Nantucket series

The Nantucket series (also known as the Nantucket trilogy or the Islander trilogy) is a set of alternate history novels written by S. M. Stirling. The novels focus on the island of Nantucket in Massachusetts which was transported back in time to 1250 BC due to something called "The Event". Shortly thereafter a conflict develops between the democratic Republic of Nantucket and a group of renegade Americans led by the ex-Coast Guard lieutenant William Walker. The series was nominated for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 2000. The series is closely related to Stirling's Emberverse with "The Change" being the synonymous point of departure.

The Nantucket series is a variant on a well-known theme in time travel literature, in which a modern person is hurled back into the past and is able to introduce modern technologies, inventions and institutions, and completely change the past society. The theme goes back to Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" and continued in many later works such as L. Sprague de Camp's classic "Lest Darkness Fall". Poul Anderson disputed the plausibility of such scenarios in his "The Man Who Came Early", in which a man marooned in the past finds that - however capable and skilled in modern-day engineering - it is not possible for one person to introduce modern technologies all by himself, since he would not have "the tools to make the tools to make the tools". The Nantucket series gets around this difficulty by having not a single isolated person hurled into the past, but a whole island, with several thousand people of various backgrounds and skills, and in possession of a considerable amount of the physical and written resources of modern civilization - making their success much more plausible. Eric Flint used a similar literary device in his 1632 series.

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