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Come to think of it has there ever been an ISOT TL or Story where the uptimers actually outright lose and the ramifications are the looting of their tech and know how? Guns of the South kinda fits I guess but not really because those were individuals rather than a state.
I did think about a timeline in which a jumbo jet fell back in time and crash landed somewhere in 1800s Britain. There would be several hundred passengers, none of which really want to stay in Britain fighting Napoleon. Some would be American and want to go back to a country that would be very strange to them (particularly if they were black and/or female); some would come from countries that simply didn’t exist in the modern form in 1800s.
I can’t think of any ISOT/GOTS/RoF story in which the uptimers lose as you suggest (unless you count the ship that fell into Soviet hands in Axis of Time). It would definitely be interesting story if Grantville was actually overwhelmed as soon as it arrived and was still trying to figure out what was going on. Perhaps it could be a British town instead, where there are very few weapons in private hands and the only people who have firearms officially would be the local police. The police are tight-lipped about just how many weapons there are stored within police stations; I’ve been told there is a weapons locker in many places and others are apparently unarmed. A great deal depends on basic training and stuff.
If we assume an English town fell back in time to meet Queen Elizabeth, the town would probably be discovered and overwhelmed very quickly. It will be hard to organise any sort of defence unless the town as a military unit assigned to it and even that would be difficult because they would rapidly run out of supplies. I suspect, in this case, the nobles who were battling for influence, if not control, over the Queen would try to take advantage of the gift from the future. History books would be read to see what happened after the Queen died; technical books would be examined to see if Elizabethian England could produce basic steamships and other technological wonders, at least by their standards. There might be a kind of amnesty for uptimers who aren’t strict Protestants - even if we assume a largely white Christian town, they won’t be the same religiously as the contemporaries.
What I think would happen here is that any future development would take place by contemporary standards rather than modern standards. Even the most liberal monarch, by contemporary standards, was a tyrant. They were held in check by technological limitations, not basic decency. An era that saw nothing wrong with storming cities wouldn’t see anything wrong with nuking them. Elizabeth would see nothing wrong with trying to build the British Empire ahead of time, despite the atrocities this would work on the Native Americans and India. Instead of uptimers bringing the ideals of the modern world to the past, the contemporary world will expand far faster than OTL. We might see a population boom in England, thanks to improved healthcare, but we might also see biological warfare used quite deliberately against the Native Americans. The nobility would also very keen to head off the impending Civil War, perhaps by limiting Parliament as much as possible or by keeping their own armed henchmen as long as possible.
It would be a fun world to write about, but not so much fun to live in.
There are other possibilities, of course. A French town going back to meet Napoleon. A German town appearing in 1919, offering the new government a chance to escape the worst of the sanctions and develop new technology well before Adolf Hitler starts his climb to power. Indeed, they might just assassinate Hitler before he has a chance to become more than a simple rabble-rouser (or deport him on the grounds he’s Austrian).
What do you think? I’ll give this one some thought.
Chris