History Main / TrappedinthePast

* The last installment of the ''Literature/{{Sorcery}}'' saga, ''The Crown of Kings'', have this as a possible fate for players choosing to be a wizard. One of the LastDiscMagic spells you'll cast is the ZED, which turns out to be a time-traveling spell, but without consulting Jann the Minimite for the proper methods of control it can backfire and send you to any random location without your equipment - the ''worst'' of them being stranded in prehistoric times, where you encounter avian monsters which went extinct several millennia ago, or sent centuries to the future, in the ruins of a destroyed world. Theoretically speaking you ''can'' cast the same spell again, but considering it requires a hefty [[CastFromHitPoints stamina cost]] (at 7 points; your maximum is 24) you probably wouldn't have enough to do it again.

* Nimue Alban's situation in Creator/DavidWeber's ''Literature/{{Safehold}}'' series lacks time travel, but otherwise fits perfectly. Nimue (or rather a RidiculouslyHumanRobot with her personality) is awoken in the last human world of Safehold, which has been trapped in MedievalStasis for almost a millennium thanks to its [[AGodAmI delusional]] founders. Nimue's objective is to undo this and bring humanity back into the era of space travel. Many details listed in the description are averted, since robots can't get sick, and Nimue has to learn Safeholdian English before she can venture out among its people.
%%%* Twice in ''Literature/SeptimusHeap'': First Septimus in ''Physik'', then Nicko and Snorri in ''Queste''.

* Creator/HarryHarrison's ''Literature/{{Deathworld}} 2'' features a non-time travel version of this, in which interstellar adventurer Jason [=dinAlt=] is stranded on a LostColony which has regressed to barbarism. Various bits and pieces of more advanced technology, generally regarded more or less as sorcery, are held as closely guarded secrets by the different clans (one group still knows how to make primitive petroleum-fueled engines, another how to make some crude electrical devices, yet another clan practices alchemy-level chemistry). The hero winds up completely revolutionizing the planet's backwater society solely out a desire to get off that primitive dirtball and back to someplace more civilized. The language issue is avoided as everyone on the planet speaks a (somewhat degraded) version of Esperanto.\\
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The issue of disease is not even mentioned. While Jason is likely immunized against any possible infection (considering he lives on a world completely hostile to humans), the same can't be said for the primitive natives against diseases he carries. He does nearly die from infection but only because he is wounded by a weapon.

* The ''ComicBook/Marvel1602'' mini-series has a time-displaced ComicBook/CaptainAmerica sent back to Elizabethan times. When asked to return to the future, he insists on staying to try and build a better America from the beginning -- which he does in small ways, such as helping a group of colonists survive a winter that should have wiped them out, or warning the natives against selling their land. The final touch comes when, because of his actions, the American colonies declare independence from Britain 174 years early. Unfortunately, it has consequences beyond his control -- his presence causes the Franchise/MarvelUniverse to impose itself on the past, and period versions of the Franchise/XMen, ComicBook/TheAvengers and other superheroes start appearing.
* ''ComicBook/{{Sasmira}}'': A young couple from the present day somehow find themselves sent back to the turn of the 20th century.

* ''ComicBook/GreenLantern1941'': In a blatant homage to ''Literature/AConnecticutYankeeInKingArthursCourt'', Alan and Doiby were once transported to Arthurian England. They were there long enough that Alan's ring ran out of power, leaving the two of them apparently stranded. Thankfully, Alan's lantern was centuries old, and existed in that time period, so he was able to charge his ring and return to his own time.
* Ultra Boy of the ''Comicbook/LegionOfSuperHeroes'' was once trapped in the distant past. It took him a while to realize, since he started out stranded on an alien world as well. There have also been several periods where a subgroup of Legionnaires was trapped in their past/our present for a span of issues; in the Nineties, the 20th and 30th century groups each 'owned' one of the two ''Legion'' titles being published then.
* In ''ComicBook/{{Cavewoman}}'', Gramps more-or-less exiles himself and his granddaughter Meriem in the prehistoric past. The entire town of Marshville is later accidentally transported into the past.
* The 2014 ''ComicBook/SpiderMan2099'' comic is the end result of this: thanks to his dad stranding him in the past and ComicBook/SuperiorSpiderMan's interference, Miguel O'Hara is now trapped in present-day New York. Miguel decides that if he can't get back home, he'll make home a better place by trying to nudge his future grandfather down a better path.
* Happens to Reed, Franklin, Johnny and Doctor Doom in the ComicBook/FantasticFour issue of ''ComicBook/MarvelOneHundredthAnniversarySpecial'', and they spend several years trying to find a way home.
* ''ComicBook/WhatIf'': One issue features an alternate ending to the ''Doomquest'' storyarc mentioned above, where Doom betrays Tony Stark and leaves him stranded in Arthurian times with only a damaged suit of armor. Stark instead uses what tools already exist to make better tools to partially fix his armor, and ends up becoming one of the knights of the round table. After being mortally wounded by Mordred, Arthur passes Camelot to Stark, who ushers in a new golden age of peace, and jumpstarts the industrial revolution 1000 years ahead of schedule. This also foils Morgan Le Fay's plots for good, and Camelot never falls.

* ''Franchise/{{Superman}}'':
** In ''ComicBook/TwoForTheDeathOfOne'', the Man of Steel gets dragged to the fourteenth century by his enemy [[EvilSorcerer Satanis]]. During a magic duel between Satanis and villainess Syrene, the Man of Steel gets split into two duplicates. Since their enemies only need one Superman to carry out their plans, one "twin" is hurled back to the present day. The remaining Superman remains trapped in the [=XIVth=] century until his duplicate self manages to go back to the past and merging back together with him.
** ''ComicBook/SupermansReturnToKrypton'': Superman accidentally goes back to pre-destruction Krypton, and since his powers do not work in the vicinity of a red sun, he gets stuck there. Since he cannot leave the planet, Superman tries to adapt to his new life until the planet explodes.
* Temporally inverted in the ''2078'' arc of the Filipino comic strip ''ComicStrip/PugadBaboy'', whose main cast accidentally ride a train from the then-present of 1992 into 2078, thanks to a wormhole swallowing up their train car. The whole arc has them briefly adjusting to a very dense, overcrowded, and CyberPunk-ish metropolitan Manila (and lamenting the lack of beer in the 2070s) before riding the next wormhole back into their time. (The arc never explains the fate of the presumed other passengers though.)

** [[Recap/DoctorWhoS38E1E2Spyfall Spyfall Part 2]] has [[spoiler:the Master]] trying to find the Doctor in 1943 (where she is accidentally stranded) by disguising himself as a Nazi officer, however he is exposed and captured, enabling the Doctor's return to the present. In the present-day sequence of the episode, set in 2020, [[spoiler:the Master then turns up, remarking that he has just had [[TheSlowPath the worst 77 years of his life]]; being a Time Lord he was able to live through these years and has barely aged]].

* ComicBook/EobardThawne, the Reverse Flash, in ''VideoGame/Injustice2'' can't return to his original timeline due to The Regime killing off one of his ancestors. Suffice it to say, he's [[OOCIsSeriousBusiness not too happy about it]].

** ''Anime/DoraemonNobitasGreatAdventureInTheSouthSeas'' have the gang touring the seas, only to accidentally enter a time warp sending them to the 16th Century during UsefulNotes/TheGoldenAgeOfPiracy, with plenty of {{Sea Monster}}s abound.
** In ''Anime/DoraemonNobitaInTheWanNyanSpacetimeOdyssey'', Nobita and gang sneaks a group of stray cats and dogs back to 300 million years ago with the Evolution Light, before leaving (with Nobita promising his new pet dog, Ichi, that he will return the next day). But when the gang (with Doraemon included) tries going back a day later, their TimeMachine accidentally hits a temporal warp and jettisons them to 299,999,000 years ago - a millenia off their designated timestamp - and they realize the cats and dogs they left behind have now formed a society of their own. And as luck would have it, the machine gets damaged beyond repair because of the warp, and the gang need to find a way back.

* As ''Series/StarTrekEnterprise'' featured time-travel heavily this happens more than once. Reptilians travel back in time to release a plague on mankind in the earyl 21st century, their method to get back gets destroyed resulting them attempting to release the plague early to hamper humanity. At some point the Enterprise goes through a NegativeSpaceWedgie sending the ship back 100 years; placed out of time it becomes a generational ship and aids the present day Enterprise before it can go back in time. Finally, and infamously, the opening of season four saw [[NinjaPirateZombieRobot Time-travling Alien Space Nazis]]; who was a group of aliens helping [[AlternateHistoryNaziVictory Nazi Germany win]] provided the Nazi's helped them build a time-machine back to the future.

* As ''Series/StarTrekEnterprise'' featured time-travel heavily this happens more than once. Reptilians travel back in time to release a plague on mankind in the earyl 22st century, their method to get back gets destroyed resulting them attempting to release the plague early to hamper humanity. At some point the Enterprise goes through a NegativeSpaceWedgie sending the ship back 100 years; placed out of time it becomes a generational ship and aids the present day Enterprise before it can go back in time. Finally, and infamously, the opening of season four saw [[NinjaPirateZombieRobot Time-travling Alien Space Nazis]]; who was a group of aliens helping [[AlternateHistoryNaziVictory Nazi Germany win]] provided the Nazi's helped them build a time-machine back to the future.

* Happens several times in Creator/AndreiBelyanin's novels, likely because of the author's love for AnachronismStew. Also, almost never do the heroes end up in a historical version of the past but a deliberately fictionalized version full of magic. The three prominent examples are ''Literature/TsarGorokhsDetectiveAgency'', which involve a modern-day Russian policeman being transported by unknown means to a cross between MedievalEuropeanFantasy and Myth/RussianMythologyAndTales; ''Literature/SwordWithNoName'', where a modern-day man finds himself in a typical MedievalEuropeanFantasy, and ''The Thief of Baghdad'', with yet another modern-day man being transported by a genie to ArabianNightsDays (there are aliens there too). Also inverted in ''The Redheaded Knight'', in which an English crusader ends up in modern-day Russia thanks to a witch's spell.

* The ''Assiti Shards'' milieu by Creator/EricFlint and others. Cast-off shards of transdimensional alien "art" bombard Earth and transpose large chunks of it with other times and places. Several alternate histories are planned in this meta-setting, including ''Time Spike'' (several separate Shard events deposit a modern maximum security prison, the Cherokees on the Trail of Tears, a band of conquistadors, and multiple pre-Columbian Indian settlements into the Cretaceous), ''1776'' (the armies of George Washington and Frederick the Great both find themselves in ancient Rome during the Crisis of the Third Century), and ''By Any Other Name'' (the Assiti themselves make unwilling contact with Elizabethan England), but only two has seen any publishing. The first one has, however, seen a lot:
** In the ''Literature/SixteenThirtyTwo'' series, the West Virginia coal-mining town of Grantville is translocated to southern Germany in the middle of the UsefulNotes/ThirtyYearsWar by an "art" project by AlienSpaceBats, utterly shattering the power structure and world view of Reformation Europe. The problems of the period, including communication with the natives by the transplanted West Virginians, wars and other conflicts, and the spread and control of diseases both of the 17th and 20th centuries are discussed in detail, often as significant plot points.

* Inverted in ''The Centurion's Empire'' by Sean Mcmullan, the premise of which is that AncientRome developed a medicine that [[HumanPopsicle allowed the human body to survive being frozen]], and promptly started storing its best and brightest. After the empire collapsed the one survivor set up shop in an English village, being unfrozen when they needed his military expertise.

* ''The Dechronization of Sam Magruder'' by George Gaylord Simpson --Sam Magruder, a scientist, is accidentally sent back to the dinosaur era by an experiment. The novel is in the form of his diaries, carved in stone, concerning how he copes with being stuck in the past, alone, for the rest of his life.

* ''The Last Day of Creation'' by Wolfgang Jeschke. The US government sends an expedition five million years into the past to drill for oil in what will become the Middle East and ship it over to the Americas. A scientist protests that they have the technology to send things back in time, but not to retrieve them except via TheSlowPath, so it will be a one-way trip. The admiral in charge just waves this off, as surely they will invent a way sometime in the future and the expedition can be rescued then. This never happens, not least because the timeline changes so much due to temporal meddling that the United States ceases to exist. At the end of the novel one man encounters a time traveler from an alternate timeline who raises the possibility of at least returning to that future, but he decides [[IChooseToStay there's no point in doing so]].

* ''Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen'' by Creator/HBeamPiper. Pennsylvania cop Calvin Morrison runs afoul of the Paratime Police and is accidentally transported to a medieval alternate Earth where a corrupt theocracy controls the secret of gunpowder. Pretty realistically handled -- he knows the basic formula, but also knows that there were steps in making it consistent that he needs to rediscover, and he has to convince wary leaders to build up the entire infrastructure for gun manufacturing from scratch.

* ''The Other Time'' (started by Creator/MackReynolds, completed by Dean Ing after Reynolds' death) features a modern day (1980's) anthropologist doing field work in Mexico who gets thrown back in history to just the right time to run into Cortez and the conquistadors. The language issue is avoided as the hero (being an anthropologist) naturally speaks Nahuatl and Spanish.

* The Creator/ArthurCClarke novel ''Time's Eye'' is the extreme form of this, involving Alexander the Great's army, Genghis Khan's Mongol hordes, six people from 2037 (three UN peacekeepers and three Soyuz cosmonauts), and a British outpost from the days of the Raj, with Creator/RudyardKipling in it.

* ''Yesterday's Flight'' by Martyn Ellington has a Boeing 737 airliner come off course through Yosemite National Park, resulting in its flight through an electrical storm. On the other side, Captain David Padel finds that his instruments have failed and the GPS cannot pick up satellites. After circling for some time, the aircraft lands with nearly no fuel remaining, and the passengers settle in for rescue. Everything goes downhill after Padel comes back from a reconnaissance walk claiming to have located the body of a T-Rex... [[MeanwhileInTheFuture Meanwhile, in the present day]], Chief Air Crash Investigator Bruce Ackland is on his way to Death Valley to find out why a section of an airliner's tailplane has been dug up embedded in a 65 million year old fossil...

* ''The Cross Time Engineer'' and sequels by Creator/LeoFrankowski. Polish hiker Conrad Schwartz, in a drunken stupor, bypasses all kinds of security and stumbles into a historical-research time portal (created, coincidentally, by his cousin) and awakens in thirteenth-century Poland, where he has just ten years to industrialize and unite his nation before the Mongol hordes arrive and kill ''everybody.''

** In ''Fanfic/TimeWillTell'', Gandalf and Elrond believe that Jorryn is from the far future.
** In ''Fanfic/TheGamesOfTheGods'', this is a DiscussedTrope. Rachel isn't sure if she is trapped in TheAgeOfMyths, or in AnotherDimension.
---> ''"Yeah. It's either another world, in another universe, or a long ways in the future." I replied. "I don't want to be bothered to figure out which. All I know is there's no magic -- or any thinking creature other than humans -- on Earth, unlike here."''
* In ''Fanfic/MementoVivere'', a VideoGame/FinalFantasyX fanfiction, this is a main plot point of the story.

* Subverted in ''Fanfic/ThousandShinji'': [[SpaceMarine Khnemu]] was trapped in the past, but he wasn't aware of it -he thought he was trapped in another dimension- and he didn't try to change the timeline since he intended to lie low and merely survive. However his actions -mentoring Shinji Ikari- ''changed'' the past.
* In ''FanFic/TransformersPrimeTimeWar'', Smokescreen, Wheeljack and Knock Out along with [[spoiler: Predaking and Darksteel]] are unintentionally pulled through a time portal. They wind up in the television series very first episode, where they have to fight Megatron as he attempts to change history.
* In the ''WesternAnimation/{{WITCH}}'' fanfic ''Fanfic/{{Ripples}}'', Will ends up sent back in time to decades in Meridian's past, long before Phobos' rise to power, and on top of that is also [[FountainOfYouth regressed to childhood]] and [[ForcedTransformation changed into some kind of hybrid]].
* ''FanFic/{{Shard}}'': As revealed in the first chapter, [[WebAnimation/{{RWBY}} Summer Rose]] never actually died; she was transported to the distant past and ended up in Totum.

* ''LightNovel/TheAmbitionOfOdaNobuna'': OrdinaryHighSchoolStudent Sagura Yoshiharu finds sent back to the [[JidaiGeki Sengoku era]] for no reason. The good news is... he's a fan of HistoricalSimulation games based on that era, and didn't even have much of a shock over transported back at time at all.