Trapped in the Past: Difference between revisions

Sometimes, the [[Time Travel]]er never intends to go anywhere. He's just minding his own business when an [[Alien Space Bats|Alien Space Bat]] sweeps him into the past without any hope whatsoever of ever getting back home.

 

 

 

At the other extreme, they are lucky enough to have in depth knowledge of the time period they're stuck in, extensive engineering skills, or both, making them the ideal people to [[Giving Radio to the Romans|bring progress to the past]]. After some initial teething troubles, the industrial revolution is soon in full flow, several centuries early, allowing the traveler half the comforts of home.

 

A [[Sub-Trope]] of [[Fish Out of Temporal Water]]. Compare [[Get Back to the Future]], [[Trapped in Another World]], and [[Summon Everyman Hero]].

 

== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==

* ''[[Jin (manga)]]'': The title character, a present-day Japanese doctor, is sent back in time to the end of the Tokugawa Era.

 

== [[Literature]] ==

* [[Poul Anderson]]'s 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. The Vikings find the matches he brought with him impressive, but he has no idea how to make more. The only knowledge he has of any use is modern martial arts. {{spoiler|In the end the soldier runs afoul of his ignorance of Viking legal customs and is killed.}} The story's main point is that victims of this trope don't really have much chance of introducing future inventions because most advances are useless without an advanced societal infrastructure to support them.

* 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.

* Inverted in ''The Centurion's Empire'' by [[Sean Mcmullan]], the premise of which is that [[Ancient Rome]] developed a medicine that [[Human Popsicle|allowed the human body to survive being frozen]], and promptly started storing its best and brightest. After the empire collapsed the one survivor set up shop in an English village, being unfrozen when they needed his military expertise.

* In [[Terry Pratchett]]'s short story ''Once and Future'' a [[Time Travel|time traveller]] called Mervin finds himself not only trapped in the past, but in a past that never existed: the [[Anachronism Stew]] that was [[King Arthur]]'s time. Working as a doctor for a village in Sir Ector's demenses, he quickly realises that what they need is a great and noble leader, gimmicks up an electromagnet to hold a sword in a stone, and waits for a candidate whose body language suggests he's sensible enough to take advice. It works, although not quite how he expected.

* Nimue Alban's situation in [[David Weber]]'s ''[[Safehold]]'' series lacks time travel, but otherwise fits perfectly. Nimue (or rather a [[Ridiculously Human Robot]] with her personality) is awoken in the last human world of Safehold, which has been trapped in [[Medieval Stasis]] for almost a millennium thanks to its [[A God Am I|delusional]] founders. Nimue's objective is to undo this and bring humanity back into the era of space travel. Many details listed in the description are averted, since robots can't get sick, and Nimue has to learn Safeholdian English before she can venture out among its people.

* Brought later full circle with ''To Bring The Light'' by [[David Drake]], which is bound with ''Lest Darkness Fall'' in some editions. In this story a woman from Justinian Era Rome gets sent back to the founding of Rome and must use the inventions of later Rome to help found it...

* Temporally inverted in Philip Francis Nowlan's ''Armageddon 2419 A.D.'', or as it's better known, ''[[Buck Rogers]] in the 25th Century.'' Rogers, in the various versions of his tale, brings lost knowledge and a certain 20th-century vitality to future America and/or Earth as a whole.

* This can happen in the [[Time Scout]] series. A [[Portal to the Past]] can become unstable and vanish, trapping people on the other side. Or you can go through a temporary unstable gate and get trapped. This happens once in the series, and a few times in back story.

* Jayfeather from ''[[Warrior Cats]]'' finds himself stuck in the time of the Ancients twice. He manages to leave both times.

* ''[[Island in The Sea of Time]]'' 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"...

* 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:

* In ''[[Dinoverse]]'', the four eighth-graders sent back in time and put into the bodies of various megafauna aren't stuck; they know that if they reach a certain place and are there at a certain time there's a chance that they can make it back. But one of them, Janine Farehouse, would rather ''be'' stuck, so she abandons the group to try and live as a [[Ptero-Soarer|Quetzalcoatlus]]. A native Quetzalcoatlus hangs around her and she does fairly well for a few days, before the thought of never having anyone to talk to softens her resolve enough that one of the other kids can persuade her to help them find the place.

 

* ''[[Life On Mars]]'': Sam Tyler, a policeman from 2006, mysteriously wakes up in 1973 and does indeed have problems communicating with his police colleagues.

** Even though they speak the same language, they don't ''speak the same language'', if you know what I mean.

** It almost happens to the Doctor in "The Girl in the Fireplace." Luckily for him, {{spoiler|the portal in Reinette's fireplace was still online.}}

* Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect end up stuck on prehistoric Earth with the idiotic Golgafrinchans at the end of the ''[[Hitch Hikers Guide to The Galaxy]]''. In the earlier radio series they were rescued when Arthur's towel become fossilised and picked up by the Infinite Improbability drive in the future, and in the third book of the "trilogy", some other sort of phebotinum came to the rescue.

 

== [[Video Games]] ==

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Older Than Radio]]

[[Category:Time Travel Tropes]]

[[Category:Speculative Fiction Tropes]]

[[Category:Plots]]