Jump to ratings and reviews
Rate this book

Ett nytt Atlantis

Rate this book
När kapitalismen har utarmat hela USA, staten förvandlats till en totalitär makt och klimatförändringar gjort att stora delar av land sjunkit långt ner under havsytan, stiger hoppet om att en ny och fri kontinent ska resa sig ur vattenmassorna. Ursula K. Le Guins dystopiska novell Ett nytt Atlantis skrevs redan 1975 men behandlar ämnen som känns obehagligt aktuella även idag.

”Jag såg det. Jag såg det. Jag såg de vita tornen och vattnet som forsade nerför deras sidor och rann tillbaka ut i havet. Och solen lyste på gatorna efter tiotusen år av mörker.”
”Jag hörde dem”, sa Simon med låg röst från skuggorna. ”Jag hörde deras röster.”
”Jesus, sluta!” utbrast Max, ställde sig upp och snubblade ut i den mörka hallen utan sin rock. Vi hörde honom springa nerför trappan.
”Phil”, sa Simon från sängen, ”skulle vi kunna lyfta upp de vita tornen med vår hävstång och vår fasta punkt?”
Efter en lång tystnad svarade Phil Drum: ”Vi har kraften att göra det.”

”Det är nästan obegripligt att den är över fyrtio år gammal, Le Guin beskriver en lätt igenkännlig värld”
DN

”Däremot skulle Le Guins drömska ”Ett nytt Atlantis” kunna vara klimatfiktion skriven förra veckan. Denna berättelse om livet i en sorts postapokalyptisk statsreglerad patriarkal superkapitalism, vars egna system har gjort lösningar på klimatkrisen omöjliga, får en extra udd genom hennes (för sci fi-litteraturen lite ovanliga) kvinnliga perspektiv. Detta bidrar till att ge en intim dimension åt en annan storslagen och nästa mystisk novell.”
Flamman

Ursula K. Le Guins (1929-2018) i produktiva författarskap har sedan 60-talet rört sig över en rad genrer, däribland science fiction, ett mansdominerat område där hon inte bara tagit sig fram, utan även framhållits som en av de största: ”America’s greatest living science fiction writer” skrev till exempel The New York Times 2016. Nu ger Novellix ut hennes novell Ett nytt Atlantis i en nyöversättning av Lena Jonsson.

46 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

11 people are currently reading
733 people want to read

About the author

Ursula K. Le Guin

1,045 books30.2k followers
Ursula K. Le Guin published twenty-two novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many awards: Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PEN-Malamud, etc. Her recent publications include the novel Lavinia, an essay collection, Cheek by Jowl, and The Wild Girls. She lived in Portland, Oregon.

She was known for her treatment of gender (The Left Hand of Darkness, The Matter of Seggri), political systems (The Telling, The Dispossessed) and difference/otherness in any other form. Her interest in non-Western philosophies was reflected in works such as "Solitude" and The Telling but even more interesting are her imagined societies, often mixing traits extracted from her profound knowledge of anthropology acquired from growing up with her father, the famous anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber. The Hainish Cycle reflects the anthropologist's experience of immersing themselves in new strange cultures since most of their main characters and narrators (Le Guin favoured the first-person narration) are envoys from a humanitarian organization, the Ekumen, sent to investigate or ally themselves with the people of a different world and learn their ways.

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think?
Rate this book

Friends & Following

Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!

Community Reviews

5 stars
77 (9%)
4 stars
186 (23%)
3 stars
344 (44%)
2 stars
136 (17%)
1 star
37 (4%)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 85 reviews
Profile Image for Vivian.
2,919 reviews483 followers
June 26, 2018
I wanted to enjoy this more than I did, but I think it felt disjointed and uncentered for a short story.

America has fallen. A dystopian vision of corporate fascism where the population is controlled and monitored, "reeducated" as required, and each citizen given their due portion of goods. The collective is paramount, marriage and nuclear family units outlawed. Imagine Stalin and the Chinese revolution, 1984 and V for Vendetta rolled in this version of socialist imprisonment. The glimpses of Atlantis and the commentary has beautiful language and the dissonance between the two realms are extreme and you wonder which is truly worse, but it felt like it didn't quite gel for me.

Remembering that this was originally written in 1975 it is a disturbing vision nonetheless.

"The Neo-Birch insurgents in Phoenix could not hold out much longer against the mass might of the American army and air force, since their underground supply of small tactical nukes from the Weathermen in Los Angeles had been cut off."

"In a way it was more like an ethereal snowfall than a sunrise. The light seemed to be in discrete particles, infinitesimal flecks, slowly descending, faint, fainter than flecks of fine snow on a dark night, and tinier; but blue."
Profile Image for Christina.
78 reviews90 followers
December 4, 2019
Otroligt språk! Beskrivningen av färgen mörkblå?? Magisk. Men. Fattar... inte... vad som... händer? Ja alltså. Atlantis stiger. Ja ok. Men vad har det med huvudkaraktären att göra? Oklart.
Profile Image for DivaDiane SM.
1,193 reviews119 followers
July 30, 2020
What a strange story. Actually 2 stories in one. One in a world we can recognize as our world in a future gone wrong. The other in a dreamlike, surreal world re-emerging after an unknown amount of time submerged.

I think I appreciate Le Guin’s foreword more than the story itself. The story was first published in 1975 and the reprint in 2013. She does a little retrospective which is quite entertaining.
Profile Image for Ksenia Kwiecińska.
49 reviews2 followers
March 27, 2023
It did not occur to us that there might be another moment - there was no reason to assume there might be more than one. One! was marvel enough: that in all the field of the dark, in the cold, heavy, dense, moveless, timeless, placeless, boundless black, there should have occurred, once, a small slightly blurred, moving light. Time need be created only once, we thought. But were mistaken. The difference between one and more than one is all the difference in the world. Perhaps, that difference is the world.
Profile Image for Sanna G. Ståhl.
Author 1 book46 followers
December 4, 2019
4 December 19 - Novellix kalender

Ett nytt Atlantis av Ursula K. Le Guin föll mig dessvärre inte riktigt i smaken. Största anledningen till detta var att jag inte riktigt förstod mig på budskapet.

Dock tyckte jag verkligen om att miljöproblem och hur människor påverkar vår planet togs upp.

⭐️ Ett nytt Atlantis av Ursula K. Le Guin får av mig 1/5 stjärnor!
Profile Image for Richard.
Author 30 books50 followers
November 23, 2013
(Unfortunately, I left my notes on this at home, so I'll wing it until I can recover them.)

I liked the story quite a lot. It was first published in 1975, but this e-book edition has just been published through the Book View Cafe co-op. The protagonist is a violist, and I always have a big soft spot for violists... It's one of those stories that's too short. The world it describes is vast, and really screwed up and dystopic... Oh! Kind of like the USA now... And the concepts it explores deserve fuller treatment. In that sense, it's like a 15-second view through a keyhole into a marvelous room full of incredible stuff... Which leaves one wanting more, so I suppose that's good. The brand new introduction (October 2013) by the author is practically worth the price of the book...

If I had any criticism it would be that the ambiguous, veiled passages about whatever thing is rising from the sea didn't coalesce for me into something that I felt satisfied with. Kind of like one of those luscious looking meringue things (I can't remember what you call them) that appears substantial, but when you bite it, dissolves into a mere whiff of fragrance... If the work were longer, that could have been treated.

So I'm kind of left with the question of whether Ms Le Guin wrote anything else about this particular world... I suppose I should go look.

Profile Image for Noah Skogberg Nord.
36 reviews3 followers
March 19, 2021
Jag var så förvirrad när jag läste den här novellen? Jag tror den hade fungerat bättre som roman, så man hade fått mer tid på sig att förstå sig på den här dystopiska världen.
Profile Image for Bjorn.
988 reviews188 followers
December 8, 2022
Two counterstories; one a familiar (and creepily familiar) cli-fi dystopia, the other a story of gradual reemergence, ending on both hope and despair and you're not quite sure which is which.

"The universities don't teach math anymore, just marketing."
Profile Image for John Hatley.
1,383 reviews234 followers
February 22, 2018
Written 43 years ago, this is the dark story of a future that is closer today than ever, one in which global climate change has submerged much of the world under water, where electric power is only available to the masses for a few minutes a day, and where that electric power is under the strict control of those in political power. The people keep the dream alive that a new Atlantis will rise up out of the ocean. Ursula Le Guin's grim vision, seen today, appears prophetic.
Profile Image for Lotta.
569 reviews19 followers
September 10, 2018
Jag tillhör tyvärr en av de många som helt enkelt inte förstår sig på den här novellen. Jag tyckte om den skrämmande verkliga framtidsvisionen som Le Guin beskriver, men de vaga mellansekvenserna kändes bara förvirrande och gjorde novellen seg. Jag hade hoppats på science fiction likt Bioshock med en undervattensvärld likt Atlantis, men bortsett från att novellen utspelar sig i framtiden så skulle jag inte kalla det här science fiction.
Profile Image for Manny.
33 reviews
January 20, 2021
I enjoyed it, but am only giving three stars because I’ve also read her masterworks and know what her writing looks like at its best. The atlantis sections were reminiscent of one of the poems in Always Coming Home in a way that I loved. I also found the wry anticipation of 1970s nostalgia very funny. It is a story looking at the future, but is also about the then-contemporary moment. Good god, we’ve had environmental destruction and American imperialism forever... Marriage becoming illegal is a very silly idea, and Le Guin acknowledges it in the introduction, but I found the depiction of marriage in that timeline’s pulp novels to be remarkably like depictions of gay and lesbian relationships in a certain era of pulp novels, where things had to end tragically in order to be “edifying.” The parallel seems intentional. If Simon hadn’t been the narrator’s husband, but her wife, I wonder...
Profile Image for Bibliotekstanten.
824 reviews87 followers
March 15, 2018
Sista novellixen i scifi-boken är Le Guins Ett nytt Atlantis.

I en framtid med krig, klimatkatastrof och Supersonic Superscenic DeLuxe långdistansbussar får vi följa huvudpersonen och hennes man, nyligen frisläppt från rehabiliteringsläger, i en serie glimtar. Han är matematiker och tillsammans med några vänner har de kommit på ett sätt att få energi av solljus hon spelar fiol och hör då och då om att det börjat resa sig landmassor i Atlanten, eller om det nu är Stilla havet.

Jag vet inte... jag kanske är korkad men jag tyckte verkligen inte att den här var bra. Framtiden är på sitt sätt intressant (det lilla vi får veta) där bland annat äktenskap är förbjudet. Men de här mellanpartierna där vi hör Atlantis medborgare (?) vakna och stiga. Dels var de tråkiga dels fattade jag inte poängen.

I vanliga fall är Le Guin en favorit, men Ett nytt Atlantis föll mig inte på läppen. Och det kan som sagt bero på att jag är för korkad för att förstå vad novellens poäng egentligen är.
Profile Image for Julie.
1,034 reviews297 followers
January 3, 2019
"The New Atlantis", by Ursula K. Le Guin. A Swedish translation of a novella that I picked up while on vacation with Kaia, feat. a dystopian future America controlled by corporations and ravaged by environmental devastation & melting ice caps (astonishingly relevant, still, considering this was published in 1975).

I finally read this on the plane coming back from Christmas -- comprehension thus hampered a bit by the fact that, without internet, I couldn't look up words that I didn't recognise. I don't actually speak/write Swedish (only Norwegian), but it worked surprisingly well and was somehow both easier and harder than I thought: easier because I was able to sound out the words in my head and managed to clip along at a fairly okay pace; harder because, as mentioned, there were times when I just literally did not know the word, so I just had to skip over them in sentences and vaguely hope that I was understanding what the fuck was going on. (This did not always work.)

So, with that disclaimer out of the way that my comprehension of the novella wasn't the greatest... onto the text itself! It's a fascinating take on a dystopia, in which there isn't enough electricity to power the cities, and where government control and corporate sponsorships paint a nightmarish vision of the world. There's some great wry humour from the main character, particularly in terms of their apartment being bugged & her playing her viola for the agent listening to them (reminded me of those government agent watching me memes).

3.5 stars, and the main reason bumping the rating down: The 'main' scenes (in the dystopian society) were great, but then interspersed with some weird dreamlike overly-poetic Atlantis bits that(???) I literally did not know what to do with, and barely understood. I thought it might have been an effect of me reading this in a language I'm shaky on, but glancing at the other reviews, I saw that others had a similar reaction to it even in English. So, I'm thinking that if it had just stuck to the primary storyline and not included those vague dreamy bits, it would've been stronger.
Profile Image for josefinessen.
609 reviews36 followers
December 8, 2025
3,5 ✶
Denna novell varvar en framtidsdystopisk (cli-fi) berättelse med mer filosofiska, existentiella, konstnärliga stycken, som ger en känsla av att sväva runt i rymden, vilket såklart låter konstigt men det var fint att läsa. Jag ska dock villigt erkänna att jag gillade delarna som har mer av en traditionell berättarstruktur mer än de lite flummigare. Jag känner att det finns något djupare att förstå här som inte helt landar hos mig, därav inte ett högre betyg, men den var väldigt behaglig att läsa och Le Guin känns som alltid briljant.

(Novelljulkalender 2025 baserat på Novellix julkalender 2019)
Profile Image for Yvonne.
13 reviews
March 23, 2022
Le Guin's writing touches in a way no other author has. The mixing of cli-fi, sci-fi and social dreaming is just impeccable in this book. It also blurs the lines of anthropocentric hyperseparation and allows us to look beyond the human domination of the world. The rising islands working together with the resistance on land shows a political and a natural response to the dystopian world they are put into, which just shows how Le Guin employs the ecocentric approach to the world. An absolutely amazing work.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
15 reviews
August 23, 2025
Short story that is a bit confusing near the beginning, but very good world building for being so short. An interesting concept of new beginnings that may come with the demise of humanity. The government’s subjugation of the body made me think of the work as extra prescient given the overturning of Roe V Wade. 1984esque and mildly Kafkaesque in terms of the absurd bureaucracy.
Profile Image for Chinook.
2,333 reviews19 followers
August 31, 2017
I loved the brief glimpse into a world where marriage is outlawed and scientists are sent to reeducation camps. I'd love an entire novel about that world. The bits about Atlantis or whatever was rising from the depths I was less fond of.
Profile Image for Anna Granberg.
Author 12 books55 followers
September 3, 2019
Skrämmande dystopi som känns aktuell trots att den är från 1975. Bra världsbygge som skulle varit intressant att läsa en längre berättelse från. De poetiska avsnitten hade jag lite svårt att få grepp om, men tyckte att det klarnade i slutet, som lämnas öppet för tolkning på ett snyggt sätt.
Profile Image for Alma Hedmark.
55 reviews1 follower
December 13, 2019
Ingen tvekan om att språken är fantastiskt, liksom heeeelt underbart. Men jag vet inte om jag förstod allt, inte hur de två historierna påverkade varandra eller hörde ihop. Känns som att jag har läst ett kapitel ur en bok med flera hundra sidor. Men jag är pepp på mer sci-fi i alla fall!
Profile Image for Jessica.
1,156 reviews29 followers
January 19, 2020
Jag fascineras av att Le Guin skrev den här novellen redan 1975, med tanke på att klimatförändringar egentligen bara varit "i ropet" på allvar i några år. Jag förstår däremot inte allt hon skriver, men lite kul att läsa om att äktenskap är olagligt medan utomäktenskapliga förbindelser är lagliga...
Profile Image for Sam.
23 reviews1 follower
June 26, 2020
I enjoyed the writing style and the internal dialogues of the main character, but I was confused by the story and didn't feel like I'd had a good time after turning the last page.

During the most of the book the uncertainties and confusion within the main character and among the people in the story played a meaningful part in how I interpreted the overall emotions of all of the characters and that was somewhat enjoyable. Sadly, the feelings of confusion and uncertainty instilled in me as if empathically infected by the characters within the pages lasted even after I put the short story down for the last time and I felt unsatisfied.

Despite my negative view on the book I look forward to reading other works by Le Guin since I really do enjoy her style.
Profile Image for Tobias Blixt.
26 reviews4 followers
November 22, 2019
This was a hard one to rate. I read the swedish translation, which I believe was a rather crude one. I have made some comparisons to the original English text and it might be worthy of another star.

The biggest problem for me is that the glimpse we got into this alternative future wasn't small or big enough. I wanted more focus on the core story of this novella.

The strenghts being of course that this text was written in 1975 and still feel rather fresh. Sometimes it even seems like Le Guin must have known what was going to happen over 40 years later.
Profile Image for Sarah.
87 reviews2 followers
November 3, 2023
Not very memorable. Didn't stick for me. It has some interesting interpretations of the downside of a socialist society.
95 reviews1 follower
January 3, 2015
It's such a joy to read UKL - however weird the imagined world. The way the characters fit into the story, just living a human life, gives me a feeling of always coming home. This has a lot to do with the beautiful cadence of her language (reminiscent of the sound of a viola...), and of course a basic, no-nonsense view of humanity. Even when we've completely screwed up our world. We do go on dreaming, and holding on to what we cherish. "He knew there was no mountain, he was skiing on air." Wow!

The new preface is also lovely, giving a very personal perspective to the writing. "Whatever whas I thinking!"
Profile Image for Honestmitten.
68 reviews
February 15, 2018
Such a short book deserved a second read before returning to library just to check that feeling of having missed something. Following the news of Le Guin's recent death and to overcome the guilt I have of never selecting her books - despite the sense they were calling to me since the age of 10 - this is a bare bones of a book, almost an idea of a book, with a few interesting concepts considering it was written four decades ago. I look forward to reading more of her work.
Profile Image for Anna.
24 reviews13 followers
February 8, 2018
This had so much potential to be super interesting, but instead was constantly interrupted by these vague parts that I didn’t liked at all. This is my first Le Guin though and I definitely will try out one of her novels!
Profile Image for Victoria.
454 reviews
December 4, 2019
Jag gillade att få en lite längre novell! Jag gillade språket i denna, och att fokuset var på att måla en bild av människorna och samhället istället för en press på mycket handling. Det känns coolt att den skrevs på 70-talet!
Profile Image for Princess Consuela Bananahammock.
366 reviews10 followers
February 9, 2023
Har tydligen läst denna för ett år sedan och jag minns inte ens att jag öppnat den. Gav den då 1/5 i betyg och kommentar "Jag förstår ingenting". Nu får den närmre 3/5 i betyg och jag undrar vad det var jag inte förstod för ett år sedan för nu var det inget som var oklart. Aja!
Displaying 1 - 30 of 85 reviews

Can't find what you're looking for?

Get help and learn more about the design.