Adventure with a bit of sex to spice thing up. It can go as far as the cavemen era. Modern man brings modern solution or something.
Adventure with a bit of sex to spice thing up. It can go as far as the cavemen era. Modern man brings modern solution or something.
https://storiesonline.net/a/ScotlandtheBrave has several stories about going back to dark ages Scotland and kicking off social changes.
There are two by Fantasy Lover, "Spirit Quest" and "When in Rome" that immediately come to mind.
https://storiesonline.net/s/20316/when-in-rome-by-fantasylover
https://storiesonline.net/s/15868/spirit-quest
Another two that come to mind have an engineer wind up in prehistoric glacial era southwest US-Mexican area where he kick-starts a kinda steampunk quasi-industrial step forward.
Then you have the half-dozen or so stories where aliens transport a modern age guy to a paleolithic era planet to provide entertainment for their society.
Ernest Bywater has "Stand In Time" where a nuclear explosion catapults a modern-day jet jockey back to the pre-Civil War southwest US.
https://storiesonline.net/s/13358/stand-in-time
There are more but those are the first to come to mind.
Ernest Bywater has "Stand In Time" where a nuclear explosion catapults a modern-day jet jockey back to the pre-Civil War southwest US.
Close but a little off. The description given is for Will to Survive while the link if for a story Stand in Time where I fellow is sent back to the mid 1850s USA to change the course of the war in favour of the South, but they got the wrong person and he fights them .
https://storiesonline.net/s/13144/will-to-survive
I also have a story where aliens send a guy to a prehistoric Earth type planet - Times of Old.
https://storiesonline.net/s/74132/times-of-old
The entire Damsels in Distress Universe set of stories has the main action taking place on a planet that's like medieval Europe.
https://storiesonline.net/universe/65/damsels-in-distress
Actually, I erred twice. Wrong story and neither one of them returns to a pre-industrial society. Still good stories though.
PS: I do appreciate the effort you and a few others put into researching all the details to make the story accurate. It shows and makes the story that much better. I actually have markers on my Google Earth for Rivers, Ryan's Ridge, and Wood Valley. :-)
I just finished reading one of these:
https://storiesonline.net/s/14638/gateway-what-lies-beyond
This is one of those in the genre I tend to dislike: "Sgt McToughguy is lost in some place with his harem of women and rebuilds society."
- Usually I get a few chapters in and give up because it fails to appeal. But I got through all 74 chapters and am bugged out that there's no sequel for "what happens with the follow up generation?"
The story is really solid, hard to put down, and has very good internal consistency despite having a few million named side characters.
If like me you hate the 'Sgt McToughGuy and his Harem' genre, this one might be an exception to that. If you like that genre, this one is probably the best of the bunch.
I liked it NOT because it broke out of the genre, but because even though it was a genre I'm not a fan of, it was very well written and had actual character depth, solid plot, and consistency to it's world building.
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"Tangent Camera:"
That said, the only issue I have is with the foundation principle that early societies were extremely patriarchal and often warlike.
More and more evidence points to cooperative highly gender role-based but still semi-egalitarian societies (this would be a good counter role model against the people who think equality means we need to erase gender, except the roles are often too strict in these societies. He's right that men hunt and women gather - but he's wrong in that this is a power dynamic). Said evidence being things like archeologists examining bones for nutrition / age, burial traditions indicating social hierarchy, religious artifacts, evidence / lack of evidence for a history of war, and of course - comparing to modern 'primitive' societies.
Mid 20th century archeologists found patriarchy everywhere. In the 1980s feminist archeologists found matriarchy everywhere. But I think the modern perception of 'trying to look at it without our own biases' is more 'it was closer to balanced even when 'strongly role based'. Which frankly, is what "Plains Indians" could have told them a long time ago. Plains Indians of the Great Plains traditionally had very strong gender roles, but gender equality. With leadership more or less being "women lead over peacetime conduct, men lead in war and hunting". And those folks are still around and will tell you this if you actually listen to them. But Archeologists have a very long history of being in conflict with and always refusing to listen to North American Indians... To the point where if an Indian in 2022 holds up his iPhone and says 'this is my phone, let's use it to order pizza' the Archeologist will write down 'The filthy Injun got a dildo and is attempting to kill me with it'.
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Back on topic:
HOWEVER, he only has one truly violent society among the privative and that... actually matches with my own paternal grandmother's ethnic group: The Amazonian people, where we have the Yanomami in the Brazil part that is violent, and probably a few others here and there, while most people try to 'avoid conflict' because it's too costly when you're "just barely getting by".
The Once And Future Man by WestCoastWilly is in early days, but it's headed 8n that direction and a good read so far.
https://storiesonline.net/s/27713/the-once-and-future-man
Lumpy's 'Imperium' series is tagged 'No sex' but has a man from the future sent back to Roman times, where he tries to advance the science and technology to fight off the Carthaginians.
AJ
pretty rusty on most history, but the English vowel shift would bring a lot of people unstuck. a small detail I know but with time travel small details matter. you can't just rip off Dr Who telepathic tardis shtick.
pretty rusty on most history, but the English vowel shift would bring a lot of people unstuck
"How Far Back in Time Could an English Speaker Go and Still Communicate Effectively?"
Two competing videos on the same question:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y63dBBlHlSk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fxy6ZaMOq8
It seems to be a surprisingly short amount of time for language commonality to break down.
Some people from countries where there's some government organization that declares what is an official word and what isn't might think that means their language would hold up longer than English does if they went back in time. But such nationalistic / ethnocentric government organizations are very recent creations. And they spend most of their time telling people to stop saying words like "Ice Cream".
Nobody ever likes the guy who tells you to stop talking about Ice Cream. :)
But yeah any time travel story that doesn't have a section where the characters point at something and say "chair" or "dog" or "toilet" or whatever... is skipping over a major part of the struggle.
I'm 36 pages into an Alien First Contact story and that's been a running theme of my story thus far. Just how do you say "tentacle porn" to a Space Alien... Important concepts need translation.
The story I noted earlier, https://storiesonline.net/s/14638/gateway-what-lies-beyond , makes it a huge part of the story, though the author does give a 'crutch' in that one of the major characters is a linguist who can 'pick up new languages in a few days'. Despite one character thus having super powers, the author otherwise does make it a major plot point and the fact that his hero places so much importance on language becomes his most powerful "weapon" in overcoming obstacles. The hero may be "yet another Sgt McToughGuy" but he wins most of his fight by figuring out how to say "hello" with respect the way the locals do.
Some people from countries where there's some government organization that declares what is an official word and what isn't might think that means their language would hold up longer than English does if they went back in time.
And they spend most of their time telling people to stop saying words like "Ice Cream".
And from what I've read, they are mostly losing the battle.
Yep. Language is a naturally evolving thing. Fools that try to dictate it never succeed.
Imagine if somebody had succeeded in 1901, is defining all words that were allowed to be used in English. Now imagine all the changes in society and technology from then till now... and people having no words for them.
Even if they decided that all such words would be "officially foreign" and use a special writing system - then you just end up with the situation in Japan where a person needs to learn 4 alphabets to be literate, and has to keep track of language purity to be able to write a text to their friend saying "let's go out for tacos before hitting the Chinese Lunar New Year festival tomorrow. I think Juans' is down by Apple store so you can get that new iPad too."
- Gonna need at least 3 if not 4 alphabets to write that. That system's going to crumble eventually.
On topic:
A few good moments in the story I've been linking in this thread happened when the main character tried to explain a remote drone to a caveman, or explain a time travel gate or helicopter. The writer handled it by having everyone just give up in frustration at each other realizing they had no ability to even explain the concept in abstract terms, which I thought was a great plot device in the moments it occurred.
One way language became such a powerful tool in that story is that the various people 'then and now' evolved their own new mixed language - letting future and past folks who knew this new hybrid language be much more effective in organizing then the groups of future and past people who did not.
Remote control drone: Wizards familiar is a bird.
Helicopter: Dragon. Sometimes its friendly and carries passengers, sometimes its evil and hurls fire.
Time travel gate: Fairy ring.
Could make the basis for a story, but I suspect its already been done to some extent.
Could make the basis for a story, but I suspect its already been done to some extent.
I think you will find that both technology disguised as magic and magic disguised as technology have both been done.
A Close Call - Book 1: A New Beginning
Doug Holmes, an ex-Ranger and now an anthropologist, gets accidentally bounced back to Clovis-era New Mexico of 12,000 years ago. Join him as he copes with the primitive life style of the natives and becomes an important leader as he gradually introduces more modern devices to make their lives easier and more fun. His attitude is, this may change history, but to hell with that--I have to live here!
https://storiesonline.net/s/50903/proeliator
Most of this authors stories:
https://storiesonline.net/a/cmsix
https://storiesonline.net/s/56088/alaskan-vacation
https://storiesonline.net/s/51104/depression
https://storiesonline.net/s/57996/john-and-argent
https://storiesonline.net/s/53267/lifes-a-bitch
and others.
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https://storiesonline.net/s/52948/hawk-the-stone-age-spirit-guide