The most efficient form of time travel might not be a phone box or a Delorean, but rather a good-old fashion bump on the head…
Though it was Arthur C. Clarke who doled out the maxim “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, it was Mark Twain who originally brought the firestick to the ignorant savages of the past. Though certainly not the first work of English-language literature to deal with time travel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court does predate H.G. Well’s The Time Machine. But unlike The Time Machine, Twain takes his protagonist backwards rather than forwards, and features an unwitting everyman time traveler in opposition to Well’s intrepid inventor and explorer.
Twain gives us Hank Morgan, a man who resides in the American Northeast during the 19th century who, after suffering a bump on the head, wakes up in the middle of Camelot in the year 528. Almost immediately—by virtue of Hank seeming out-of-place—he is imprisoned and identified by Merlin as someone who needs to be burned at the stake. Though he’s initially depicted as a philistine, Hank is in fact a 19th century version of MacGyver crossed with Hermione Granger. He seems to be able to make makeshift technology out of nothing and also possesses a handy slew of trivia in his 19th century brain, including the fact that a solar eclipse is coming up. Hank is a little off on the exact timing of the eclipse, but still manages to parlay this knowledge into making it look like he can out-wizard the wizard. From there, Hank puts events into motion that involve a secret army, going undercover among the peasants, and accidentally getting sold into slavery with an incognito King Arthur. The novel eventually culminates with the Catholic Church sending 30,000 knights to take out Hank, who eventually refers to himself as “The Boss.” With homemade Gatling guns and a small band of soldiers, Hank basically brutally slaughters the attacking knights. In a kind of Richard III move, Hank wanders the battlefield thereafter wracked with guilt, only to get stabbed.
The great thing about this novel is it sort of seems like Twain is gearing up for his later work, the really dark fantastical Letters from the Earth. In A Connecticut Yankee, he handles science fiction in way that has been influential for years. It’s not so much that Twain is obviously evoking the Prometheus myth of bringing fire to a society that can’t handle it, it’s that he’s also making his version of Prometheus (Hank) a guilty and relatable character. Hank isn’t an anti-hero, but he’s not quite a villain either, in short, he makes certain decisions that lead to other decisions that eventually spin out of control. He may not be as likeable as Twain’s other famous characters like Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn, but Hank is certainly as realistic.
In a sense, Hank is sort of like a dark version of Kirk in the 1960s Star Trek. In all instances when the Enterprise encounters an alien planet where the people haven’t gotten their technological acts together, someone will point out that the Enterprise can just lay waste to planet from orbit and show everyone who’s boss. But, Kirk usually ends up giving speeches involving how he won’t kill “today.” Human barbarism and desire to destroy in order to maintain power is treated by Twain and Trek writers the same way. The only difference is Kirk almost always makes the right decisions and resists the impulse to impose his superior knowledge and technology on “primitives.” Hank does the opposite, and his punished by having to actually live with the guilt of basically being a mass murderer.
The best science fiction will put characters in a situation in which technology’s interaction with humanity has created some kind of ethical dilemma. In Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court the main character creates a situation for himself in which technology is interacting with humanity with dubious moral implications. Twain was not only one America’s greatest writers ever, but also created a blueprint for the themes science fiction writers would be following for the next 130 years, and likely beyond.
It would be interesting to see what Twain would write about if he got bumped on the head and woke up in our century.
Top image: original frontispiece to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), illustration by Daniel Carter Beard.
This article was originally published in April 2011 as part of our ongoing Genre in the Mainstream series.
Ryan Britt is a longtime contributor to Tor.com. He is the author of the book Luke Skywalker Can’t Read and Other Geeky Truths and is a staff writer for Inverse.com. He lives in New York City.
The more I learned about the real Middle Ages the more irritating I found this book, which is not entirely Fair as it’s intended as a satire on the equally inaccurate romanticization of the the period which was a literary trope of his day.
I read a children’s adaptation when I was young, which made the ending especially grim. Morgan’s decision to fight the knights didn’t seem as morally questionable. He’s got a bunch of young men and kids he’s educated and knows these guys are coming to massacre them. On the other hand, the battle turns into a ruthless slaughter as the knights refuse to retreat. The last bit of the story is written by one of Morgan’s students when they’re trapped by a wall of decaying bodies and slowly being poisoned by the disease and rot.
After that, I never had the heart to read the heavier, adult version. Still, here goes an opinion.
I understand Twain was especially satirizing what were seen as the Yankee virtues of the north (which was fair, Twain spent enough time poking fun at the south). But, I still don’t know how to take Morgan and how he deals with the world he arrives in–and how it deals with him.
However, I think Twain was falling into what was his big weakness. He was always willing to tell people what they were doing wrong. But, he sometimes forgot to offer up any ideas on what they could have done right. Should Hank Morgan have let himself be executed at the beginning? Should he have refused to share knowledge he had that could help make people’s lives better? Should he have let the people be slaughtered whose only crime was that he’d tried to teach them what he knew?
Since Hank failed to save them and only managed to take thousands more with them, maybe Twain’s answer to that was, “Yes,” but I can’t quite buy that one.
Ellyanne, I think I read that adaptation too – “Best Illustrated Classics”. I had a whole stack of them that I kept getting from a relative for Christmas, and I was so angry when I found out what “abridged” meant and that I hadn’t been getting the whole story! The worst was what they did to Huckleberry Finn – although they managed to make “The Three Musketeers” make a lot more sense than the original did when I finally read it!
There are scads of SF tales that owe their existence to this work by Clemens. Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague DeCamp, Gunpowder God by H. Beam Piper, the Nantucket trilogy from S. M. Stirling, etc, etc. In most of them, remembering the formula to gunpowder makes all the difference.
As I recollect, I bought this book during a tour of Clemens’ house in Hartford. I was surprised at how grim it was. While he didn’t get all his facts straight, he got the people and their reactions right, and it is a good fable on how things spin out of control. In fact, he ended up accurately predicting the carnage of WWI, and the effects of automatic weapons on the battlefield.
@brendaa, that’s how I was introduced to many of the classics myself, through that “Illustrated Classics” adaptations. Since this was when I was very young, I mostly picked up the books for the pictures and came like to them for the stories … I was shocked to find out they merely shortened down versions of the originals so of course I had to hunt down all original copies I could find at the library.
@brendaa, yes, it was one of the Best Illustrated series. I’m amazed they didn’t soften the ending more. That one haunted me.
However, I did like the Once Upon a Classic adaptation for TV. In that one, Merlin obviously has magic from the beginning. He also knew about things like gunpowder and was the only black character. It left it open whether, like Morgan, he was from some future era (with technology that was like magic) or whether he was just from elsewhere. When Morgan uses a gun to kill someone (and doesn’t understand why people are shocked), Merlin says guns don’t belong in this time and sends him back.
This “Illustrated Classics” was probably the same series that first gave me “Anne of Green Gables” (for which I am forever grateful for) and “The Red Badge of Courage”, among other things. Though I, too, was disappointed when I found out it was only a part of the story, so to speak.
Another aspect of this novel is Twain’s long-running vendetta against the works of Sir Walter Scott and his idealization and veneration of days of knighthood and chivalry. In “Life on the Mississippi” and elsewhere, he accuses Scott (only half-kiddingly) of being responsible for the Civil War: Southern plantation-owners, Twain argues, read Scott’s novels and fancied themselves as the incarnations of his lords, ladies, knights and squires, seeing themselves as superior socially and morally to the Yankees and leading to their enthusiastic pursuit of secession and ultimate downfall. Twain also jabbed at this in “Huckleberry Finn” in a scene aboard a wrecked, looted steamboat called “Walter Scott.” In “Connecticut Yankee,” Twain seems to revel in Morgan’s disgust and disappointment in the grubbiness and tedium of Camelot, from the greasy, oil-lamps to the lame jokes of the king’s jester.
There was a lot of emphasis on chivalry in the antebellum South.
Look at the opening text from the movie Gone with the Wind, for example:
“There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind…”