Fish Out Of Temporal Water / Literature

• Isaac Asimov:
  • Pebble in the Sky: Joseph Schwartz, a tailor from contemporary Chicago, is inadvertently and permanently displaced into The Future some several thousand years due to a scientific experiment gone strangely wrong.
  • "The Immortal Bard": Every historical figure that Dr Welch brings to the present begged/demanded to be returned to their own time in very short order, finding the present day far too alien for them to be comfortable in. The exception was William Shakespeare, who adjusted quite well and stuck around for several months... until one day he too demanded to be sent back, not because something made him uncomfortable, but because something seriously pissed him off. He took a college class on analyzing the works of Shakespeare. And failed.
• Andrei Belyanin loves this trope and uses it humorously as a basis for several novels, including the Sword with No Name series (a modern-day man is transported into a medieval kingdom filled with magic and evil sorcerers), the Tsar Gorokh's Detective Agency series (a modern-day policeman ends up in a mix of medieval Russia and fairy tales), The Thief of Baghdad series (the author's friend ends up in Ancient Arabia and forms the legend of the Thief of Baghdad), the Professional Werewolf series (a young female college student is recruited by a time-travelling duo to go to different time periods and fight evil), and The Redheaded Knight (a medieval knight ends up in modern-day Russia). The My Wife Is a Witch series also includes several parallel worlds that are in the past (such as the Aztec Empire during its final days). In most of the novels, there is a good deal of anachronism; however, this is deliberate on the author's part, who notes the absurdity of the situation.
• Aleksandr Mazin's Barbarians (AKA Roman Eagle) trilogy:
  • It has two Russian cosmonauts somehow end up in the 3rd century AD during the final years of the Roman Empire. One of them gets captured by the barbarians encroaching on Rome, while the other one joins up with the Roman legions. Naturally, they change their names from Gennady Cherepanov and Aleksey Korshunov to Gennadius Paulus and Alaseia the Heavenly Warrior. Somehow, Alaseia/Aleksey ends up the chieftain of the barbarian tribes, while Gennadius/Gennady becomes the Primus Pilus (senior centurion) of the Roman legions. The author's goal appears to be not to change history but to describe the fall of Rome through the eyes of our contemporaries, one of which is determined to keep the Empire from falling (having already lived through one such experience).
  • Mazin's Varyag series has an ex-commando end up in 10th century Kievan Rus' (the original Russian state).
  • His The Morning Of Judgment Day novel involves a trained commando being sent to prehistoric past to discover the cause of 20 Minutes in the Future catastrophes. Despite the training (mostly involving survival and fighting big cats), he's still ill-prepared to deal with the reality of prehistoric Africa. Imagine trying to ride an undomesticated zebra without a saddle or the time to break the animal in while running away from a tribe of murderous cannibals.
• 1632. A whole modern town gets sent back to the titular year (and moved from Appalachia to Central Europe). Not having any way to return to the present (and having an exclusive cache of modern technology and information), they decide to get the American Revolution started a hundred and fifty years early.
• Charles Stross' Accelerando: In Glasshouse, a group of tormented war veterans in the 27th century have their worst memories erased, then find themselves participating in an alleged experiment to recreate society in the "Dark Ages" of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, sometimes even with their genders switched. Much Hilarity Ensues from the confusion.
• Most of the characters from Aeon Legion: Labyrinth since the Aeon Legion usually recruits MIAs from various points in history. They tend to experience culture shock when seeing Saturn City for the first time where doors vanish in time rather than open and roads have been replaced by glowing lines that fade travelers to their desired location.
• Kir Bulychev's Alice, Girl from the Future series has a book about the titular from the late 21st century who ends up the 80s USSR. In the meantime, an 80s schoolboy trades places with her and finds himself in the future, trying to stop Space Pirates from obtaining a dangerous mind-reading device.
• In Amongst Our Weapons, a servant-turned-assassin who'd been imprisoned in magical stasis in 17th-century Castile is accidentally released into 21st century England. She faints the first time an airliner passes above her, yet is delighted beyond words by the existence and convenience of vacuum cleaners.
• Aurora Cycle: At the beginning, Human Popsicle Auri O'Malley is rescued from the drifting derelict of the colony ship she was travelling on 220 years after the ship was lost. Among the things that she has to adjust to is that humanity has made contact with aliens in the intervening time. However, she also has to run from the government agents hunting her because of who and what she is and has become as a result of her time in the Fold...
• In Blood And Ice by Robert Masello, Eleanor Ames and Sinclair Copley spend the better part of two centuries frozen in ice after they are thrown overboard a ship in 1816, until they are found by an Antarctic research base in the twenty-first century. While Sinclair's bitterness makes it harder for him to adapt as he refuses to accept aid, Eleanor soon bonds with her rescuers and is shown to be willing to learn about her new time, quickly accepting the base medical officer Charlotte Barnes as a doctor despite coming from a time when a black woman as a doctor would have been doubly impossible.
• The Book Of Kells by R. A. MacAvoy. Who knew that tracing the pattern of the Cross of Bridget while listening to traditional Irish music could open a portal to another time?
• Broken Princess: Ancient Edo is suddenly massacred by an unprovoked attack from mechas, tanks, and other war machines. The only survivor, Himiko, attempts revenge and pursues them, only to suddenly find herself in the distant future and confused by things like cars, electric lights, etc.
• Bruce Coville's Book of... Aliens II: Becky in Fine or Superfine, who's from so far in the past that she doesn't know what her fellow captive is talking about when he talks about television.
• One of Spider Robinson's early Callahan's Place stories — and one of the few to involve no overt science-fictional elements — was called The Time Traveler. It was about a man who spent the 1960s in a foreign prison and everything that had changed when he got back. For perspective, he had been jailed before Sputnik was launched and was released around the time of Watergate... This was published in science fiction magazines: the author argued that the character had as much claim to being a time traveler as anyone with a time machine. The whole point of the story was that Tom Hauptman time travelled the hard way. One day at a time.
• The Camp Half-Blood Series:
  • In the 1940s, Bianca and Nico di Angelo were dropped to Lotus Hotel and Casino, where time runs much faster compared to the outside. When they leave, over 60 years have passed. While they adjust relatively well, Nico's angst about his sexuality can be attributed to the fact that LGBT issues were considered taboo in his era.
  • Hazel Levesque, another daughter of Hades/Pluto, also underwent this trope, though it was because she died and was then brought back over 60 years later. Like Nico and Bianca, she seems to have few difficulties adjusting, although she does feel scandalized upon learning that premarital sex is common nowadays.
• In The Centurions Empire, a popsicled Roman Centurion does the usual "horseless carriage" remark, only to add, after the canonical explanation, that ok, so it is only an unsurprising "Greek Device", and then to brag about having seen similar gadgets when he was in Alexandria...
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and all of its imitators/remakes.
• Thibault, one of the main characters of the Les Conquérants de l'Impossible French novels for young readers, fell into a natural pool of liquid nitrogen just after it is implied that he's the one who fired the shot that killed King Richard Lionheart. He is found and revived in the early 1990s by the other main characters and spends quite some time learning to adapt to the change.
• In John C. Wright's Count To A Trillion, Menelaus after his cure.
• Astrid in Daniel Gonzalez's time-travel novel Crononautas, she is a 2nd Century Germanic girl traveling in time with three 21st Century scientist. Although the other characters may also fit the description of this trope do to the fact that they get lost in time and can't control where their time machine travels.
• Conrad Stargard has a similar premise as Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee, but with a 20th century engineer.
• Crosstime Traffic: When characters from alternate timelines come to the "home timeline", they're often shocked at the contrasting technology levels and cultural norms. Jacques (who's from a Crapsack World with early-Renaissance tech levels at best) has no idea what a toilet is, and ends up using his hotel room trash can as a chamber pot before it's explained to him.
• Stephen King does this in The Dark Tower series, using parallel worlds in which time sometimes passes at different rates. Thus a character from the '60s is as shocked as Doc Brown that Reagan is President in the '80s. (But at the finale, she ends up in a universe where Gary Hart is President instead.)
• In the Dora Wilk Series short story Skeleton In The Closet, vampire Antoni escapes his punishment tomb after eighty years of imprisonment, and is completely lost — the street plan of his city is completely different, a whole new political system came and went, along with new laws, culture and architecture, and even blood, with its higher vitamin and sugar count, is different and makes him nauseous.
• The Dragon Knight series by Gordon R. Dickson features graduate student James Eckert, who is teleported back to the middle ages somewhere near the year 1300 and ends up cohabitating a dragon's body for the first book, so he not only has to learn how to adapt to medieval surroundings but also being a large flying target for overzealous knights.
• In Dragonriders of Pern, a good number of the dragon-riding occupants of the five Weyrs brought forwards in time by Lessa are this trope, which is a source of drama in quite a few books. In their own time the Weyrs are used to getting whatever they want from the grateful Holds and Halls that they protected from the deadly Thread. Four hundred years later, after an Interval that was twice as long as normal, they arrive from Between times to find that Hold and Hall no longer respects the Weyr as they once did, and are in fact resistant to returning to their previous unquestioning obedience to dragonfolk.
• Dragons in Our Midst: In The Candlestone, several Knights of the Round Table have been trapped in the titular gem for centuries. The stories they hear from others have prepared them to some extent for when they are released, but still make mistakes, like when they thought that a giveaway box actually contained goodwill and got day-glo leisure suits from the seventies.
• In Andre Norton's Dread Companion returning to their own place puts them decades later than they left.
• Sylvia Engdahl's Enchantress from the Stars. The author states specifically that the locale is not set in time or space and it is never ever ever ever ever lots and lots of ever ever ever hinted on the truth of if Earth is involved in any way. The Enchantress in the title is a girl from the future in which people have psychic powers and gets a trip on her dad's starship to a more early world in the equivalent of Middle Ages ("dragon" is a mining thing from rebel imperialistic people from the future group.) and the other protagonists are from Mid Ages.
• In Er Ist Wieder Da" ("He's Back" or "Look Who's Back"), none other than Adolf Hitler experiences 2011.
• Ghost Roads has a downplayed example in the second book. Rose has been dead since 1952, but in 2016 is brought Back from the Dead via an Unwanted Revival. She has some experience with the modern world, since she's been interacting with living people all that time, but she's never had a reason to carry money, or go inside, say, a Target, or on a plane. She also has no ID and everyone she knew in life is now dead.
• Of similar sensibilities to Robinson's story, Dean McLaughlin's story "Hawk Among the Sparrows" uses time travel to move both a late 20th century jet fighter and its pilot to WW1 France (the Analog magazine in which it appears showed a VERY cool cover painting of the aircraft). The story notes the parallel between useless assumptions present in the pilot and the more or less useless nature of the advanced fighter to that earlier time (at least as it might pertain to combat).
• in Kim Harrison's The Hollows series, a witch named Pierce who lived in the 1800s appears first as a ghost, later gaining a body. He often comes up against the unfamiliar technology as well as more liberal culture of the 21st century, and speaks in an archaic manner.
• Household Gods: Nicole, a modern woman from the late 20th century, is sent back to the 2nd century Roman Empire. She knows very little of how things are done (hence her over-romanticized view about ancient Rome, which prompted the wish to begin with) and struggles mightily with adapting. The people around often think there's something off with her as a result.
• In Rene Barjavel's The Ice People:
  • Two people are cryonically preserved during a time of technologically advanced civilization thousands of years ago, and reawakened during the twentieth century.
    • Averted with Paikan, given that he never interacted with the members of the scientific expedition, even before his death.
    • Subverted with Elea: aside from the fact modern day humans eat organic matter unlike the gondawa people themselves for both cultural and possibly evolutionary reasons, she doesn't seem to be shocked or astonished when discovering the modern day humans's world.
• Played with by the different characters of In the Keep of Time. When the children go to the past, Ian and especially Elinor do not feel like they belong at all, with Elinor constantly complaining of only wanting to get back to the present as soon as possible. Andrew, however, fits in almost right away thanks to some handy archaic clothing and a mercy mission to save the people of Smailholm, befriending Mae, proving himself to the Laird and his men, learning much of history from Cedric, and even witnessing the Battle of Roxburgh. When they all return to the present, it is Ollie, in the mentality of Mae, who is instead completely out of her depth and has to be instructed and helped to become part of that world. Interestingly, she isn't able to fully accept who she is and where she belongs until after another trip where they're all in the wrong time, in the future.
• Floe in I Was A Teenage Popsicle by Bev Katz Rosenbaum. Floe was frozen at the time of her death. When she is defrosted ten years later, she finds that her parents are still frozen and she must live with her sister, who was younger than her but is now older than her.
• The Invisible Detective: One book sees Art and Arthur sent into each others' time periods (1937 and 2003) by the mysterious lodestone.
• John Schettler's series Kirov sent a Russian battlecruiser Kirov from year 2020 back to the flames of WW2. The crew struggle to understand what has happened to them, and then make a choice that could be decisive in the outcome of the war and whose side are they on.
• The Dutch novel Kruistocht in Spijkerbroek (Crusade in Jeans) is about a 20th century boy who is stranded in the year 1212 and joins the Children's Crusade. He adapts relatively well despite some initial difficulties with language, and his 20th-century knowledge helps keep most of the children alive.
• The Legend of Yan-Kan Mar: The three main characters in the novel as well as the invaders are all from a species called Taiko, and the protagonists are from 44 million years ago in earth’s history. Along with being in an unfamiliar time period, the Taiko are also among a different species: humans.
• The narrator/protagonist of Letters Back to Ancient China (not only this, but he also arrived on the wrong continent).
• Lie Huo Jiao Chou: Sheng Lingyuan is reawakened a thousand years after he died. In the present, he gets confused by things like hotels and smartphones.
• Looking Backward: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy, written in 1888 about a man from 1887 who wakes up in 2000. Which is a socialist utopia.
• Sergey Lukyanenko's A Lord from Planet Earth: In Sea of Glass, the main character is a modern-day Russian man who ends up in the 22nd century. However, the cultural and technological shock is lessened by the previous two books in the series being about his adventures in a galaxy populated by numerous Human Alien races. He mostly adjusts to life in the 22nd century with his wife (a Human Alien princess from planet Tar) but still feels weird when he sees three young people (one of them barely 13) having sex in the woods. When he confronts an older man with this, the man explains that they are all legally considered adults (even the 13-year-old who has passed his self-sufficiency test) and, thus, are granted all possible rights. The older man points out that freedom must not be limited by any one person's morals or it's not freedom at all. So, if three consenting adults want to have wild sex in the woods, they can do that.
• In The Lost Fleet series, Captain John Geary has spent around 100 years as a Human Popsicle after his first and only battle, a Last Stand during the initial stages of the Alliance-Syndic war. He wakes up to find that the war is still on with both sides being too large and powerful to be completely defeated by the other. The concept of fleet tactics is gone due to the heavy attrition of the war (all experts died during the early stages), and Attack! Attack! Attack! is the default tactic of any ship commander with admirals being more politicians than fleet commanders (captains actually vote on what to do next). Saluting has been forgotten (except by the Space Marines, of course). Interestingly, technology hasn't changed that much in 100 years, although weapons are slightly more powerful and ships can now send brief messages during FTL jumps. Additionally, a new Portal Network speeds up fleet movements, although Geary is forced to avoid it. Basically, being an average commander in his own time, "Black Jack" Geary (as he's now known for his Last Stand) is a tactical genius thanks to nobody else knowing how to control an entire fleet in three dimensions with a time lag.
• Cyril M. Kornbluth's The Marching Morons. An amoral 20th century con man awakens in the year 7-B-936, offers his Final Solution to the world's population problem, hilarity does not ensue. For the billions he helped send to their deaths, or for him when he is forced to join them.
• In The Mermaid of Black Conch, a Taíno woman named Aycayia is transformed into a mermaid. Over a thousand years later, she changes back into a human. She knows that ships are larger and faster than they used to be but is totally ignorant of everything that's happened on land. She's shocked by the news that the Taíno are mostly gone from the Caribbean and bewildered by modern technology and the need to wear clothes.
• Happens briefly in Mindwarp when two teenagers from the 1990s go back to 1945, chasing an obscure clue. While they're not surprised by the technology, Ethan uses CPR to save a man's life, and several small details are off-putting. And before that, when the kids all travel forwards to a post-apocalyptic world.
• William Morris' News from Nowhere, written in 1890 as a direct response to Bellamy's book, follows the same structure but shows a very different vision of a socialist future.
• Nightside:
  • In Paths Not Taken, characters from the modern Nightside travel back to Arthurian, Roman, and pre-Roman Britain. While John and Suzie don't have much difficulty elbowing their way through the series' everlasting World of Snark, Tommy Oblivion is horrorstruck by how the squalor and slavery of the 6th century contrast with his romanticised pop-culture impression of the period.
  • More broadly, lots of supporting characters become this trope when they wander out of Timeslips. Julien Advent is the most prominent example, although he's adapted quite well.
• The Noob novels have a whole continent in such a situation as part of a Fictional Video Game universe.
• Several novels and stories of the Noon Universe by the Strugatsky Brothers include astronauts coming back from relativistic trips a century or two after they left and have to adjust to living in a new world with all of their friends and loved ones dead. This is until the discovery that relativistic travel doesn't have to be of the Year Outside, Hour Inside variety, if one foregoes the Special Theory of Relativity, which flips it into the Year Inside, Hour Outside variety.
• A central plot point in One Last Stop is the unique predicament of Jane Su, who was ferried through time while bound to a New York City Subway line from 1976 to 2021, and her memories before that point are blanked out as a result.
• Mikhail Akhmanov's novel Pharaohs Guard has a modern-day Russian man end up in the service of Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt.
• Rainbows End is all about the rapidly increasing rate of technology change. Robert Gu has been suffering from Alzheimer's since more-or-less the present day, and wasn't much interested in technology then. 20 Minutes in the Future, when he's cured and given rejuve treatments, he's so far behind the curve on everyday technology that he needs to start attending classes at the local high-school just to begin to have a hope of getting by in normal society.
• Return from the Stars: The main theme. Hal Bregg, the protagonist, ended up returning from his space mission to an Earth 127 years later due to Time Dilation (along with the other astronauts). The Earth government would want them to spend some time adapting in a special educational facility, but Hal decides to try and integrate himself into the future society on his own (mainly because he distrusts the educational facility's propaganda about how wonderful all future achievements are). It is difficult, due to huge changes in psychology of humans, for one.
• Ringworld: The City Builders never developed FTL, and relied instead on slower-than-light ships to connect their interstellar empire. The relativistic speeds at which these ships traveled meant that, while each journey lasted for centuries, the ships' crews would only experience years. Many ships — the precise number is lost — were out on their routes when the City Builder empire fell about a thousand years before the books' time, and still trickle back from time to time. Their crews have no knowledge of what happened to their old home and, at least those that manage to get past the now-inactive spaceports, find themselves as scattered relics of a bygone golden age in the wilderness that replaced their home.
• Rip Van Winkle: The original story is about a guy who literally sleeps through The American Revolution. He awakens twenty years after having originally fallen asleep and heads back to his town, thinking only one night has passed. Confusion ensues.
• Running Out of Time: A variation. The protagonist believes it is 1840, but she is actually living in a historical village in 1996. The parents volunteered to live in the village, posing as frontier villagers 24/7, with tourists watching them via hidden cameras, but they kept this knowledge secret from their children for the sake of authenticity. When diphtheria starts to kill children in the village, the owner won't give them medicine for it (since it didn't exist in 1840), so the main character has to sneak out of the village to get help, and is overwhelmed by the world of 1996. Yes, the publisher of this book did accuse M. Night Shyamalan of stealing ideas for his movie The Village (2004).
• In Norma Fox Mazer's Saturday The Twelfth Of October Zan ends up spending a year with cave dwellers due to desperately wishing she was somewhere else after her brother Ivan read her diary to his friends. In addition to the language problem and the fact that she's a city girl transported to a great deal of country, she finds their typical diet disconcerting.
• Septimus Heap features first Septimus, then Nicko and Snorri in Queen Etheldredda's Time and afterwards Marcellus Pye in Jenna's Time.
• In The Seventh Sword trilogy by Dave Duncan, a chemist named Wally Smith dies and is transported to an unfamiliar world where he inhabits the body of that world's greatest swordsman. Throughout the story, his knowledge of our world and lack of knowledge of his new world both get him into and out of trouble.
• Lily from Soon I Will Be Invincible has this as her "official" origin story. But it turns out it's all just part of her Masquerade.
• Arthur C. Clarke's The Space Odyssey Series: In 3001: The Final Odyssey, one of the astronauts from 2001: A Space Odyssey has been rescued and revived after floating frozen in space for a thousand years. Now, in Real Life, the year 2001 is in The Past... But in the Odyssey novels' continuity, in 2001 we've got permanent moon bases and manned missions to Jupiter in giant spaceships, making it feel more like The Future to present-day readers (3001 was written in 1997, but still assumed the events of 2001 will have taken place). Really, though, the trope most closely evoked by the frozen astronaut's experience is someone from The Present ending up in the future. So which variety of this trope is being exemplified here? Past to Future, Present to Future, or Future to Future? Only you can decide.
• The book Taft 2012 is based around the idea that William Howard Taft fell asleep on the day of Wilson's inauguration and disappeared, then woke up in November 2011. Soon after, he starts a new presidential campaign, adapting his old ideas to the modern world.
• In That Hideous Strength, a man from the fifth century is awakened from a temporal ripple and expected to spend the night in a 19th-century mansion. He has problems adjusting to table manners that don't involve eating with your hands, hospitality that combines incredible luxury with extreme apathy, and most importantly, a world where Christendom emptied its faith and spread that emptiness around the globe.
• In Poul Anderson's "Time Lag", Elva, rescued at the end and able to return to her home planet, contemplates how alone she will be. Her rescuers quickly tell her that her son survived, that one of their number is her grandson named for her dead husband, and that he has a son of his own. And they are all ready to welcome her home.
• In Time Scout uptimers often make fatal mistakes downtime. Downtimers trapped uptime are the most pitiful refugees ever; many go mad.
• There's Umneys Last Case, where a Raymond Chandler-style PI is dumped out of his vague 30s/40s fictional world by his creator and ends up in the real world of the 90s. It's a serious shock to the system.
• Set in the Warhammer 40,000 verse, Simon Spurrier's novel Lord of the Night involves the Night Lords first captain Zso Sahaal waking from stasis after his ship had finally escaped from Warpspace. While Sahaal had thought he had been trapped for a century or two at most, he realizes he woke up 10,000 years in the future. The trope here is notably Zig-Zagged, in that Sahaal, coming from the era just after the Horus Heresy, finds that culture and technology in the Imperium has backslid, if anything; but the political situation is almost unrecognizable. The Emperor is now considered a deity, most of the figures of note are forgotten or obscured by legend, and the Night Lords Legion has been broken up and hasn't lived up to their father Konrad Curze's example of cruelty for purpose. And the part of the Legion Sahaal had seen has turned to Chaos, which Kurze had despised for it corrupting influence.
• In John C. Wright's War of the Dreaming, Warlock Azrael de Gray is one of these: person from the past transported to the present day. While he does eventually figure out the modern world, he never quite gets it.
• In Warrior Cats, Jayfeather is sent back to the time of the Ancients and must adapt to their traditions, while teaching them traditions he learned from the future version of them.
• Worldwar: Homeward Bound by Harry Turtledove has this briefly. After being sent to an alien planet while on ice, the main characters come back to Earth because humanity developed Faster Than Light travel in the meantime. Some of the changes are a result of humanity's interactions with the alien race (such as women going topless), while others are things they would have encountered anyway (like dealing with modern pop culture). The "women going topless" example wasn't that shocking, though, as it's mentioned to be one of the trends of the younger generation in the Colonization series with teenagers (both male and female) wearing only body paint. However, it was shocking that is was so commonplace that it was perfectly acceptable on network TV even without bodypaint. Additionally, two characters go see a cheesy B-movie at a drive-in only to find that it features a very explicit sex scene with the leads (and Matt Damon as a supporting actor).