Giving Radio to the Romans: Difference between revisions

* [[Conversed Trope]] in Kir Bulychev's short story "Паровоз для царя" (lit. Steam locomotive for the tzar), where the characters discuss how hard would it be to pull this off in [[Real Life]]: if you were to give the tzar the technology of automobiles, you'd first have to explain to him the workings of petrochemistry (assuming he'll listen to your ramblings at all). Oh, and you'd better be an expert in petrochemistry and engineering in general.

* 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.

=== A group or community is transplanted. ===

* ''[[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"...