Attack from Atlantis is one of the thirty-five juvenile novels that comprise the Winston Science Fiction set, which were published in the 1950s for a readership of teen-aged boys.

[1] Certain crystals obtained from undersea volcanoes, when stimulated by small amounts of electricity, generate a forcefilm bubble that excludes liquids and solids with unlimited force.

At age seventeen, Don Miller is already an accomplished electronics technician, helping his uncle, Dr. Edward Simpson, with the testing of a new kind of submarine, the Triton I.

Accompanied everywhere by his dog Shep, a schipperke, he has assumed that he would be aboard the boat for its sea trials, though he mans the communications gear on the surface support ship during the submarine's first test run somewhere south of Puerto Rico.

The test run is successful, in spite of some problems with the control systems and stress on certain crew members that has made them believe that they have seen, on the television screens that give a view of the outside of the submarine, men encased in form-fitting bubbles.

Because the United States Navy has taken an interest in Triton and has partly funded her development, the commanding officer on the test run will be Admiral Robert Haller.

As the crew watches helplessly through their closed-circuit televisions, the Atlanteans attach thick ropes to the submarine and then bring in ichthyosaurs that have evolved to breathe water to tow the boat off the plateau.

Don regains consciousness in a cell where he meets Muggins, an American whom the Atlanteans had rescued from a ship sunk in the war, fifty years previously.

Don discovers that K'mith, his family, and several other Atlanteans speak English, having learned it from Muggins in order to read the books that they find in sunken ships and to understand the radio messages that they pick up occasionally through a floating antenna.

As Don gets settled into K'mith's house, S'neifa tells him how an outcast European tribe, some 28,000 years ago, made some accidental discoveries that enabled them to live underwater and develop the Atlantean civilization.

Kept in a cell separate from the rest of Triton's crew, Don asks Muggins to bring him some metal tubing and tools so that he can make a tin whistle to pass the time.

Writing in The New York Times, Villiers Gerson received the novel favorably, saying "The virtue of Mr. Del Rey's book is in his handling of his characters.

"[2] Reviewer Groff Conklin praised the novel for its "swift pacing, vivid imagination, real characters and absence of juvenile melodrama.