A printed map mounted on the inside front board depicts a self-contained island world organised around a great central maelstrom, with settlements and regions arranged within a circular system of land and water. By the early twentieth century, improved surveying, communications, and global transportation had made the traditional fictional device of the wholly undiscovered island increasingly difficult to sustain (Stableford, Langford and Pringle, 2022).

 The Ultimate Island solves the problem by making geographical isolation part of the premise itself: the archipelago is hidden and protected by surrounding fog and turbulent waters. A similar conceit was subsequently used to explain the secret of Skull Island in King Kong (1933).

Ex Carta

 (1925) by Lance Sieveking imagines the rediscovery of a surviving Atlantis, inhabited by an advanced, isolated civilisation. Its map shows us an archipelago concealed in the Atlantic by fog and dangerous whirlpools. It is one of several British novels of the period exploring the theme.

Lancelot de Giberne Sieveking (1896–1972), generally known as Lance Sieveking, was a British writer, poet, broadcaster, and producer whose career spanned speculative fiction and the development of new mass media. He served in the Royal Naval Air Service during the First World War and began publishing science fiction in the early 1920s. His first novel, Stampede! (1924), was a scientific romance involving a machine capable of transmitting telepathic commands; The Ultimate Island: A Strange Adventure followed the next year. Sieveking joined the BBC in 1925 and remained there until 1956, becoming a prolific producer of radio drama and an important figure in the development of early British television (Clute, 2025).

The Ultimate Island belongs to the long imaginative tradition surrounding Atlantis and other Drowned And Lost Worlds. Set in a near future in which commercial transatlantic air travel has become commonplace, the novel describes the discovery of a mysterious Atlantic archipelago concealed by fog and protected by dangerous whirlpools. At its centre survives a remnant of Atlantis, isolated from the outside world and possessing a civilisation far in advance of contemporary Europe.

Sieveking’s Atlantis is also conceived as a social experiment. A contemporary reviewer in the English Review described the island as a ‘remarkable remnant of Atlantis’, whose age-old population had worked out ‘social, economic, scientific, and psychological problems’ centuries in advance of the rest of the world. The reviewer praised the novel’s initial promise of ‘utopian ingenuities’ and even ‘delicate allegory’, while regretting its later turn towards conventional adventure and melodrama. The intervention of European warships culminates in violent conflict and the destruction of the island, bringing Sieveking’s experiment in alternative civilisation to a catastrophic conclusion.

The Ultimate Island appeared during a renewed vogue for Atlantis in British popular fiction between the wars. Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Maracot Deep (1929) subsequently imagined explorers discovering a surviving Atlantean population beneath the Atlantic, while Dennis Wheatley returned to the subject in They Found Atlantis (1936). Such works inherited a much older body of speculation in which Plato’s Atlantis had become entangled with supposed lost continents such as Lemuria and Mu, nineteenth-century theories of vanished civilisations, Theosophy, and the literary tradition of the Lost World. Sieveking gives these materials a particularly modern setting: it is advances in aviation that make possible the encounter with an ancient, previously isolated civilisation.

The novel also sits naturally within Sieveking’s broader engagement with speculative media. He had begun publishing science fiction in 1922 and continued to write speculative fiction throughout his career. At the BBC he became an important figure in the development of radio drama and later television, producing adaptations and original work during a period when broadcasting itself was still an experimental medium. In this respect, The Ultimate Island is characteristic of Sieveking’s wider fascination with new technologies, new forms of communication, and speculative futures.

A curious afterlife of Sieveking’s Atlantis tale is provided by his son, Paul Sieveking (1949–), who later became co-editor of Fortean Times. This British magazine became a prominent forum for reports and speculation concerning anomalous phenomena, alternative archaeology, lost civilisations, and other subjects closely related to the imaginative territory explored by his father half a century earlier.

A printed map mounted on the inside front board depicts a self-contained island world organised around a great central maelstrom, with settlements and regions arranged within a circular system of land and water. By the early twentieth century, improved surveying, communications, and global transportation had made the traditional fictional device of the wholly undiscovered island increasingly difficult to sustain (Stableford, Langford and Pringle, 2022).

The Ultimate Island solves the problem by making geographical isolation part of the premise itself: the archipelago is hidden and protected by surrounding fog and turbulent waters. A similar conceit was subsequently used to explain the secret of Skull Island in King Kong (1933).