"The Lost Millenium" is a 1967 science-fiction novel, written by husband and wife team Walt and Leigh Richmond, and published as half of an Ace Double. Apparently, Walt and Leigh wrote several books, set in a shared setting, most of which were published by Ace.

The story is basically Chariots of the Gods (which would be released the next year), only admittedly fiction, only the authors put enough technical detail in that I am not quite convinced they were writing this as fiction. The story starts with an archaeologist meeting an engineer to discuss the engineer's latest invention: a "solar tap" that will use electric potential differences between the ionosphere and the earth's core to provide unlimited power. The archaeologist warns the engineer that this has been done before, disastrously, thousands of years in the past. The book is then a series of dialogs between the engineer and archaeologist (who are never named), used as a framing device for the action of thousands of years ago, where an advanced society destroyed the earth with the same technology, trying to power ramjet spaceships to near-lightspeed. All of ancient human legends, everything from the story of Atlantis to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, are part of the involved process of the world's destruction and resurrection. It is told in detail that is meticulous as it is non-sensical. Of course, the authors were working with the scientific knowledge of the 1960s, but even with that, their alternate history of the world is a hodgepodge of pseudoscience, some of which seems to be inspired by Immanuel Velikovsky.

This book was still entertaining to read, as science-fiction, and it was almost a game for me to see how they could tie as many things as possible into their theory (did you know circumcision was a way to weed out hemophilia in an age of mutation?), and also as a reminder of just how weird the 1960s were. What was probably a "far-out" idea at the time is now an amusing story. I have lost my amusement for pseudoscience in the present day, but its past history can still entertain me.

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