In fact, the man is a surgeon engaged in research; he explains to Walker that they are in Atlantis, at the bottom of the sea, and gives the American a cursory explanation of the nature of Atlantean society.

The people of the domed city dress in red; their buildings, and even the cigars they smoke, are of the same color, giving their society its nickname, the Scarlet Empire.

489 ADG, as he is designated) is delighted to have awakened in a socialist state; but his enthusiasm quickly fades as he experiences the capricious irrationality and the privations of life in a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Atavars are given chances to conform; the recalcitrant ones are fed to a kraken outside the dome of Atlantis, in a ceremony reminiscent of the Christians martyred in the Colosseum of ancient Rome.

The Atlanteans keep all they recover from the surface world in their Hall of Curiosities; its contents include everything from ships' figureheads and waterlogged books to enormous heaps of jewels and gold coins.

Walker, Astraea, the doctor and the surgeon depart in their (treasure-laden) submarine; in a confrontation with the attacking kraken, they fire a torpedo, which kills the monster and also punctures the dome of Atlantis, destroying the city.

Utopian novels of Parry's era regularly advocated socialist solutions to the world's problems; Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) was the most famous book of this type, though there were many more.

Other authors, however, reacted against this literature of socialist advocacy; writers of more conservative and capitalist orientations wrote to counter the leftist tendency of utopians like Bellamy, and produced dystopias and works of satire.

[4] Parry cast his Scarlet Empire precisely in this satiric dystopian vein; he exploited the ancient story of Atlantis to portray his conception of the defects of a socialist state, which he termed "Social Democracy."

"[7] In the book, Parry envisions the Atlanteans as reverting to the habit of some of the early democracies of ancient Greece, in which some public offices were assigned to citizens by lot.

He quickly learns that the people who run Atlantis are corrupt and self-interested, and violate the basic tenets of Atlantean equality to feed their own hunger for power.

Parry's primary goal, however, is not in crafting a tightly organized fiction, in the way a science-fiction writer might do; he does not even attempt to provide a plausible explanation for the survival of Atlantis.

Parry's Atlantis does not rely upon secret police, like Czarist Russia and later totalitarian societies; spies and enforcers work openly, as "Inspectors" (successors of AFL-style "walking delegates").

Matchmaking is determined by government function, without personal choice: tall people are matched with short, attractive with homely, etc., to produce a more uniform and standard Atlantean.

The Atlantean legislature eventually passes bills "Requiring the Use of the Left Arm as Much as the Right", and "Providing for the Equal Use of the Maxillary Muscles on Both Sides of the Mouth in Masticating Food".

[12] The early responses to Parry's Scarlet Empire were conditioned by its politics: conservative or mainstream reviewers liked or accepted it, while progressive reception was far more critical.

He is good on the gloomy grandeur of the Atlantean realm, as when Walker first beholds the full scale of the city: It was as though we had stepped into some vast cathedral...I looked down a vista of titanic columns, which rose to a dome of immeasurable height.

The dome was faintly disclosed by lights which shed their rays like distant stars...and in this half-light the columns shimmered like colored marble and were dimly mirrored in the smooth and glossy flooring of the mighty naves.