A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court - Time Travel As A Science Fiction Subgenre

Time Travel As A Science Fiction Subgenre

While Connecticut Yankee is sometimes credited as the foundational work in the time travel subgenre of science fiction, Twain's novel had several important immediate predecessors. Among them are H.G. Wells's story "The Chronic Argonauts" (1888), which was a precursor to The Time Machine (1895). Also published the year before Connecticut Yankee was Edward Bellamy's wildly popular Looking Backward (1888), in which the protagonist is put into a hypnosis-induced sleep and wakes up in the year 2000. Yet another American novel that could have served as a more direct inspiration to Twain was The Fortunate Island (1882) by Charles Heber Clark. In this novel, a technically proficient American is shipwrecked on an island that broke off from Britain during Arthurian times, and never developed any further.

Twain may have created a specific subgenre in which the time traveler attempts to introduce modern technology into a past society. Subsequent writers have tended to examine further the issues this raises, usually drawing the historical setting more realistically than Twain. A well-known example is L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall in which an American archaeologist of the 1930s arrives at Ostrogothic Italy and manages to prevent the Dark Ages by introducing printing and other modern inventions. Leo Frankowski wrote the Conrad Stargard series in which a 20th century Pole arrives in 13th century Poland and by rapid industrialization manages to defeat the Mongol invasion and annihilate the Teutonic Knights.

Poul Anderson presented an antithesis in his story The Man Who Came Early, in which a modern American who finds himself in Viking Iceland fails to introduce modern technologies despite being an intelligent, competent, well-trained engineer, and finds that in a 10th century environment 10th century technologies work best. Ford Madox Ford presented another antithesis in his Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, in which the time traveler, in spite of being a trained engineer, lacks the technical know-how to develop modern technology from scratch in medieval society. After some half-hearted attempts he "goes native" and makes a credible effort at becoming a knight.

S. M. Stirling introduced a new twist in the Nantucket, books and Eric Flint in the 1632 series, in which it is not a single modern individual but a whole modern community (American in both cases) transported into the past—to the Bronze Age and Germany of the Thirty Years' War respectively. This premise increases the plausibility of their ability to influence the past.

Some maintain this entire subgenre shares with Twain's original book a mindset that regards Western culture as inherently superior to other cultures, past and present. Specifically, some assert that Stirling's "Nantuckars" are depicted as embarking on colonial empire-building in the Bronze Age. In Boris and Arkady Strugatsky's Monday Begins on Saturday, Merlin is transported to the Soviet Union of the 1960s, where he explicitly refers to Twain's novel, declaring its protagonist an early exponent of American imperialism. He boasts to his Soviet hosts that he already opposed that "imperialist". (However, this reference—like much of the Strugatsky novel in general—is clearly satire).

In Timeline, author Michael Crichton explored the practicality of time travel through theoretical quantum physics. His characters went back in time knowingly and attempted to not be anachronistic in their ways, though they use grenades and teach the locals how to use special chemistry techniques.

In "That Hideous Strength", the final novel in the space trilogy by C.S. Lewis, Merlin is brought forward into 1940s England, woken from his long sleep in his cave prison. In disguise, he assists the protagonists in their struggle against the imperious N.I.C.E.