Island in the Sea of Time
It's spring on Nantucket and everything is perfectly normal, until a sudden storm blankets the entire island. When the weather clears, the island's inhabitants find that they are no longer in the late twentieth century...but have been transported instead to the Bronze Age! Now they must learn to survive with suspicious, warlike peoples they can barely understand and deal with impending disaster, in the shape of a would-be conqueror from their own time.
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What Hacker News says
- > if anyone else has any other recommendations in same genre of time travel and re-booting up civilisation it be great to hear!
The island of Nantucket goes back to the Bronze Age. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_in_the_Sea_of_Time
- This is so interesting because one of my favorite books is Island in the Sea of Time by S. M. Stirling.
It's an alternative history sci-fi book where the author proposes that greeks are sending envoys to britain in 1250bc for trade.
To be precise, Iberian greek colonies are sending these envoys but they speak a common language being ancient greek.
- Fiction:
- The Time Machine (still holds up very well, and seems strangely eerie and prescient in places)... (H. G. Wells)
- Dune (Frank Herbert)
- The Hobbit (and LotR) (Tolkien)
- Neuromancer (William Gibson)
- Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties (I picked up Idoru first, so I haven't yet read Virtual Light) (also Gibson)
- The Difference Engine (Gibson, Sterling)
- Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson)
- Cryptonomicon (" ")
- Circuit of Heaven, End of Days (Dennis Danvers)
- All of the "Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser" stories and novels. (Fritz Leiber)
- The Earthsea trilogy (Ursula K. LeGuin)
- 'salem's Lot (Stephen King)
- Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein)
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain)
- the Coldfire trilogy (C. S. Friedman)
- various Cory Doctorow short stories
- Kamikaze L'Amour (Richard Kadrey)
- Lightpaths (Howard V. Hendrix)
- A Canticle For Leibowitz (Walter M. Miller, Jr.)
- Moonwar, Venus (Ben Bova)
- the Stainless Steel Rat series (Harry Harrison)
- Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson)
- Ringworld (Larry Niven)
- Cthon (Piers Anthony) -- Trippiness level approaching Philip Jose Farmer ;-)
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series (Douglas Adams)
- The Black Company (Glen Cook)
- there's one particularly good post-cyberpunk series that takes place in a world in which Canada emerged as a major world power, but for the life of me I can't rememeber the title.
- the 1632 series (Eric Flint)... see also S. M. Stirling's Nantucket series ("Island in the Sea of Time", et al.), and H. Beam Piper's novel Kalvan of Otherwhen
Non-fiction:
- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hume)
- the surviving words and works of Epicurus, and Diogenes the Cynic
- Freakonomics (Levitt, Dubner)
- The Gay Science (Nietzsche)
- The Jefferson Bible (Christ, Jefferson (ed.))
- The Devil's Dictionary (Bierce)
- Brain Droppings (George Carlin)
- anything by P. J. O'Rourke
- anything by Dave Barry
- Very true, and we should remember that in a lot of (all?) cultures across time, literacy (learning to read and write) was a marker of class, and/or a protected trade, and/or considered sacred, and/or considered profane.
In other words, there wasn’t much an incentive or recognized need to make the scribe’s job easy to pick up.
Caesar (I think) tells us that the druids of the Celts did not allow members of their tradition to write down their beliefs, traditions, etc. Writing in that context (prior to 50 BCE) was profane.
Of course, those of us in America are familiar with slaves being prevented from learning to read. Forced illiteracy in this context was a tool of oppression. [1]
I think in one of S.M. Sterling’s fictional books (On the Ocean of Eternity?? Part of the Island in the Sea of Time series, anyway) there’s a great exchange with a Babylonian scribe who laughs at the simplistic alphabet of the American, condescendingly remarking that child could learn that, to which the guy replied, yeah, that’s entirely the point!
1. https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/singleton/singleton.html
I can’t help but link this recollection by William Henry Singleton. He recounts being whipped as a child because it was thought that he had merely opened a book, but the whole pamphlet he authored(!) (and available to read in full at that link) after becoming free, fighting in the War, and learning to read/write, is an utterly fascinating account from a primary source spanning from his experience being born into slavery in about 1830 to the point where he authored this in about 1920. It’s too easy to understate but this man saw a lot of change in a momentous century, first-hand.
- Actually, there is a real isekai series with an Aegis class destroyer going to another world other than Zipang: :) https://www.novelupdates.com/series/rune-troopers/
Yes, that's an elf, an Aegis class destroyer and a dragon on the picture. ;-)
I haven't read this series yet but it seems to be doing good with 10 light novel volumes out so far. :)
While I haven't seen that that yet but an Isekai series based around a nuclear submarine would be cool. Being nuclear powered it could be rather independent from the now missing modern infrastructure. They could also include dramatic elements such as the submarine hiding underwater during a nuclear Armageddon only to surface later to find out they have been somehow transported into a world of swords and magic instead of the radioactive wasteland they have expected. Not that it would make it any less dangerous and their adventures any less epic. ;-)
BTW, tracked down the Japanese-island-chain-in-Isekai as well: https://www.novelupdates.com/series/nihonkoku-shoukan/
"Basically, the Japanese version of Island in the Sea of Time.
For clarity: The summoned area of Japan are the four disputed Kuril Islands, Japan Home Islands, and Ryuku Islands"
- I liked Island in the Sea of Time, which is supposedly set on the other side of the same "Emberverse." But I got really tired of the other novels in that universe after a while (both the Nantucket and the Dies the Fire branches). Which is frankly my general take on the vast majority of science fiction and fantasy series. I get why they're appealing to both many authors and many readers but I often wonder if the genre wouldn't be better if it had more standalone novels or at least shorter series.
