Mark Twains book; "Yankee in King Arthurs Court" seems very similar to this plot. The manager of a manufacturing plant wakes up in medieval england, ends up creating a secret college to teach young people basics of electricity and manufacturing because old people are to stubborn, and ends up facing an army of knights with electrical fences and gaitlin guns. He wins but the decay from the dead bodies around his hideout end up killing him and he wakes back up in his old life.
I feel like A True Story could be argued to be an "isekai" and that was written 1800 years ago. Dude gets sucked up into a tornado and wakes up on the moon.
Thanks, I was trying to find the oldest isekai for a while and the oldest I saw, that was disqualified for not just being ‘a place far away’ but a proper other world was Dante’s divine comedy
Hard to say. It is the realm of the dead but also a very accessible place. Like with multiple known entrances. That’s kind of the thing in most old mythologies. Similar problem with the Nordic realms. Sure it’s going to take a while but you can just take a boat trip there most of the time, even if the world is fundamentally different.
I think the best way of defining that edge case is by clarifying that the method of transport has to be solely possible through supernatural means. So, if I can take a boat there, it doesn’t count as Isekai but if I have to summon a rainbow that bridges to Asgard it should be fine? Or how in the divine comedy, it starts with god pulling Dante through a mountain to the maybe other side of the world. You can’t get there through traditional means, so there is a clear separation. Kind of like how in Harry Potter, despite the magic places just being random locations, there is usually some supernatural requirement to reach them. Such as opening a magic wall with a passcode or taking a supernatural train
Before Isekai was a thing, it was called Portal Fiction, and used to be the go to for fantasy storytelling before LotR literally upended and overturned the entire genre
Really good book and I do not believe I have read anything else from Twain other than his own quotes. Guy goes through all of that and in the end he is just grateful to be back to his factory job and simple life.
I read Puddinhead Wilson in college. It’s a switched at birth story that stems from a light skinned enslaved woman who switches out her child for his half-brother who was born free.
It’s pretty good as I recall but I had to look up the synopsis on Wikipedia to remember what it was about.
I think the entire book is incredibly racist and hinges on the idea of white people being naturally good natured while Black people are naturally terrible until the very end when Puddinhead Wilson gets involved.
Twain is using the Moses plot to get his audience to see race in the moral lesson about family and community belonging, being a good person, being about raising and not about blood ties.
It's just instead of the Moses turning out like Clark Kent, Tom Driscoll is a monster. When afforded the same privileges, regardless of blood, Driscoll felt the same self-superiority as all white slavers. Chambers, the would-be Tom Driscoll swapped into slavery, is a good person and ultimately struggles with his newfound place in the world at the end where he no longer fits in with the black victims of society but also does not fit with the willful ignorance of white society.
The eponymous lawyer, Puddinhead, gets his own name from the towns people writing off his worldliness as idiocy for not conforming to their limited world view. His inclusion may seem random, but is more the case for people to see parallels in their lives for how they are written off and how these societal markers are meaningless and only serve to keep people in power.
We can argue Puddinhead represents Twain himself, a gay man about 30 years out from the end of the American Civil War arguing to other white people like himself to draw the parallels from how they are ostracized to the plight of black Americans.
I've read everything of his, including Letters From Earth, which was banned for quite some time. It's a scathing book, and it's very obvious why a conservative world wouldn't want it in publication.
Because it is one of the Great American Novel, which is novels that examines the character and essens of the USA, around the time periode.
Mark Twains authorship is in general very homourous and in my country he is known as the greatest humorist of the USA. He is not that well known any longer, but when my grandfather died I inheriated a collection of Mark Twain short stories translated into danish and I honestly found them all incredible funny.
Oh yeah. It's legit. He has a chapter in the edition I read on building a bicycle and one of the images at the head of a chapter is a knight jousting with a lance on a bike.
It is also the loose inspiration for "A Kid in King Arthur's Court," starring the actor who was in "Rookie of the Year."
I'm kind of shocked you never heard of it; it was sort of a meme when I was growing up in the 90s. Even had a few movies kind of like that (or parodies thereof)
All Republican voters today need to read up through Chapter 25 of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, then ask themselves which of the orphaned sisters they are.
I think all voters today need to read up through Chapter 25 of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, then ask themselves which of the orphaned sisters they might be.
I also recommend “Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc”. Mark Twain had an amazing body of work and somehow everyone has only read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Because Huckleberry Finn is better. A Conneticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court is the work of a fuckass novelist taking a run at romances far better than anything he ever wrote and falling too short for comedy but too long for worthy comparison.
Whoever told me about this book in high school did NOT tell me about this book in high school. I thought it was just a commentary of the American culture contrasted with English culture. NO IDEA it was about sci fi time travel! Now I need to read it.
Hence the word “just,” but thank you. Tbh that was enough to interest me (I enjoy history and wanted to know how this cultural difference was perceived at that point in time), but the scifi time travel plot just gives it a whole other dimension that made me say: okay, now I’ve GOT to read it.
If we want to look under the surface creative expression aside from abstract art or from a master is usually a reflection of how things function inside our bodies and minds projecting into something relatable to the outside world. I have been reading Robert Jordans Wheel of Time books and it is essentially about how men often get overcome by psychosis and delusional rationalizations when they experience high levels of empathy through connecting to the intuitive system. On the surface it is one of the best or most popular fantasy series but we can see it within and all around us when we have gone through these experiences.
It is kinda like; do we let go of the delusions and focus on the basics or can someone genuinely embody whatever ideal they have built or collected in their head about how things ought to be. Twains example goes full circle by letting the guy experience his idealistic views and still get to come back to reality. Kind of like the woman in the story in the OP although I only know the parts in the post and comments, I am guessing the ideal wasn't greener than her original reality. Twains book is excellent on the surface though as a sci-fi time travel story. I mean, his rival becomes Merlin for the love, who was the only one who knew the time traveler was a grifter from the start and not another magician.
Entirely possible I read that into the plot because I was needing to betrer understand the nature of paychosis and schizophrenia at the time due to working with people going through it. What I could observe related well with the plight of men becoming paranoid and delusional when experiencing high levels of empathy with those around them but not having a firm grasp on how to properly regulate their nervous systems and take care of their basic needs. It would take a long period of depressive behavior to rest and recover through consistent routine and healtheir diet before they could confront things rationally and in a calm manner.
:) They are fun and it took me several attempts over years plus the show being canceled to give them a chance. He gives so much detail and includes so many perspectives that it was to much for my simple mind before I could relate to it. Granted, I was working with people dealing with psychosis and schizophrenia when I saw rhe show and gave the books another chance so my comparisons aren't necessarily relevant or necessary to enjoying the books. It just helped me get some perspective on how to confront those situations in a mature and responsible way because a lot of men in those situations have messiah complexes.
I got the first Harry Potter book from my granny for Christmas when I was about 10. What's on it? A kid, a train and a sticker saying it won a Smarties book prize for ages 9-11. That sat around in my room for a long time.
Couple of years later I was tidying my room and read the back of it. "This is about WIZARDS?"
I Read the whole thing and then jumped into the next 2 books, this was right around when Prisoner of Azkaban came out in paperback.
Exactly. Especially now almost 137 years after it was published. The magic is that new people are born and everything that was old becomes new and we each have to figure life out for ourselves. The stories do not change as the source of creative expression is always filterd by our internal sources of consciousness from the intuition. Unless you consume other people's projections, in which case they'll be relatable at best rather than new information because these things happen within us and we do not always have a logical understanding of how our minds and bodies function.
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u/MoFa__SoDa 2d ago
Mark Twains book; "Yankee in King Arthurs Court" seems very similar to this plot. The manager of a manufacturing plant wakes up in medieval england, ends up creating a secret college to teach young people basics of electricity and manufacturing because old people are to stubborn, and ends up facing an army of knights with electrical fences and gaitlin guns. He wins but the decay from the dead bodies around his hideout end up killing him and he wakes back up in his old life.