with Atlantis. I found out the way you are finding out now, by opening it. I am not going to tell you what that means. I stopped needing to decide. I am telling you what happened.
So I set out to adapt it. That sentence covers three years. My first complete draft ran past 160 pages, which is what happens when you try to fit Atlantis into a screenplay. It does not go quietly into two hours. Cutting it down taught me more about the book than reading it had. Along the way I read nearly everything the Atlantis literature has to offer, from Ignatius Donnelly's Victorian bestseller to Edgar Cayce's readings to the modern researchers, the sober and the strange alike, because a world this large deserves homework this thorough.
And here is what I have not mentioned, the thing that turned a reader into a filmmaker. Underneath the philosophy, underneath the machines and the towers, this is a love story. A tragic one. So large that the book itself cannot resolve it in a single volume. That was the moment I understood what I was holding. Not a curiosity for the esoteric shelf. A story. The oldest kind: love, ambition, consequence, and the long hope of setting things right.
A Dweller on Two Planets is in development at Cineira Studios. The challenge is exactly the one you would guess: honoring the scope and the questions while making something that works the way movies must work, for an audience that has never heard of Phylos and never needs to. Entertainment first, always. The deeper cargo rides underneath, where it belongs.
You do not need to believe what the title page claims. I am not asking you to. Read how this book says it was written, keep your skepticism, and then weigh the one fact I can verify from personal experience: a hundred and twenty years after publication, this book is still finding its readers.
It found me.
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