Giving Radio to the Romans: Difference between revisions

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== Comic Books ==

* The ''[[Marvel 1602]]'' mini-series has a time-displaced [[Captain America]] sent back to Elizabethan times. When asked to return to the future, he insists on staying to try and build a better America from the beginning -- which he does in small ways, such as helping a group of colonists survive a winter that should have wiped them out, or warning the natives against selling their land to unscrupulous capitalists. The final touch comes when, because of his actions, the American colonies declare independence from Britain 174 years early.

* The ''[[Marvel 1602]]'' mini-series has a time-displaced [[Captain America (comics)]] sent back to Elizabethan times. When asked to return to the future, he insists on staying to try and build a better America from the beginning -- which he does in small ways, such as helping a group of colonists survive a winter that should have wiped them out, or warning the natives against selling their land to unscrupulous capitalists. The final touch comes when, because of his actions, the American colonies declare independence from Britain 174 years early.

** And it's got ''[[Everything's Better with Dinosaurs|dinosaurs]]''.

** It also has consequences beyond his control -- his presence causes the [[Marvel Universe]] to impose itself on the past, and period versions of the [[X-Men (Comic Book)|X-Men]], [[The Avengers (Comic Book)|Avengers]] and other superheroes start appearing.

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== Literature ==

==== One person ====

* ''[[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.

** Also his contribution to [[Harlan Ellison]]'s ''[[Dangerous Visions]]'', "Eutopia", is about an alternate world where Alexander the Great solidified his Empire and the Greeks are still ruling the world in 1960 AD (or thereabouts).

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** And he later tries to modernize the Lamuellans. The only invention he succeeds in introducing is the sandwich. They take it very seriously, though, and Arthur's position of divine sandwichmaker gets him even more respect than the village chieftain.

*** A bit of a Deconstruction: Arthur doesn't know ''how'' to make anything but sandwiches. Because Arthur is the consummate average man, he doesn't understand most of the technology he's familiar with. If you were in Roman times, could ''you'' make a digital camera? Thought not.

* John Barnes's Timeline Wars trilogy: ''Patton's Spaceship'', ''Washington's Dirigible'', and '''Caesar's Bicycle'' all see this trope used, as part of a multi-universal time war against Carthagian descended timelines.

* [[Isaac Asimov]]'s short story ''The Red Queen's Race'' is about a man who attempts to do this to ancient Greece, sending back modern knowledge with the intention of getting the scientific revolution going in classical times and giving the world a two-millennium head start. {{spoiler|However, the professor who did the translation into ancient Greek realizes what was up, and so deliberately included only such information as would explain certain before-their-time theories that really did appear in ancient times, thereby creating a [[Stable Time Loop]].}}

* A variation from K.A. Applegate's ''[[Everworld]]'' series: the heroes, while trapped in a [[Fantasy Kitchen Sink]] alternate world, introduce telegraphs to an Elven city, and use the technology to get rich.

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** 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.

* The ''Assiti Shards'' milieu by Eric Flint and others. Cast-off shards of transdimensional alien "art" bombard Earth and transpose large chunks of it with other times and places. Several alternate histories are planned in this meta-setting, including ''Time Spike'' (several separate Shard events deposit a modern maximum security prison, the Cherokees on the Trail of Tears, a band of conquistadors, and multiple pre-Columbian Indian settlements into the Cretaceous), ''1776'' (the armies of George Washington and Frederick the Great both find themselves in ancient Rome during the Crisis of the Third Century), and ''By Any Other Name'' (the Assiti themselves make unwilling contact with Elizabethan England), but only two has seen any publishing. The first one has, however, seen a lot:

** ''[[1632]]'' and many, ''many'' sequels. The West Virginia coal-mining town of Grantville is translocated to southern Germany in the middle of the [[Thirty Years War]], utterly shattering the power structure and world view of Reformation Europe. Once again, this setting deals with language and diseases fairly well. Although in this case, it's the ''uptime'' people of Grantville who have to worry about the risk that the pandemic plagues of the 1600s will devastate their community. On the bright side, they're at a recent enough point in the past that their English is recognizable in England, and their German-speakers are understandable to the Germans around them.

** ''[[1632]]'' and many, ''many'' sequels. The West Virginia coal-mining town of Grantville is translocated to southern Germany in the middle of the [[Thirty Years' War]], utterly shattering the power structure and world view of Reformation Europe. Once again, this setting deals with language and diseases fairly well. Although in this case, it's the ''uptime'' people of Grantville who have to worry about the risk that the pandemic plagues of the 1600s will devastate their community. On the bright side, they're at a recent enough point in the past that their English is recognizable in England, and their German-speakers are understandable to the Germans around them.

* Parodied repeatedly in this [http://subterraneanpress.com/index.php/magazine/winter2007/fiction-missives-from-possible-futures-1-alternate-history-search-results-by-john-scalzi/ short story] (scenario 6).

* The ''[[Axis of Time]]'' trilogy by [[John Birmingham]]. ''World War 2.1: Weapons of Choice'', ''World War 2.2: Designated Targets'', and ''World War 2.3: Final Impact''. A multinational naval task force from 2021 is sent back to [[World War II]], where it (literally) impacts with the American fleet steaming for Midway. The consequences are ''extremely'' far-reaching.

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== Web Original ==

* In ''[[Cradleland]]'', a man from twentieth century America had flown through a hyperspatial interstellar portal to a world populated by [[Transplanted Humans]] and got stranded there. He had patented a few inventions due to his technical knowledge, including a Stirling-cycle engine. He did not bring any radios though.

* Rome, Sweet Rome examines whether a modern U.S. Marine Expeditionary Unit could overthrow the Roman Empire in the reign of Agustus (23 B.C.).