Atlantis High

Lore & Background

The series revolves around 16-year-old Giles Gordon (Michael Wesley-Smith), who has just moved to Sunset Cove, 'a beautiful coastal surfing town where the sun is always shining, the people are all beautiful and everything is perfect... or so it seems'. He enrolls in Atlantis High School, where he soon discovers that Sunset Cove is unlike any town he has ever seen: populated by double-agents, aliens and high school students with blue hair and pointy ears, its inhabitants are eccentric lunatics who at times turn into superheroes or other whimsical figures.

The main cast includes Robyn Malcolm as Violet Profusion, the scheming principal; Ken Blackburn as Mr. Dorsey, a science teacher secretly an alien; Ray Henwood as Commander Vermont, who commands local military forces; Loren Horsley as Sabrina, the ultra-popular girl; Elizabeth McGlinn as Octavia, a secret agent; Todd Emerson as Beanie, a strange student with out-sized ears; Lucy Gamble as Sophie, who claims to be haunted by a poltergeist; Lee Donoghue as Josh, the ultra-rich jock who moonlights as a superhero; Laura Wilson as Jet, a conspiracy theorist with blue hair; Victoria Spence as Antonia/Antony, who appear to inhabit the same body; Joanne Mildenhall as Dorothy, Giles' mother; and Richard Lambeth as Coach Shane, the narcissistic sports coach.

Reader's Guide

Atlantis High is significant as a New Zealand-filmed series that aired exclusively in the United Kingdom, never airing on New Zealand's TV3 despite being produced there. It represents a niche entry in teen television, blending parody and homage to soap operas with surreal elements such as aliens, secret agents, and split personalities. The show's 52-episode commission and short original run from September 2001 to March 2002 on Channel 5 mark it as a brief but distinctive experiment in genre television. Its legacy lies in its cult appeal, with a cast that includes actors who later gained wider recognition, and its status as a product of Cloud 9 Screen Entertainment, a British-owned company based in New Zealand.

Did You Know?

• The series was filmed in Wellington, New Zealand, but never aired on New Zealand's TV3.
• The character Josh Montana secretly moonlights as the Silver Lining, the ersatz superhero of Sunset Cove.
• The character Antonia and Antony appear to inhabit the same body, as observed by Giles.
• The series was commissioned for 52 half-hour episodes.

The Expanding Horizon of the Genre

Science fiction stands as a genre of speculative fiction built on the premise of imagining how technology, scientific understanding, or biological systems might evolve into advanced or futuristic forms. What makes the field remarkable is how its thematic palette has broadened dramatically across the centuries. Early works gravitated toward space exploration, encounters with extraterrestrial beings, time travel, and robotics. Over time, the genre absorbed parallel universes, dystopian societies, and the manipulation of biology. In more recent decades, writers have turned their attention to information technology, transhumanism, posthumanism, and pressing environmental challenges. At its core, science fiction is less about the technology itself and more about charting how human beings react to the consequences of these projected or imagined scientific advances. The genre functions as a laboratory for exploring what it means to be human when the rules of the natural world are rewritten. This ever-widening scope ensures that the genre remains a living, evolving conversation rather than a fixed set of tropes.

The Definitional Quagmire

One of the most persistent challenges in the world of science fiction is the simple act of defining it. Authors, critics, scholars, and readers have long disagreed on where the genre's boundaries lie. Isaac Asimov framed it as literature dealing with how human beings respond to shifts in science and technology, while Robert A. Heinlein emphasized realistic speculation grounded in solid knowledge of the real world and a thorough grasp of the scientific method. Lester del Rey acknowledged that even devoted fans struggle to articulate what the genre actually is, noting that no full satisfactory definition exists because the field resists easily delineated limits. Damon Knight captured the circularity with his famous quip that science fiction is simply what people point to when they say the words. The genre houses numerous subgenres—hard science fiction prioritizing scientific accuracy, soft science fiction leaning into social sciences, space opera centered on adventure, cyberpunk probing the technology-society interface, and climate fiction tackling environmental crises. David Seed suggested it may be more productive to think of science fiction as the intersection of these more concrete subgenres rather than a single unified category.

Roots and Pioneers

The intellectual ancestry of science fiction stretches further back than many readers expect. In the second century CE, the satirist Lucian penned A True Story, a work packed with themes that feel startlingly modern: journeys to other worlds, alien lifeforms, interplanetary conflict, and artificial life. Some scholars even call it the first science fiction novel. Stories from The Arabian Nights, the tenth-century Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, and Ibn al-Nafis's thirteenth-century Theologus Autodidactus are also cited as containing science-fiction elements. During the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, a wave of science-fantasy works emerged, including Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, Johannes Kepler's Somnium, Cyrano de Bergerac's lunar and solar epics, Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and Voltaire's Micromégas. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, published in 1818, is frequently credited as the first true science fiction novel. Jules Verne and H. G. Wells became pivotal figures in shaping the genre, and the twentieth century brought the Golden Age, space operas, dystopian literature, and the pulp magazine era that further expanded the field's reach.

Naming, Culture, and Legacy

The very name of the genre has been a source of debate. American magazine editor and writer Forrest J. Ackerman is generally credited with coining the shorthand sci-fi around 1954, drawing a parallel to the then-trendy term hi-fi. The first known printed use appeared in a January 1954 review of Donovan's Brain by movie critic Jesse Zunser. As the genre permeated popular culture, many writers and fans began associating sci-fi with low-quality pulp novels and low-budget B-movies. By the 1970s, critics like Damon Knight and Terry Carr deliberately used the term as a marker to separate hack-work from serious science fiction. Australian scholar Peter Nicholls noted around 1993 that SF or sf remained the preferred abbreviation within the community of writers and readers. Heinlein himself felt the term was insufficient for more thoughtful works and proposed speculative fiction as an alternative. Beyond the nomenclature wars, science fiction has left an indelible mark on literature, film, television, and broader culture, serving as a tool to critique present-day society, imagine alternatives, entertain audiences, and spark a sense of wonder.