Any medium is fine, but I am looking for more recommendations a´la Island in the Sea of timeor even old stuff like Conneticut Yankee in King Arthurs court. Can be Original fiction, can be fanfiction, like a farmers tale, an ASOIAF ff. I am sure as you guys contribute more titles I have already read will come back to my mind as well.

There was also Lest Darkness fall, that was pretty good. One manga I am currently reading, as far as it goes at least is Sengoku Komachi Kurou Tan!

Any more come to mind?

 

Heard of it, though I find most Isekai to be pretty annoying, devolving into power fantasies too quickly. I´ll give it a closer look, though.

 

Other manga about person with advanced knowledge of some profession returning to a previous era: Nobunaga no Chef (about a chef), Jin (a doctor), Dr Stone (more shounen-y thing about rebuilding after the apocalypse - I think, haven't read it/seen the anime).

In terms of fanfiction, there's esama's Island of Fire series.

 

The manga I all know and love, but fuck, didn´t know Esama wrote on AOOO.

BTW. Another one would be ISOT in Grimdark 2012 Germany transported to Warhammer Fantasy. Almost a million and a half words long and still no end in sight, though the update schedule has slowed.

 

I am intrigued. Is it good?

 

There is the classic story, Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp. A man goes back to the fall of Roman Empire and tries to change history. The original fix-it story.

Poul Anderson's The Man Who Came Early. An American soldier goes back to 11th century Iceland.
It is a realistic portrayal of what would happen if a modern man were to go back into the past.

 

I typically use TvTropes when I'm looking for a specific theme for a story. Some relevant ones: Giving Radio To The Romans, One Man Industrial Revolution, and Stranded With Edison. You should be able to find something relevant in those three pages.

One that I found this way was the manga Jin. A brilliant brain surgeon in modern Tokyo gets transported 140 years into the past, just before the cholera epidemic kicks off, and he decides to use his modern medicine knowledge to save lives and revolutionize medicine.

Then there's Maoyuu Maou Yuusha ("Demon King and Hero"), a light novel series and a bunch of related adaptations. While there is an anime, if you want to get the full "building up society" thing, I'd avoid it--it felt like a lot of things got skipped over when it got adapted. Basically the Hero discovers that the Devil King is a woman who wants to end the war between demons and humans, but both sides are too entrenched into the war to allow themselves to end it without major economic and deadly consequences, so they decide to play the long con and work both sides of the war effort to bring about a situation where the war can be safely concluded. The relevant portion to your request is that part of the solution is introducing modernizations to farming, industry and navigation that help humanity avoid the need for war.

Then of course there's Dr Stone, which isn't so much a time traveler to the past as a couple people (mainly just the MC) who have to restart technology from the Stone Age after all of humanity is turned to stone for a couple thousand years.

 

Listening to A long time until nowatm. Some American Soldiers transported back to the stone age. Not far along, so can´t say too much about it yet other than that I find it enjoyable.
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BTW, can we do a sticky post with all the stories gathered that we got links to? Would make a nice, little library. I am super unfamiliar with how forum functions work.

 

I watched a pretty good anime a few years ago called Zipang where a modern Japanese Defence Force destroyer is transported back to WWII on the first day of the Battle of Midway. The story focuses on whether they should assist Imperial Japan against the United States and the way they are gradually drawn into the war whether they like it or not

 

I don't know if it's what you're looking for, but Taylor Andersons Destroyermen series is pretty good. WW2 Pacific fleet destroyer ends up in an alternate past earth with cat people and various monsters which they build up industry to fight. Conquistador-Khornate-Catholics, a Fascist league and all sorts of other crazy shit turns up later on and there are a lot of books at this point. It's pretty fun.

There's also the 1632 series by Eric Flint which has a West Virginia town appear in 17th Century Germany, again a lot of books but not so much my cup of tea.

E; Also there's David Webers Safehold novels which have a scifi robot build up a planet iirc, but I got tired of Webers hatred for editors and gave up.

 

I can't believe there's been no mention of the 1632 series. The first book (appropriately titled 1632) is authored by Eric Flint, but since its publication there's been a cottage industry of sequels on different storylines, even if Flint retains overall oversight. The first book is actually available for free here.

The premise is that a town in West Virginia (with the fictional name of Grantville, but it has since been revealed that it's heavily basedon the real life town of Mannington, in Marian County, WV) is transported back in time to Thuringia (in Germany) during the 30 years war. The books are of varying quality, but generally very engaging, and there's so many of them, they'll probably last through the quarantine!)

 

Ahem.

 

Oops

 

Not to worry, and thank you for the direct link.

 

I tried A Connecticut Yankee but I just couldn't. The narration was stellar and everything, but there's just something about the aged language that just made it a deeply unpleasant listening experience...

I tried finding more books like this too a while back and found the pickings slim (especially since I consume all my fiction through audiobooks).

I have one sitting in my wishlist that is mostly in that wheelhouse that I haven't gotten to yet. Cast Under an Alien Sun by Oran Thorensen.

Summary:

Spoiler

What if you were thrown into a foreign society, never to see home again? What would you do, and could you survive?

Joe Colsco boarded a flight from San Francisco to Chicago to attend a national chemistry meeting. He would never set foot on Earth again.

On planet Anyar, Joe is found unconscious on a beach of a large island inhabited by humans where the level of technology is similar to Earth circa 1700. He awakes amid strangers speaking an unintelligible language and struggles to accept losing his previous life and finding a place in a society with different customs, needing a way to support himself and not knowing a single soul. His worry about finding a place is assuaged when he finds ways to apply his knowledge of chemistry - as long as he is circumspect in introducing new knowledge not too far in advance of the planet's technology and being labelled a demon.

As he adjusts, Joe finds that he has be dropped into a developing clash between the people who cared for him, and for whom he develops an affinity, and a military power from elsewhere on the planet - a power with designs on conquest. Unaware, Joseph Colsco has been poured into a crucible where time and trials will transform him in ways he could never have imagined.

I got onto this genre through my addiction to LitRPGs. If you haven't considered that genre of book, you might want to give it a go. You'll often find stories with protagonists set in fantasy video game worlds where they city build. There's so many of them that I'm actually kinda over the trope and prefer the ones with lesser scopes.

 

I have read this book. The beginning was promising but the story lagged, and as usual the uplifting came to absorb most of the ink. The characters felt bland, and that includes the MC.

Have you read any other books of this sort ?

 

Heh I couldnt stand the 1632 series, found it horribly unbelievable.

If youve read island on the sea of time, I assume you have read conquistador by the same author?

In terms of original fics theres a bazillion of them on the AH forum of varying quality. I cant recall all the names. Tis but a scratch was one. There was a semi decent one about someone finding themselves in the body of the king of prussia in the napoleonic era and introducing all sorts of changes. But suffice to say literally DOZENS there. So i'd skim through their fiction section and keep an eye out. A lot of them are godawful but there are some decent ones (if you like that sub genre) mixed in.

 

'Tis But a Scratch has the author wake up in Tsar Nicholas II's body. The "scratch" was received in the Ōtsu incident.

The story you have described is Of Course I Can, I am the King of Prussia ! The author is inserted into the body of King Frederick William III of Prussia.

The second is worse than the first.