If you’ve not read Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court,” or like my friend Robert (for whom I post this link) haven’t even heard of it, you need to buy it. It is a prototypical sci-fi/fantasy story, written before anyone ever talked of “time machines” or “rips in space/time”, which is why Twain’s mode of time travel is for his hero to get conked on the head and wake up in sixth century England.

What almost every movie adaptation of this book gets wrong is that they have the hero bemoaning his time-tossed fate and wishing to get back. In the real book, the hero, an engineer, realizes that he is the smartest person on the planet and uses his knowledge to promptly take over King Arthur’s kingdom, transforming it into a progressive technocracy. He overthrows the knights (by shooting them with handguns in the joust), makes Merlin look a fool, threatens Morgan LeFay, spreads education and hygiene to the peasantry and gets King Arthur to establish a republic. That’s a really bad summary of a hilarious book.

If you haven’t read it, buy it.