Lords of Atlantis by Wallace West (1960)

Lords of Atlantis (1960), a science fiction novel by Wallace West.

Pictured below: Paperback (New York: Airmont Publishing Co., 1963), #SF3, 128 p., 60¢. Here’s the blurb from the back cover:

In the dim past, men had fled to Mars for refuge, but now the red planet was a dying world, and the Martians returned to colonize Earth and rule over the Titans -- descendants of those who had stayed behind at the time of the now-legendary catastrophe.

But the rulers of the Titans, retained by the conquerors on their ancestral thrones, grew restless under the benevolent progress of the Lords of Atlantis, looked back to a so-called “golden age,” and plotted rebellion.

Here is a thrilling novel of what might have been the basis of the Great Legends that have come down to us: of the “gods,” of Atlantis, of Zeus, Hermes, Hephaestus, Hera, Athena, Aphrodite, Jason, Medea -- and of a mighty empire which was weighed in the balance and found wanting!

Surprisingly, Lords of Atlantis was mentioned in a 2003 Space.com article about getting close to Mars with books, film and music: “Hardly a classic in any sense of the word, West's story is still one of my personal favorites. The pulp novel was first published in 1963 [1960] and details the last days of a Martian colony on Earth during early human history. Included in the story's campy plot: the tale of humans who fled to Mars to avoid an ice age and have returned to reign over the Earthlings that stayed behind, the death of Mars, Greek mythology and the legend of Atlantis.”