RIP Mary Settegast (1934-2020).
Mary Settegast passed on a little under two months ago. I was communicating with Mary for the past few years and encouraged her to release an updated version of Plato Prehistorian (originally published 1986). She asked if I’d provide a new foreword and appendix focusing on recent discoveries that complement her original ideas. The updated manuscript, including new illustrations, went to the publishers in April of this year. However, it has recently emerged that there was a bit more work to complete, including graphic issues, which she’d left undone. It appears it will be released next year, perhaps by spring.
Plato Prehistorian was, and remains, a blazingly original study of Plato’s Timaeus and Critias dialogues and I’ll write a review describing what it’s about when the new edition is finally out. Though she uses Plato’s 9,600 BCE date as an investigative key, Plato Prehistorian falls far outside the usual Atlantis genre in fascinating ways. Related others by her include When Zarathustra Spoke (2005) which considers religious ideology behind the spread of agriculture and The Bear, the Bull and the Child of Light (2018) which is a young-adult novel set in Çatalhöyük. As prehistoric fiction it’s in the same vein as The Inheritors and Dance of the Tiger but instead of imagining contrasts between human species, it plays on disparities between urbanites and hunter-gatherers within the world of Neolithic Anatolia.
