Cross-Time Engineer
The Right Man for the job One moment Conrad Schwartz was a hungover hiker in the mountains of modern Poland, the next he was running for his life from an angry Teutonic Knight. At first Conrad just thought he'd stumbled across a mad hermit. But several days of ever stranger events convinced him that he had somehow been stranded in 1231 A.D. And that meant Conrad had to turn Medieval Poland into the most powerful contry in the world. Otherwise the Mongols were destined to detroy it--in just ten years!
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What Hacker News says
- A light, enjoyable read along these lines is Leo Frankowski's "high tech knight" series, starting with The Cross-time Engineer. The main character -- a real engineer -- gets transported back to medieval Poland, and he knows that he's got ten years either to bug out, or help Poland defend itself from the coming Mongol invasion.
[I only liked the first four books, but that's enough to cover the original story arc]
- You recommended "Primitive Technology" which I thought of as well while reading the article. It would be really neat if he did an episode on making a more complicated wheel and axle structure.
Also, I would highly recommend "The Cross Time Engineer" series as it's this same scenario but works through how he's able to apply his modern knowledge as leverage to work up from a boatman earning pennies to running the country.
1 - https://www.amazon.com/Cross-Time-Engineer-Adventures-Conrad...
- It's not quite what you're asking for but there's a really interesting series of books called the "Cross-Time Engineer" [1] which is a thinly veiled thought experiment of how to reboot civilization from a medieval time period with modern knowledge.
I recommend the series as it's absolutely fantastic from an engineering perspective, but also kind of horrifying from a culture one.
1 - http://www.amazon.com/Leo-A.-Frankowski/e/B000API2VY/ref=dp_...
- There's a really interesting book series called "The Cross Time Engineer". It puts a modern day engineer back into the middle ages and follows his path to rebooting an industrial society from just the knowledge in his skull.
While it's surely not wholly accurate, everything related to the material science and technology level is at least plausible.
http://www.amazon.com/Cross-Time-Engineer-Adventures-Conrad-...
- An interesting look into that idea is "The Cross Time Engineer" by Leo Frankowski. The main character is an engineer, so he has extensive knowledge, but it's interesting in how that knowledge is applied to medieval times. It ended up being a series of many books.
- Yeah specific ideas would be powerful and actionable (germ theory, for example; though people had somewhat of a rough working idea of some of it with the concepts of "bad water") though many of those were somewhat in play even in ancient times (often as religious practices).
There have been some books that explored the idea - I recall a series "The Cross-time Engineer" which isn't actually that great, but does have some obvious engineering knowledge.
One thing I do think it gets right is that if you're sending someone back in time to change the past, you do NOT send a scientist, you send an engineer or a mechanic with the Handbook of Chemistry.
