Sorry to derail immediately, but the typo from back to beck made me read your entire post as if the actors from Flight of the Conchords were saying it.

 

This is also in the wrong section. Needs to be moved to Fanfiction Discussion.

Regardless, I really don't see how you're making this different than typical back-in-time stories.

 

From the title, I though this'd be something about Harry being adopted by some wizarding settlement on Mars. No such luck.

 

I believe she meant that it would be different because you would be avoiding the whole 'destroy the horcuxes before Voldemort comes back' and 'go to school with my parents' plotline would be avoided.

I think it would be great if you decided to do this, maybe a humor fic?

 

The basic premise seems kind of hard to replicate in many ways. We know so little about actual wizarding culture that it can easily be argued for things being very static. (After all, why develop new things if everything can already be done perfectly with a flick of the wand.) Nobody at Hogwarts even seems to listen to music, and we only know of one band, for lack of a better word, in all of canon.

Compared to Muggle social life, that all just seems so... small and limited, lifeless even. The entire frantic rush of youth just doesn't seem to exist in the books, and by extension the setting. At least, not in a form that would be exclusive to wizards. And just tacking them on to the Muggle existence seems to be countered by the examples of wizards just feeling and looking out of place in the Muggle world. (The entire vibe of the stranger looking in on this quaint world full of little people struggling with meaningless issues. You might be amused by some of their antics, but they aren't really your equals. - Generalizing here, since there are the parts where Muggles do marry magic-users. Though, how that is actually meant to work in practice leaves me scratching my head. Having a relationship, where the partners have virtually nothing in common socially, just seems fraught with strife and upset. But then, this is the Potterverse, where divorces don't seem to exist either.)

Which would leave the entire story either kind of floundering or in need of an excessive amount of work to flesh out an actual culture.

Don't get me wrong, it's certainly a novel idea for doing something with time-travel that isn't centered on Hogwarts and the good old Riddle-hunt, but picking a good focus is kind of difficult. While adult Harry certainly beats the umpteenth repeat of teen Harry, he still is pretty much a staid cop, at the end of the day. You can only explore the difference in setting for so long, before you need some actual plot.

And for the wizards the being back in the past part wouldn't really be an impossibility. He'd just pop on over to Dumbledore or some researchers, and they'd quickly determine that he's telling the truth.

Going for a more literal implementation of the Life on Mars plot could potentially work. (Mind you, I've only seen parts of the UK version, so no clue how that relates to the US version.) Harry, after some kind of accident wakes up in a 70s version of the past. Instead of being from a different district, he can be a transfer from Australia or Canada, somewhere in the Commonwealth at least. His parents don't exist in this world. Voldemort doesn't exist. (Man is pretty ruined as a credible villain anyway.) Dumbledore has never heard of him and popping across either of the big ponds isn't easy for even wizards (arbitrary limit to move the story along). Mind magic doesn't show anything out of the ordinary and Harry's reading as being who they expect, Auror Potter, the new transfer.

But then you're stuck with the same problem that Life on Mars had, basic police work needing to be done. Not really all that thrilling, though a few scenes might be fun to pick out to highlight the differences in outlooks. And the entire issue with Sam being back in the past or just delusional in a coma doesn't make for a much more thrilling story when you dump it on Harry. Well, maybe if you tweak it a bit more, but I'm not really seeing it at the moment.

 

Life on Mars is fairly different than such things as Quantum Leap and Terminator. See, you're never really sure if the main character is actually back in time, in some kind of crazy coma dream, or if he's in another realm that plays by someone else's rules.

The premise is, Sam Tyler got hit by a car in 2008 and woke up in 1973. As he looks for a way back to his normal time, he has to put up with the very different standards of living (such as lax police standards, non-existent technology that he takes for granted, etc) as well as people calling him Spaceman because they think he's crazy, and getting the occasional tantalyzing flash of 2008/2009 as he works on cases.

 

I've not seen the shows, but based on the description you've given it sounds like something more in line for Luna instead of Harry.

Maybe instead of her going back in time, Luna witnesses her mother's death, wakes up on the train heading to Hogwarts for her fourth year/Harry's fifth year, and tries to make her way back to the past where she belongs.