Thread by @0starkafterdark

Revisiting my #top10 #scifi special mentions
@ViciousRicardan

ERIC FLINT

One of my favorite sub-genres of science fiction - time slip science fiction

What might be dubbed Connecticut Yankee or Lest Darkness Fall time travel on an individual scale - or Axis of Time, Island in the Sea of Time, Assiti Shards or just pure alien space bats time travel on a larger scale

Time slip science fiction involves time travel to the past, almost always unintentionally and often by unknown means. And because the time travellers typically transform the historical past, it tends to involve alternate history

Hence the label of alien space bats used by alternate history creators or fandom to connote wildly fantastic points of divergence from our own history

Connecticut Yankee time travel - named for the titular Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court in Mark Twain's novel, who attempts to transform Arthurian Britain with late nineteenth century American know-how

Lest Darkness Fall time travel - where an American archaeologist is thrust by random timeslip into the dawning dark ages of Ostrogothic Rome in L. Sprague De Camp's novel and successfully staves them off, starting with Arabic numerals, double-entry bookkeeping and brandy

Although time-slipped individuals often transform the past, my favorite time slip science fiction tends to be on a larger scale, where it truly rises to alien space bat alternate history

Axis of Time time travel - for the trilogy by @JohnBirmingham of a 21st century naval task force thrown back to the Battle of Midway by a quantum physics experiment gone wrong

And unlike the carrier group in the similar Final Countdown film, they do make a difference - transforming the Second World War from that other one in our timeline, which the Germans dub as zeitgeist or ghost world

Island in the Sea of Time time travel - for the trilogy by S.M. Stirling, where the whole island of Nantucket is transported back to the Bronze Age by the mysterious Event (which also reverts the world they left behind back to its own pre-modern version or the Emberverse)

And Assiti Shards time travel here in my entry for Eric Flint - where, unknown to the unintentional time travellers, weird alien space-time sculptures transport whole groups back to different time periods

Including the series that introduced Flint to me, the 1632 or Ring of Fire series, where the whole Virginian town of Grantsville is thrust into the middle of Germany in the Thirty Years War