A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
A blow on the head transports a Yankee to 528 A.D. where he proceeds to modernize King Arthur's kingdom by organizing a school system, constructing telephone lines, and inventing the printing press.
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25recommend
88mentions
80people
2009–2026years
28% recommend69% neutral2% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Definitely Twain and it's not even close. Huckleberry Finn even has the episodic flavor of The Odyssey.
For books you have "The Innocents Abroad", "Roughing It", "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", "A Tramp Abroad", "The Prince and the Pauper", "Life on the Mississippi", "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", and "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court".
That's a hell of a lineup and includes a LOT of the flavor of the US as a young country.
- Also, if you want even further back precedent for this kind of plot device, I highly recommend reading a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court by Mark Twain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Connecticut_Yankee_in_King_A...
- My favorite books transported you to a new world and showed you how characters adapted and learned to navigate.
Here's a few I don't see on lists frequently:
Here’s an updated list with your addition:
1. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster- adventure that encourages curiosity while navigating a magical world.
2. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg- Mystery about independence where two kids hide in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
3. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain- A time-travel pioneer + clash between modern thinking and medieval traditions.
4. My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George- survival story of a boy living in the wilderness, promoting self-reliance + love for nature
- Read "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", which is exactly this. The Boss, before being sent into the past, ran an arms factory. He gets some 19th century technology going and builds weapons in quantity.
Steel came late. Not until the Bessemer process in the 1880s was steel produced in volume. Steel as an exotic material, about as rare as titanium today, dates back to the Roman Empire at least. Early blast furnaces were seen in medieval Spain and 5th century China. But good steel could only be produced in small quantity by those processes. For the longest time, nobody got the heating, the ingredients (mostly iron ore, coal, and limestone) and the air injection right, so they could not get mild steel in quantity.
A medieval society could have built a Bessemer converter if they knew how and the right minerals were available. It's the metallurgy that's hard; the thing itself is simple.
- LibriVox (https://librivox.org/) has free audiobooks for many of these public domain books. They're recorded by volunteers, so the quality is a grab bag. Some of them are quite good though. Most recently I listened to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court read by John Greenman (https://librivox.org/a-connecticut-yankee-in-king-arthurs-co...) Goofy book, but very entertaining.
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court. A novel by Mark Twain. it is really fun.
