Opening Atlantis is an alternate history novel from the genre's leading current practitioner. But unlike most alternate histories, its starting point isn't a human event with a different outcome, or even a random cosmic catastrophe like the comet impact in the back-story of S. M. Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers. Turtledove's new alternate history is based on an alternate geography: the presence of a large island or minor continent in the mid-Atlantic Ocean. (The map on the book's cover shows it as eastern North America, broken off at the Appalachians and displaced out to sea, but the text doesn't clearly support that configuration.)

This isn't the Atlantis of Plato's myth, though, or of 19th century archaeological speculation, or a fantasy realm such as J. R. R. Tolkien's Numenor. This is a natural body of land, named for the legendary Atlantis by the Europeans who colonize it, in the same way that California was named for a fictitious Amazon nation in a Spanish romance. Its discovery and colonization open up an era of European expansion, a couple of centuries earlier than the European discovery of America, and dominated not by Spain and Portugal, but by the English, Bretons, and Basques. And unlike the Americas, Atlantis has no indigenous civilizations and indeed no native populations. Its animals have never been hunted and, like animals on some real smaller islands, have no fear of human beings—and, in the years after the colonization starts, many of them die back from over-hunting.

Opening Atlantis is mainly an action/adventure story, divided into three parts, each with an analog in the real history of the New World: the colonial era, followed by Caribbean piracy, followed by the French and Indian Wars (but without the Indians!). In fact, it's an odd hybrid of the history of the proto-United States and that of the Caribbean, with runaway black and native American slaves forming rebellious communities in the interior, and with a pirate-ruled free port. But there are several historical themes that libertarians will recognize and find interesting.

This is especially true in the first part, with the essentially ungoverned colonies founded by European fishermen eventually being visited by European nobles intent on making themselves rulers. This is very exactly the Nock-Oppenheim conquest theory of the origins of the state. And Turtledove's colonists view their new rulers “taxes” as no more than robbery, and look for ways to free themselves of the imposition.

The second part shows us a pirate city, Avalon, and the efforts of the British, the Dutch, and some of the English-descended colonists to suppress its pirate fleets. Like historical pirates, Avalon has a measure of egalitarianism; each pirate ship is a kind of republic. The city as a whole has no overarching government; rather pirate leaders have to personally agree to any common course of action. Turtledove shows the difficulties of mounting an effective “national defense” under these conditions—a theme and a problem of much interest to libertarians. And he also shows the earlier issue of Atlantan independence from direct European rule remaining an issue.

This theme somewhat recedes into the background in the third part, which focuses on a European war that spills over into the colonies, with the English fighting the French and Spanish. Colonial irregular warfare and alliances with runaway slave forces offer some rude surprises to the regular army officers sent over from Europe. Turtledove shows slavery becoming an issue, though in a less ideologically focused way than in the history of the United States. At the end of the novel, the issue remains unresolved, as does Atlantean resistance to European authority, clearly leaving room for a sequel.

In other words, there are a lot of libertarian themes running through this story of battles and journeys. LFS members are likely to find it sympathetic, as well as entertaining. The ideological content is light, but what there is is nearly all good. And the storytelling, as is usual with Turtledove, is skilled and enjoyable.