Giving Radio to the Romans: Difference between revisions

If a Hero succeeds, there's still a risk of [[Gone Horribly Wrong|going horribly wrong]], [[Gone Horribly Right|going horribly right]], or both.

 

* [[ET Gave Us Wi-Fi]]: Essentially, this trope from the POV of the less developed culture.

* [[Low Culture, High Tech]]: Will result if the time traveler ''doesn't'' lay the groundwork for the low tech people to properly replicate the future tech.

 

* [[This Is My Boomstick]]: The Hero only wants to impress the locals short-term.

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== Literature ==

* ''[[A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court]]'' is one of the first works to use this trope [[Unbuilt Trope|or to seriously examine the difficulties behind it]]. The aforementioned Connecticut Yankee attempts to introduce both modern technology and [[Values Dissonance|modern egalitarian ideals]] into a medieval feudal Camelot, but events spiral out of his control and cause the timeline to snap back into course.

* [[Poul Anderson]] [[Deconstruction|showed the problems]] with this in his short story ''The Man Who Came Early'', in which an American soldier stationed in Iceland is sent back to the Viking Era after being hit by lightning. Luckily the Icelandic language has not changed much since then. All his attempts to change history fall flat on their face. When he tries to show the Vikings how to make compasses, he has no idea where to find or mine magnetic ores. When he tries to show them how to build more modern sailing vessels, the Vikings point out that such vessels are too cumbersome to dock anywhere where there is not a ready built harbor, an obvious rarity in that time period, and so on. The story's main point is that introducing future inventions is immensely difficult because most advances are useless without an advanced societal infrastructure to support them.

* In [[Vernor Vinge]]'s ''[[Zones of Thought|A Fire Upon the Deep]]'', two groups on a medieval planet get technological advice, but not physical help, from stranded human children with, respectively, a small computer and an FTL phone, allowing them both to advance significantly. It helps enormously that the child's computer has a full history of technology stored, while the people on the other end of the phone can look up theoretical academic research on bringing technology to lost colonies, which is apparently a minor academic discipline in that galaxy.

* referenced/averted in 'The Golden Crown'- Maegen decides that radios would be useless, and brings mini chocolate bars and ball-point pens to trade to the Romans instead.

* ''[[Island in The Sea of Time|The Islander Trilogy]]'' by [[S.M. Stirling]]. The island of Nantucket is whisked into 1250 BC, and must contend with Bronze Age cultures and their own crop of power-hungry renegades. This one ''does'' contend with language difficulties, uptime diseases, and so forth; the Nantucketers manage to wipe out huge numbers of Native Americans before they even realize what's going on, because the first party sent to the mainland contains someone with a sniffle. Their language difficulties are moderately eased by the fact that the languages of Europe are, at that point, much closer to still being "Proto-Indo-European"...

** Also helped by Nantucket being big and upscale enough that having a professor of ancient languages on it at the time isn't ridiculously improbable.

 

== Real Life ==

* [[Averted]] in the sense that no time travelers have gone back to change things... as far as we know.