I’m looking for examples of what I’m calling the “Connecticut Yankee” genre, based on one of its seminal works, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, where Hank Morgan, an American from 1889, was transported back to the time of King Arthur.
The basic element of the genre is that a person or group of people from one time (often modern day America) are transported to another time or place. They travelers do not control or understand how the transportation occurred and that issue is usually irrelevent to the plot. The main plot is usually how the transported group attempts to first survive and then modernize the setting they find themselves in.
Other examples of this genre:
Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp: An American archaeologist from 1938 (when the book was written) is transported back to 6th century Rome.
The Destroyermen series by Taylor Anderson: American destroyer from 1942 is transported to a fantasy-setting world where ape-men are fighting dinosaur-men.
Nantucket trilogy by S.M. Stirling: the modern island of Nantucket is transported back to the year 1200BC.
Axis of Time trilogy by John Birmingham: multinational (but mostly American) carrier group from 2021 is transported back to 1942 in the middle of the Battle of Midway.
1634 series by Eric Flint and others: modern village in West Virginia is transported back to Germany in the middle of the Thirty Years War.
Conrad Stargard series by Leo Frankowski: modern Polish engineering student is transported back to 13th century Poland.
Lost Legion series by Harry Turtledove: Cohort of 1st century BC Roman legion is transported to a fantasy-setting world that parallels the Byzantine Empire.
Lost Regiment series by William R. Forstchen: Union Civil War regiment is transported to fantasy-setting world where lizardmen are attacking humans.
As I said, I’m looking for other examples. But I’d also be interested in any general discussion of the genre or specific works in the genre.
The High Crusade by Poul Anderson is similar in substance: a group of knights heading off to the Hundred Years War are attacked by advanced aliens and manage to defeat them, after which they take the spaceship to fight against the alien empire.
Also similar in Ken Grimwood’s Replay, where the person sent to the past makes changes that often have serious ramifications.
I’ve been trying to recall the author and title of a series for a while, hopefully someone in this thread will have heard of it.
I recall reading a youth fiction trilogy in the ‘Connecticut Yankee’ genre as a kid.
An American boy and his British cousin are sent back in time during a visit. In the first book, they experience the Roman occupation of Britain. In the second book, they travel to the Americas and are involved with adventures in an Aztec or Mayan empire. In the third book, they travel to China and join opposing sides of a civil war.
Throughout the series they apply Yankee/English ingenuity and take advantage of their advanced knowledge. In one of the final chapters, the American helps his Chinese friends develop a tank, only to have it destroyed by a plane developed by his cousin.
A modern day individual transported to a more primitive society is a common theme in fantasy novels, I don’t know if they all necessarily make the cut.
Some that stand out in terms of the individual using a modern / technological approach to change society are:
Dave Duncan’s Seventh Sword trilogy. An engineering manager builds a world conquering army.
Gordon Dickson’s Dragon Knight series. A little weaker connection here, although the protagonist takes a scientific approach to becoming a magician.
More scifi-ish, is Jerry Pournelle’s Janissaries series. A group of 20th century soldiers fight against a Roman-style empire (and aliens).
There’s that god-awful Crichton book from a few years ago – Timeline. A truly terrible book about a group of young modern-day historians who are transported back in time to the Hundred Years’ War by some evil Bill Gates or something.
“Ethical Engineer” by Harry Harrison. It’s not time travel per se, but very similar - the highly technically competent guy ends up on a feudal planet with some remnants of industrial civilization and tries to build up a more high tech empire out of one of the existing states.
Oh, and where would we be without the “Army of Darkness” movie :-). Admittedly the scope of technical reforms is much smaller there.
another “near miss” might be “Jack Faust” Jack Faust (novel) - Wikipedia . I guess with time the Faust legend is getting better and better from the authors learning more elaborate technologies and ideas to back project into 16th century. Goethe’s version is more sophisticated than Marlowe’s, and this one is apparently appropriately further modernized.
Joel Rosenberg’s Guardians of the Flame series: a group of college students, playing a fantasy RPG, get transported into their game world. They use their knowledge of modern technology (and more enlightened governance) to transform the world.
I just want to say that I really wish I had a copy of the Once Upon A Classic version of A Connecticut Yankee In In Arthur’s Court, which was broadcast on PBS in the late-'70s. Roscoe Lee Browne played Merlin, and Richard Basehart was King Arthur.
Keep thy lady from gettething slayed
Protect her with a real sharp blade!
Lord Pelinore!
(Pelinore!)
Swords fo-or Lords!
Does it only work if they go back in time? What if they accidentally move forward in time? If so, Futurama would fit, because, throughout the first couple of seasons, Fry is injecting his twentieth century customs into the thirtieth century.
The only thing that really doesn’t fit is that he knows how he got there (cryogenically frozen, though he doesn’t know all the mechanics of how it works.)
Also, would Planet of the Apes fit this, even if the protagonist, doesn’t know he time traveled until the end?
Terry Pratchett wrote a short story called Once and Future, where a time traveller takes on the mantle of Merlin when his time machine breaks. It might not be exactly what you were looking for, as the main character is a professional time traveller rather than a victim of circumstance, but it goes into how “Merlin” introduces antibiotics and has to work out how to generate electricity. It was published in Once More*, a collection of short stories and essays which is bloody difficult to find.
H. Beam Piper wrote a series of short stories (and a novel) on this theme- the Paratime series and the Gunpowder God story, which is about a 1960s police officer who ends up in an alternate universe where gunpowder is this rare and tightly controlled by The Church commodity. And, as it happens, this police officer is a firearms enthusiast…
The Paratime stories about about a sort of police agency that controls access to cross-dimensional travel to prevent people from high-tech universes visiting low-tech ones and messing things up there.
All really good stories and worth reading if you can find them, IMHO.
Harry Turtledove and Judith Tarr wrote one about a female Californian lawyer being transported back to a town on the frontier (on the Danube?) of the Roman Empire in 170 AD.
Turtledove also has his Crosstime Engineers series of juveniles about people from the near-future contacting and trading with various historical cultures. (The teenagers involved always seem to get stuck and have to cope on their own for a while in each book.)
These may not be quite what you’re looking for but Jack McDevitt has a fairly lightweight timetravel adventure just out in paperback called Time Travellers Never Die, in which the characters visit all sorts of cultures and historical figures… John Kessel had one called Corrupting Dr. Nice, about time-travelling swindlers…
And of course there’s a whole sub-genre of time-travel romance with present day heroes and heroines mysteriously travelling back to almost any period you care to name and finding true love! And, indeed, vice versa, with barbarians, etc. popping up in the present!
Probably not really what you’re after, though!
This was, incidentally, the running gag on the BUCK ROGERS tv show: our hero would save the day with twentieth-century know-how in episode after episode, since folks in the future have pretty much forgotten judo and sign language and so on. Also, he impresses the ladies with his disco-dance moves and winds up being the only person who can foil a vampire attack (since, y’know, even myths have been lost).