The other day I found a new paperback in the local library: Into the Storm. It was another spin on a genre I call the Connecticut Yankee novel.
In the CY genre, some guy (or bunch of guys) goes back in time to face a hell of a problem with the tools of modern technology. In Mark Twain's original, "Sir Boss" goes back to King Arthur's court with the engineering skills of the late 19th century. Before long firearms are going off and knights are riding to battle on bicycles.
The genre really took off with Lest Darkness Fall, by the late and beloved L. Sprague DeCamp. Here an archaeologist, visiting the ruined Coliseum, is hit by lightning and finds himself on the same spot in the early 6th century. Before long, he's running the world's first newspaper and distilling brandy.
Plenty of others have explored (and exploited) the genre, and a recent development has been the "alternate history" CY novel, in which we see how events might have worked out if the South had won the Civil War and then fought the North with bombers, tanks, and nuclear weapons. S.M. Stirling has built a saga out of putting Nantucket Island into the third millennium B.C.
I confess I'm a sucker for the genre, but its basic premises deserve some careful scrutiny.
In Into the Storm, a decrepit 1914-vintage US destroyer, fleeing the Japanese in early 1942, finds itself transported to an alternate world where humans didn't evolve and a horrendous war is under way between mammalian lemurs and wicked, wicked raptor-like human-size dinosaurs. Lots of explosions ensue, and of course the story must run into at least three volumes.
What gets me about the genre is the iron-clad faith in technology. If only the American (or at least Western) gadgets and weapons of the 20th or 21st century are available to our heroes, American values will prevail and everyone, except the raptors, will be happy. (Never mind that lemurs branched off our evolutionary tree long before the apes did, and would find humans as incomprehensible as we would find lemurs' evolved descendants.)
This faith in technology has led the US and its allies into any number of miserable wars, coups, and assassinations in the last 60 years, with notable lack of success. B-52s dropped bombs on Vietnamese guys pushing bikes down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and the bike-pushers won. Helicopters, drones, and satellites have scanned the Tora Bora for almost a decade, and Osama bin Laden is still at large.
Even real history doesn't back up this view of technology as social redeemer. In the late 18th century, the Nootka of Vancouver Island captured a British trading ship, plundered it, and killed all the crew except for John Jewitt, the ship's blacksmith.
For the next few years, Jewitt was the slave of a chief named Maquinna, making iron-tipped weapons and doing what he was damned well told to do. The Nootka had a strong and complex culture that used iron, and Jewitt, for its own purposes. It was not about to be transformed just because Jewitt understood some high-tech techniques.
But some SF readers still eat up CY novels, imagining the fun of thwarting the Mongols' invasion of Poland (The Crosstime Engineer) or some other unfortunate event. I eat them up too.
Mark Twain, the father of the genre, understood it better than his followers: The Connecticut Yankee fails to bring Dark Age Britain up to modern standards. In fact, his technology only makes darkness fall that much faster.
A thoughtful SF writer should bear this mind when inspired by a Connecticut Yankee idea for a story.
I'm a sucker for these books too and have enjoyed reading Stirling's work for years now. Anderson does a pretty good job coming out the blocks as a new writer so I'm anxious to see if his next series is even better.
Posted by: TK42ONE | July 22, 2009 at 06:17 AM