Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

As science fiction

While Connecticut Yankee is sometimes credited as the foundational work in the time travel subgenre of science fiction, Twain's novel had several important immediate predecessors. Among them are H. G. Wells's story "The Chronic Argonauts" (1888), which was a precursor to The Time Machine (1895). Also published the year before Connecticut Yankee was Edward Bellamy's wildly popular Looking Backward (1888), in which the protagonist is put into a hypnosis-induced sleep and wakes up in the year 2000. Yet another American novel that could have served as a more direct inspiration to Twain was The Fortunate Island (1882) by Charles Heber Clark. In this novel, a technically proficient American is shipwrecked on an island that broke off from Britain during Arthurian times, and never developed any further.[14]

Twain's book introduced what remains one of the main literary devices used in time travel literature—a modern person is suddenly hurled into the past, by some force completely beyond the traveler's control, is stuck there irrevocably, and must make the best of it—typically, by trying to introduce modern inventions and institutions into the past society. Several works considered classics of science fiction clearly follow on this pattern set by Twain, such as L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall and Poul Anderson's "The Man Who Came Early." This strand of time travel literature is clearly distinct from that following the basic pattern of the Wells works, where the protagonist is in possession of a time machine and is able to travel at will back and forth in time. The literary device continues to see use throughout modern science fiction, from popular American time travel stories such as Michael Crichton's Timeline to Japanese Isekai like Handyman Saitō in Another World.[15]


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