Trapped In Another World / Literature

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• Across The Universe: The main character is traveling in a spaceship to land on a new planet while cryogenically frozen, and she is woken up fifty years before the ship is set to land. She is trapped on a tiny ship filled with people who don't understand her and are extremely confused at how she looks (since everyone on the ship is monoethnic, and she's not).
• In Aesthetica of a Rogue Hero, this is actually only an uncommon occurrence in the world's backstory, with special schools being set up for those who make it back to further learn how to control and use the powers they inevitably gain there. The story actually picks up for the protagonist on his way back home.
• Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, one of the earliest and most famous versions of this trope and a template for many later stories. Alice follows a rabbit Down the Rabbit Hole and finds herself in a world of nonsense. The sequel, Through the Looking Glass, has Alice enter a different world through a Magic Mirror in her room.
• Ambergris: The "patient" featured in The Strange Case of X has been dumped in one parallel dimension from Chicago, after he felt another entity drag him through. It gets worse, though; the man from Chicago has pushed Janice Shriek into a fire.
• Ankoku Kishi Monogatari has the main character Kuroki and his primary antagonists, The Hero Party brought against their will into the world of the story, with no way back.
• Aquila: Discussed. When trying to think of ways to deal with Bobby, Geoff says Aquila could send him to another dimension.
• In Ascendance of a Bookworm, a girl who loves books is reincarnated into a Fantasy world after an earthquake crushes her under a pile of them. Unfortunately, she reincarnates into the body a sickly, illiterate five-year-old daughter of a common city guard in a world where books are rare and expensive. So she begins using her knowledge of arts and crafts to invent paper, and begins trying to spread literacy and writing so more books will be made.
• The Balanced Sword: A group of teenagers are brought from Earth to the magical world of Zarathan by a mysterious wizard and tasked with restoring the long-lost connection between the two worlds — but they're not the protagonists, or even in the story much; they just cross paths occasionally with the actual protagonists, Kyri and Tobimar, who are natives of Zarathan busy with a quest of their own. They do play a role in the resolution of the trilogy, though: during Kyri's climactic battle with the Big Bad, there's a mystical aftershock portending that somewhere offstage the connection between the two worlds has been restored, and the distraction this causes the Big Bad helps Kyri to win the day. The author has said that he does intend to do a straight telling of the teenagers' story someday, but if he only got to tell one story about Zarathan he wanted it to be Kyri's.
• Beyond Reality: Evelyn Monet's initial situation in the fantasy world of Quintala. Becomes much less of an issue after meeting Zoey and Nate, and subsequently joining the UEW Agency as a liaison, allowing her to go back and forth between universes.
• In BladeArc, Yuuto is summoned to the Magical Land of High World to save the world from Eternal Nidhogg, a world-eating ancient worm.
• In Sergey Lukyanenko's The Boy and the Darkness, the protagonist is a teenager named Danny who travels to another world covered in perpetual darkness. His way home is almost immediately destroyed. The other two portals get destroyed later. At the end, Danny gets the chance to go home by wishing for one thing from a godlike being. He uses the wish to save a friend rather than return home.
• The protagonist of The Challenge from Beyond (written by the entire Lovecraft Circle; C. L. Moore, A Merrit, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Frank Belknap Long) finds, at random, a crystal that causes his mind to be transferred into the body of a monstrous, horrific alien, and the alien's mind to be transferred to his. He quickly decides that he might rather like it on the alien world, as he's a nobody geology professor back home, and becomes their king by way of stealing the talisman of their god. The alien in his body back on Earth is nowhere near as lucky, going insane and killing itself shortly afterwards as it can't override the body's self-destructive urges.
• Jack Chalker's Changewinds and Flux & Anchor series both deal with the themes of being stuck in worlds other than the main character's original one, though the details are complex, and (as is common with Chalker) very strange.
• In Diana Wynne Jones's Charmed Life, when Gwendolen escapes from World 12A, she pulls Janet in from World 12B, and so on all around the circuit. Janet is the only one who doesn't find the change to be an improvement, and when she realizes this, decides to stay in 12A for the sake of the others. Janet's parents don't notice the change.
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and every adaptation and remake that came after. With an 1889 publication date, this is the Trope Codifier.
• In Cooking With Wild Game, the protagonist is not given any sort of direction or exposition. All he knows is that he was running into a burning building, and then woke up in a primeval forest at night, completely unsinged. However, there are so many helpful coincidences about where he arrived, who was walking nearby at the time, what he ends up doing to affect that world's bigger picture, etc, that it seems...unlikely...his transplantation was entirely random.
• In Critical Failures, four friends invite a random guy online to be their Cave Master for a Dungeons & Dragons Expy called Caverns & Creatures. The guy, Mordred, gets annoyed with them not taking the game seriously and insulting him, so he uses a set of magical dice to send them into the game as their characters. Then he does the same to a sister of one of the boys, who comes back unexpectedly, and her boyfriend. The trapped friends are forced to survive in a world that is suddenly real and deal with the consequences of their thoughtless actions from back when they thought it was just a game, such as lopping off the head of a guard for no good reason. They also have to abide by the rules of the game, and their skills are limited by whatever character stats they rolled before they started playing. For example, Cooper ends up being a half-orc with extremely low intelligence and charisma stats, so he constantly does something disgusting without meaning to and can't read, even though Cooper is normally literate. This doesn't apply to reading their character sheets, since those items aren't treated as of the game world. Also, Mordred keeps an eye on them through any person, creature, or object. He also reveals to them that they're not the first people he has sent into the game world.
• Crosstime Traffic: In the first book, Gunpowder Empire, siblings Jeremy and Amanda Solters get cut off from the home timeline after a terrorist attack in Romania (they don't find out until the end of the book), and trapped in a world where the Roman Empire never fell. They switch from accepting barter for their goods to only taking cash, and worry what will happen when the trade goods, and especially the antibiotics, run out.
• In Stephen King's The Dark Tower, Roland draws his ka-tet from New York City at various points in time to his own world.
• Barbara Hambly's Darwath series: Ingold could bring Gil and Rudy back to Earth any time, at the risk of the Dark learning how it's done and coming to eat Los Angeles. By the time the threat of the Dark goes away, so does our heroes' desire to go 'home'.
• Mysteria: In the second book of the trilogy, AYANI - Die Tochter des Falken, which means Daughter of the Falcon, Jessie, a girl from our world is trapped in Mysteria, a Magical Land. This is then Deconstructed as she needs insulin injections and there is nothing comparable in Mysteria, so unless she can return home, she will die when her supply runs out.
• In Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody, The main character falls asleep and wakes up to find himself in a valley. He decides to take a break from his job and tour this new world, which initially seems to be based on the game he programmed.
• Destroyermen: The crew of the World War II destroyer USS Walker ends up on a parallel Earth where evolution took a very different path. Dinosaurs and their descendants roam the land, and the seas are full of giant monsters and piranha-like fish. Two native intelligent races are at war to the death. Later on, they learn they're far from the first to be trapped here. In fact, the Artillerymen prequel series follows another group of Americans who got trapped in that world during the Mexican-American War.
• The Devil is a Part-Timer! inverts the usual set-up. A demonic Evil Overlord, on the verge of defeat at the hands of The Chosen One, opens a portal and flees along with his most trusted lieutenant — and they find themselves as powerless humans in modern-day Japan. The story picks up several months later and shows that they've adapted to modern life quite well, with the demon lord becoming assistant manager at the local totally-not-McDonalds. Of course, that's the point when the legendary hero shows up to finish the job (with a dollar-store pocket knife, since she can't summon her holy sword).
• In Dirge for Prester John, getting into or out of Pentexore is impossible most of the year, effectively trapping anyone who isn't keeping a strict eye on the Rimal.
• The Divide Trilogy: Within the first five pages of the first book, Felix passes out above the eponymous Divide and finds himself stuck in a world where humans and science are mythical but magic and elves are real. Unusually, for most of it getting home is only his secondary objective; his primary is finding some kind of treatment for his terminal heart condition. Crossing the boundary gets a lot easier as the series goes on. At the end of the series, the Divide is closed and leaves copies of Felix and his elfin friend Betony on each side, meaning that you've got one Felix trapped in the fantasy world and one Betony trapped in the human one.
• Stephen R. Donaldson is fond of this one. It's the premise of:
  • The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.
  • Mordant's Need: a woman from the 'real world' is trapped in a fantasy realm in which any reflective surface can access another universe.
• Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks? offers a different spoof on the concept by having the main character's clingy and overly affectionate mother go with him into a virtual MMORPG...and like the title says, she turns out to be a major badass while still being just as clingy and affectionate as she is in the real world.
• In Drugstore in Another World: The Slow Life of a Cheat Pharmacist, corporate slave Reiji is transported to another world, uses his skills to make better potions and sets up a drugstore.
• Eden Green and sequel New Night: The main characters spend at least part of their adventures stuck in an alternate dimension later named Fortuna, from which alien needle monsters have been invading Earth. The portals that allow travel between the dimensions are fickle, impossible to control until late into the second book, and even then, behave in unpredictable ways.
• Empress Of Another World: Ordinary High-School Student Sabina faints in front of an oncoming train, and is transported another world, where she is taken in by a duke of the Crentia kingdom, then offered up to the ugly old emperor as a concubine.
• In Everworld, the main characters David, Christopher, Jali and April get sucked into the titular world when Loki breaches the space between worlds to abduct Senna (who specifically planned this). Everworld is populated with various mythological gods who came there from our world ("the Old World") centuries ago, along with their mortal followers. There are also weird alien creatures who came from completely different worlds, along with their gods, one of whom is an Eldritch Abomination seeking to eat all the others. Senna could bring them home, but unlike most MacGuffin Super Persons, she has her own agenda, and it's not pretty.
• In The Executioner and Her Way of Life, it's a common occurence for "Lost Ones", people from our world, to fall into the world of the story. According to the laws of this world, they even have a great potential for magic... so great, in fact, that they can cause calamities when left unchecked. The local clergy decided to set up a system of executioners to kill otherworlders before they can reach that point. One of these executioners is the protagonist, and her target becomes her partner.
• A Fable of Tonight: Private Detective John Justin Mallory travels to an alternate version of Manhattan populated by all sorts of magical creatures and ends up sacrificing his chance to go home in order to keep the Big Bad from entering our world.
• In The Familiar of Zero, the male protagonist is "accidentally" summoned to another world by the female protagonist in a summoning ceremony. It is later revealed that many people have accidentally ventured into this world, including a soldier from the Vietnam War and Siesta's great-grandfather.
• Guy Gavriel Kay's The Fionavar Tapestry. The five main characters are transported to Fionavar at the beginning of the first book, The Summer Tree, and return to their own world at the end of it; then they go back near the beginning of the second book, The Wandering Fire, and stay there through to the end of the third, The Longest Road, when their various fates are resolved. At the end of the trilogy the score stands with two going back to our world, one choosing to stay in Fionavar, one dead in a Heroic Sacrifice, and one sailing off to eternity with Lancelot and King Arthur as she is, in fact, Guinevere. The books are somewhat eclectic.
• Subverted in Gate: The titular gate is a permanent link between two worlds, our own and another world featuring magic and gods. The fact that the Japanese can constantly bring in Game-Breaker modern military tech like tanks, fighters and special forces is a continuous plot point.
• Grand Central Arena: The experimental starship Holy Grail and its crew find themselves stuck in The Arena, a vast extrauniversal construct, and can't get back home unless they learn how the rules of The Arena work. Unlike most of the other examples, this one is SF, not fantasy, although there is Sufficiently Advanced tech involved.
• Dave Duncan's The Great Game explains why characters in this situation tend to become heroes — anyone who's in a different dimension than the one they were born in can absorb Mana. At low levels, this just makes them really, really charismatic. If they convince other people to make sacrifices to them (usually of blood), they can become Physical Gods. All "godly" beings are actually humans from other worlds, many "gods" of Vales are actually from our world. There are hazards this, however...
• In Greystone Valley, the 12-year-old Sarah finds herself transported into the titular valley.
• In Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash, 12 young adults wake up in a medieval fantasy world with no memory of how they got there. They know that they come from another world (and they are initially dressed in modern day clothing), but are unable to remember anything past that. Without a way back home, they must find a way to adjust to this new world.
• Joel Rosenberg's Guardians of the Flame series depicts a small group of college students who start a fantasy game (GMed by their professor), only to get magically transported into the bodies of their characters. Most of them end up deciding to stay, and use their modern knowledge to found a democratic nation that busts slave rings with firearms. Additionally, this trope is inverted for their professor, who came from the fantasy world with the specific intent of finding The Chosen One — the child that the main character and his girlfriend have once they're in the fantasy world.
• Harold Shea (a.k.a. Enchanter or The Incomplete Enchanter): In this series of fantasy short stories (which began in 1940, with its first five installments co-written by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, with later 1990s-era installments written by de Camp, Christopher Stasheff and six other authors), the titlular university professor and three of his colleagues visit various universes from mythology and fiction. In some of the stories, the main characters are prevented from returning to the "real" world until they've accomplished some specific task, which is where this trope comes into the picture.
• Her Crown of Fire: Rose feels a magical compulsion to jump into a dangerous river; Tyson is pulled in trying to stop her. It turns out that the river is a portal to another world. It ate a car once.
• High School Prodigies Have It Easy Even in Another World: Seven high school students get into an airplane accident, and wake up to find themselves in a middle age-esque fantasy world where magic and beast-men (called juujin) exist. Like most protagonists in this kind of plot, they are high school students that excel at politics, economics, science and medicine, which enables them to build a nuclear plant in a world without electricity, control the economy of a large city in a short work's trip, and declare war on the evil nobles.
• Homerooms & Hall Passes: Five adventurers of a Dungeon Crawling game playing a tabletop RPG mirroring the real world are thrown into the game's universe. Four of the five adventurers take on the names, backgrounds, and responsibilities of their characters in the game world. Albiorix, however, was the Hall Master rather than a player, so he doesn't have an established character and has to make up his identity as he goes.
• How Not to Summon a Demon Lord involves a shut-in who is a Godlike Gamer in an RPG he plays, where he suddenly awakens in the world resembling his game and has become his overpowered player avatar Diablo the Demon Lord.
• The titular Id finds himself trapped in a world he has absolutely no knowledge about and has no idea how he got there — but where he comes from is another mystery.
• In The Ideal Sponger Life, Zenjirou is transported to an alternate world to be married to the queen, due to two of his ancestors being from the other world.
• In Another World, I Am Called: The Black Healer: A 22 year old Japanese woman finds herself transported into an RPG Mechanics 'Verse and soon realizes that she's a very powerful healer. In this world those with powerful healing magic are viewed as "Gaias Children" blessed by the setting's main god.
• In In Another World with My Smartphone, Touya is reborn in a magical world after accidentally being struck by lightning along with his Smartphone. In addition to this, he is given magic powers.
• InCryptid:
  • By the time the series begins, Thomas Price has been missing for nearly fifty years, sent to another dimension by the Crossroads after making a Deal with the Devil with them to save his wife Alice's life. Alice has spent all the intervening time traveling through countless dimensions searching for him.
  • At the end of Imaginary Numbers and for the majority of the next book, Calculated Risks, Sarah, Annie, Artie, James, and Mark are stuck in a dimension of Big Creepy-Crawlies and have to figure out how to get home. Transported along with them are hundreds if not thousands of "zombified" Johrlac and the entire campus of the University of Iowa.
  • In Spelunking Through Hell, Alice finds the dimension where Thomas was sent, a Death World where the Crossroads tossed anyone who made a deal with them and they didn't want to kill, for whatever reason. James's best friend Sally, who also made a deal, is also there. Some of the people trapped there have been there for so long that they have descendants who have never known another world.
• In The Inverted World by Christopher Priest (novelist), a city has somehow become transported to a bizarre alternate world, one where they must constantly move forwards in order to survive.
• JK Haru is a Sex Worker in Another World parodies the concept. Chiba was once a hot-blooded idiot at his school, who attempted and failed to save a classmate from a runaway truck. He awakens in another world, with unique "cheat abilities", and so begins an otaku's dream come true! But for the classmate he failed to rescue, "JK" Haru, this world is a nightmare as she's trapped in a misogynistic society with her only real option is to become a sex worker to make ends meet.
• The John Carter of Mars series and the unrelated 'Pellucidar'' series, by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
• KonoSuba is a parody of the isekai genre. Protagonist Kazuma, a shut-in NEET who dies an extremely Undignified Death, is offered a chance by the goddess Aqua to go to an RPG Mechanics 'Verse fantasy world to fight in a war against the Demon King, and is even offered one game-breaking magical item of his choice. Annoyed by Aqua's condescension towards him, he decides to bring her along as his game-breaking item, only to find that not only is she pretty much useless most of the time, but that the life of a low-level adventurer is unglamorous and grueling (Kazuma spends much of the early first season just barely scrounging up enough money to eat while sleeping in a stable.)
• For Yuna of Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear, World Fantasy Online was just her favorite VRMMO. Then, after racking up an insane amount of total playtime from obsessively playing it solo every single day, a mysterious force gifts her the Bear Armor, an Embarrassing but Empowering Outfit that resembles bear-themed pajamas then sucks her into the world of the game.
• Kyo Kara Maoh!: Though Yuuri isn't really trapped, and can go back and forth between the two worlds with relative ease, he only considers himself trapped when he returns to his native world.
• Land Of Oblivion has its Kid Hero protagonists transported to a place where dead children have their afterlife. The place is not all rosy, though, and they have to save the girl's brother from becoming Deader than Dead.
• Land of Oz: Many early books had the characters trapped in a strange magical land, and looking for a way to return to their home.
• The Laundry Files: In the Short Story "Pimpf", Bob's new intern, Playful Hacker Peter-Fred Young, doesn't listen to him and manages to trap himself inside the heavily modded Neverwinter Nights scenario Bob was building to catch people who might summon Eldritch Abominations with the Toolset. Bob has to go in after him with his roommate Pinky running the DM Client from outside.
• C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; a slight twist here is that the characters age significantly during their stay in Narnia, then are returned to their original ages when they leave. The other Narnia books tend to follow this pattern as well, except for The Horse and His Boy.
• Log Horizon: At the exact moment the newest expansion for the MMORPG "Elder Tale" goes live, its entire player base blacks out and wakes up in the bodies of their Adventurer avatars, believing that they have been transported inside the game. At the same time, in the Medieval European Fantasy land of Theldesia, the monster-hunting "Adventurer" constructs that have served humanity for generations suddenly begin acting strangely, displaying individual personalities and calling humans "NPCs". Now Theldesia must deal with the impact of an entire nation springing up overnight — one where the inhabitants have completely alien values, the fighting strength of demigods, and no form of government or law enforcement. The protagonists must use all their political savvy to stabilize things and make sure that Theldesia doesn't descend into war because of their presence.
• Right off the start of Magehunter, the titular hero and his friend, Reinhardt of Margrave, gets cursed and sent to Kallamehr, an "Arabian Nights" Days universe, where the two of them must figure out a way to work together and return to their own world.
• In Magical Girl Raising Project Restart, 16 magical girls are trapped in a game world and are forced to go through the world and defeat the Evil King in order to permanently escape. In this case, they are only trapped in it for three days at a time from their perspective, then are allowed three days in the real world for a maintenance period, and then it repeats until the game is cleared.
• The Merchant Princes Series, by Charles Stross features "worldwalkers" who regularly do this to others.
• In Teresa Frohock's Miserere: An Autumn Tale, going through the Veil to the Woerld means you can never return to Earth.
• L.E. Modesitt Jr.:
  • In the Spellsong Cycle, the main character is summoned because of her skills as a singer.
  • In the Saga of Recluce series this trope combined with Lost Colony is used in two books.
• My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! has the main character reincarnate as the villainess of two of the routes of an otome she once played. As said villainess comes to a bad end no matter what happens in those routes, she begins trying to avoid said fate(s), ultimately turning the game's story on its ear.
• In The Neverending Story, the second half of the book is about Bastian entering the world of Fantastica and his adventures there. Later on he reaches The City of Old Emperors, which is full of former humans who eventually turned into true Fantasticans and can never leave. Bastian narrowly avoids this fate and resolves to find a way home.
• Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. Richard Mayhew manages to pierce the Perception Filter that normally clings to muggles like himself, and notices a girl who is in dire need of medical attention. He pays dearly for this, as the girl is from London Below, where all the magic and forgotten history of London ends up, and he finds himself forgotten by his peers and unable to interact with them. His only hope to return to the life he knows is to delve further into London Below and its strange denizens.
• In "The New Gate", deals double cases of this. Firstly trapped-in-Deadly-VR-games then protagonist is transported to dimension similar to video game but 500 hundred years later a la Overlord and Log Horizon when he, alone, killed last boss and completed the game. The story tells his reunions with old friends, meeting new friends, saving the day on frequent basis and finding the way home. Later, it is revealed that there are 6 other players whom are trapped twice like Shin for reason yet unexplained even if the systems recognize that they are already logged out.
• In Nito's Lazy Foreign World Syndrome As Hidako Masamune was about to commit suicide, he and his classmates are summoned to the Kingdom of Gray Belka to fight against the Demon Lord and his army. When they learn that he possesses the class of "Healer" which is considered to be the weakest class, they decide to dispose of him instead.
• Lampshaded, discussed, and ultimately defied in No Game No Life. A brother and sister NEET pair get pulled by into a world ruled by its "one true god" Tet, who has made 10 Pledges that force everyone to use games to decide almost everything. However, Sora and Shiro were both quite disillusioned with society back home and have absolutely no desire to go back; they even thank Tet for bringing them there.
• Oddly Enough: "A Blaze of Glory" has Tommy's grandmother tell him the story of how, as a young woman, she fell through a hole in the world and had an adventure in Elfland, where she had to find a special item and return it to their Queen.
• Otherside Picnic bucks conventional isekai tropes (highlighted by the "urasekai" in the original Japanese title as opposed to the typical "isekai") by having entries that allow people to move between Earth and the titular Otherside at will. That said, sometimes people can be brought into the Otherside without warning and with no idea where the exit would be. An example is a group of US Marines stationed in Okinawa that was transported to the Otherside while training in the mountains. In the same chapter the marines are introduced, the tavern that Sorawo and Toriko were eating at suddenly sends them over without any warning.
• Rob of An Outcast in Another World really wants to go back to Earth. Elatra is extremely hostile and not a nice place to live, especially for a Human. As of now, he hasn't made any progress, and none of his allies are aware of a way to send him back, as his appearance in Elatra is unprecedented.
• Overlord revolves around a high-level MMORPG dungeon created by an evil-themed roleplaying guild, which is transported to an unrelated low-fantasy world. In the process, its Always Chaotic Evil NPC guardians become sentient, and the sole remaining member of said guild becomes trapped in his Elder Lich avatar as their master. As he is very fond of said NPCs (what with them being the only reminder of his old guildmates) but terrified of them turning against him, he is forced to play the role of a stereotypical Evil Overlord. Due to his undead body dulling his emotions, and his minions' attempts to "help" him, he slowly ends up Becoming the Mask.
• Once you have entered Palimpsest once, you will go there whenever you have sex, whether you want to or not.
• Inverted with The Princess 99, where an alien biker chick from the future finds herself stuck in the human world in the 1920s.
• Problem Children are Coming from Another World, aren't they? has three problem children invited by a Black Rabbit to the world known as Little Garden where competitive games decide one's living conditions.
• In Resurrection Life, Gideon, alongside eleven other people from differing realities, is summoned to the world of Khayim to protect it from the threat of Abyssal Incursions as a Paragon of one of the nations there. It quickly gets revealed that they're patsies for a conspiracy held by multiple nations, especially after Gideon is assassinated on their first mission. Thanks to his allies, he's brought back to life and is not determined to find out the real reason they were summoned there and to fix what happened in his absence.
• Played for Drama in Re:Zero. Every time Subaru dies, he goes back to a certain "checkpoint" in the story. Once he's dealt with the threat to his life, he tries to live peacefully in this new world until a new threat arises and a new checkpoint is established. Unfortunately, every time a threat is dealt with, the checkpoint is immediately established, so if Subaru can't deal with whatever is threatening him without undesired consequences, he's stuck with them.
• The Rifter: John, Laurie, and Bill have (without intending to) passed through the Great Gates from Earth to Basawar, a strange, brutal land; the gates are shut (maybe destroyed). Getting home will not be easy at all.
• It's taken a step further in The Rising of the Shield Hero; not only is the protagonist Naofumi one of four heroes who have been summoned into a fantasy world from their own (in fact, all but Naofumi himself followed the common isekai trope of dying in their own world before waking up in the new world), but it quickly turns out that all four of the heroes each come from alternate versions of Japan as well. Unfortunately, Naofumi gets the short straw as he is looked down on for unknown reasons and subjected to a Frame-Up, forcing him to survive on his own in a world that seems to hate his guts. Also notable that, right after their summoning, the four heroes talk amongst themselves and quickly discover that they all come from Alternate Universes from each other. Indeed, in the worlds where the other three come from, the world they've been summoned to seems to have come from a video game, and a different game in each universe, at that.
• Schooled in Magic: Emily, a lonely, depressed modern girl, is abruptly transported to a parallel world by an evil sorcerer who believes she's The Chosen One meant to defeat him. She's rescued by another sorcerer and sent to a Wizarding School because it's revealed she can do magic. Emily really never even wonders if she can go back, in spite of having a lot to adjust living in a very medieval world, as her only relatives were a negligent mother and an abusive step-father. As a result, she has no incentive to even try.
• Technically, The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch is a portal fantasy in which Charles Darwin enters a fantasy world. However, it's an unusual case, as the world in question is assumed to be familiar to the reader, and so rather than being about him exploring it, the book is more from the perspective of the wizards trying to figure out how to send him back. SoD IV: Judgement Day has a sensible librarian fall out of Roundworld, and does spend more time with her learning about the Disc.
• Literally the entire premise of the trilogy The Secret Country by Pamela Dean, except with a slight twist as the main characters seemed to have created the world themselves and then somehow fallen into it.
• Jo Clayton's Skeens Leap has an interstellar treasure hunter named Skeen discover a portal to a Standard Fantasy Setting while evading pursuit on a remote planet. It doesn't seem to make much difference in her life; she goes from being chased by aliens to being chased by werewolves without much intermission.
• In Alan Dean Foster's Spellsinger series, the main character is summoned by a powerful wizard looking for another powerful wizard. Apparently, an engineer would be the closest thing to the alternate world's wizards. Unfortunately, the summoning spell latched on to the main character's job title... sanitation engineer. Fortunately, he does turn out to have magical abilities in that world.
• In Summer in Orcus, a girl named Summer is transported to the world of Orcus, which is under threat from the warlord Zultan Houndbreaker and the mysterious Queen in Chains.
• The Summoning series by fantasy/romance author Robin D. Owens focuses on a group of Colorado women who are called, one by one, to be champions of the world of Amee. Unique in that any Earth-native brought to Amee will eventually face the Snap... a point where Earth tries to call the person back, and will unless she has made a stronger commitment to Amee.
• Sword Art Online isn't technically an Isekai, given the characters' bodies remain in the real world, but most pieces of media that run on the trope nowadays take cues from how this series handled something akin to it. To that end, this series can be considered the Trope Codifier, and this series' success is largely considered to be one of the biggest factors to the popularity of the Isekai genre. Though the scenarios of the Aincrad and Alicization arcs do resemble this trope quite a bit, as Kirito is stuck in SAO/Underworld respectively.
  • In the first arc, the initial 9,000-something players of the MMORPG Sword Art Online discover that they cannot log out, and that their VR headsets have been rigged with a microwave generator that will kill them if they die in-game or attempt to take it off. The only way to set everyone free is to defeat the Final Boss on the last of the game's 100 levels. Over the next two years, some players throw themselves at the task, some give up and prepare to spend the rest of their lives in the game, and some go mad with power and decide to take Player Killing to the next level.
  • The Alicization arc features a virtual world inhabited by near-perfect AIs, unaware of their artificial nature. It resembles a Standard Fantasy Setting due to being built on a modified version of SAO's game engine, with the designers using magic as a convenient Hand Wave for system commands and any oddities in the simulation that they were unable to replicate. When Kirito suffers brain damage his friends connect him to the simulation in an attempt to heal him, but without offering him any clues as to how he got there.
• Tales of the Magic Land starts off much the same as Baum (especially since the first book was a loose but recognizable translation of Baum); but Ellie and whatever relatives she takes along with her to the Emerald City always return home, and by the last book Ellie is studying in America and her cousin Fred is working on a factory, both having no intention to move to the Magic Land. It's stated that Scarecrow wanted to invite Ellie to the Emerald City as a teacher, but it's left unknown whether he did and whether she agreed.
• That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime: Of the three types of Otherworlders, two of them (Stray and Summon) fit this trope the best while the third are known as Reincarnators. The latter are those summoned by those from the main world, while the former are those literally plucked from their worlds at random to this one, hence being called "Strays". They don't even need to be in life-threatening danger for it to happen. Unfortunately, even if you want to go home and aren't magically enslaved, Dimensional Traveler capabilities have only been seen on some of the most powerful beings in the setting who are unlikely to give the average Otherworlder the time of day (i.e. the True Dragons, the angels and those closely affiliated with them), and most of them have some form of limit even if it's as simple as "unlikely to find your specific world within countless alternates and plop you back down". True, unrestricted movement between dimensions without conditions has only been achieved by Veldanava and Rimuru at the very end of the series.
• Enforced in Torture Princess: Fremd Torturchen. The isekai element was suggested by the editor as a justification for why anybody would willingly follow Elisabeth Le Fanu, the eponymous Torture Princess. It has no further effect on the storyline because Kaito Sena has no desire to return to the hellish life he lived in the underworld of modern-day Japan: becoming her manservant actually turns out to be an improvement.
• In Trash of the Count's Family, the in-series novel The Birth of a Hero features this with its protagonist Choi Han. Protagonist Kim Rok Soo is transported into the world of the novel, which could be considered either this trope or reincarnating into another world because it's not clear of he actually died or not before being transported (not that he has any interest in returning either way).
• The Twelve Kingdoms: Youko Nakajima and her friends Ikuya Asano and Yuuka Sugimoto get dropped in the middle of a mostly hostile fantasy world by a 'Mysterious Protector. Though, this is apparently common enough for the locals to coin terms ("Kaikyaku" for Japanese people, "sankyaku" for Chinese) and for the government to have a regular policy in dealing with them. For example, The Kingdom of En has a standard naturalization/citizenship process while Kou just tries to round them up and kill them.
  • And before they came in, a farm girl named Suzu was spirited away from the Meiji era and thrown in the same world. Only to go through much heartbreak.
  • Shoryu, the king of En, also was from Japan. In fact, he was a daimyo or feudal lord whose clan was wiped away in the feudal wars. Having become a Fallen Prince, he accepted to become the King of En.
  • Taiki, the kirin of Tai, was also from Japan, and was located and brought to the Kingdoms when he was ten. However, in an inversion, Taiki traveled back to Japan while fleeing a coup and is currently trapped in Japan, rather than another world.
• In Unicorns of Balinor, the heroine was actually born and raised in the other world, but due to plot-related amnesia thinks she's always been on Earth. As is typical for the trope, she initially fears the more magical aspects of her life, but eventually realizes that they feel more her than any of the (well-intentioned) lies her caretakers fed her to keep her safe. And as they guessed she would, she runs off to risk her life fighting the Big Bad who killed her family the moment her memories return.
• Un Lun Dun by China Miéville — Zanna and Deeba are drawn into the titular world, a nonsensical mirror version of London, inhabited by various creatures and animated items that have been discarded by London's inhabitants.
• In The Wandering Inn, Erin Solstice, Ryoka Griffin, and dozens of others find themselves suddenly in a completely different world. Some appear in monster-infested places, resulting in many deaths.
• In The War of Embers, somewhat downplayed in that the main protagonist's parents immigrated from another world to Earth so he is marginally familiar with the other world and ultimately deconstructed in that being from Earth, he has absolutely no power to assert himself in a world dominated by magic and powerful creatures such as dragons and thus, ends up being dragged along against his will for half of the book and at one point almost dies to a mere common thief. Finally, subverted and zig-zagged as he is turned into a dragon which requires him to travel back and forth between both worlds constantly to recharge his magic since Earth is a magic-less world.
• In Warrior Cats, Jayfeather is stuck in the past until he can turn the Ancients into the Tribe of Rushing Water by teaching them tribe customs.
• In The Way Series, Patricia gets trapped on a parallel world, and remains there until she dies of old age.
• Wayward Children is a Deconstruction, with the entire first book, Every Heart a Doorway, being about kids who went to other worlds on portal fantasy adventures dealing with the trauma of coming back — to parents who can't understand them or their experiences, to bodies that they outgrew (Kade gets a double whammy on that one, because not only does he end up in a younger body, it means that he needs to go through the wrong puberty twice), to a world that just doesn't follow the rules they've gotten used to, and/or to a world without the people they've come to love. For a lot of them, after being trapped in another world, now they feel trapped in this one.
• Welcome to Japan, Ms. Elf! plays with this: in another world, yes, trapped, no. The main character Kazuhiro has the ability to travel to another world while he's sleeping in Japan, and travels back to Japan while sleeping in the other side. He though the other world is merely a dream world (albeit a persistent one) until he accidentally brought his elf friend to Japan.
• Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke's Mansion has the protagonist pushed off a bridge and reincarnated into the world of a murder mystery she read as Raeliana, the dead centerpiece of said mystery.
• In the backstory of The Witcher, there was a cataclysm known as Conjunction of the Spheres that supposedly trapped many creatures from different worlds into the Witcher world. No one quite know what caused it, and eventually everyone made their home in the strange new world.
• L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Most of the first six-odd "Oz" books fell under this trope, with Dorothy finding her way back to Oz only to get back to Kansas by the last page, though eventually Baum just had Dorothy (along with Uncle Henry, Aunt Em, and Toto) move to Oz full-time and continue her adventures there. Whenever another human came to Oz from the outside world after that point, they generally ended up staying (after the wicked witches died and Ozma took the throne, Oz was a much more utopian place to live, occasional monsters and baddies notwithstanding). It's implied even pre-Ozma that Oz was a much better place to live than Kansas; and Dorothy only kept going back home because she didn't want to ditch her family. That certainly is her only reason after meeting Ozma, whom she has a very close relationship with. This trope is downplayed as Oz isn't in another universe, but actually another country. It's just separated from the rest of the world by a huge desert.
• World Customize Creator is about a young Japanese gamer finding himself in a parallel fantasy world where most people have elemental magic. The main character has the power to freely customize anything around him, which he uses to create rare magical items, heal people, and build things. To the people in the fantasy world, nothing like this has ever been seen before.
• In The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic, Ordinary High-School Student Ken Usato is summoned to Lyngle Kingdom, along with his two respectable schoolmates. It turns out he was summoned by mistake, but his test reveals he possesses rare healing magic, and undergoes Training from Hell in order to help defeat the demon king.

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