Imagine that, one day, you go to bed, thinking about the typical things: work problems, what might the people you love be doing, what you are going to do the day after, if you should buy certain stock options whose prices are rising... and when you wake up, you discover that everything around you has changed completely: you might be surrounded by stone walls while a fire merrily burns in a chimney, or perhaps everything is super-futurist and an android has in the meantime approached you to ask you for your breakfast preferences.
If that has just happened, congratulations! You just have been ISOTed and now you are in a completely unknown place and time.
The term ISOT is an acronym of Island on the Sea Of Time, a novel trilogy written by French-Canadian-American writer Stephen Michael Stirling (better known in the alternative history community as S. M. Stirling). This trilogy begins with a strange Event (this is how it is called in-universe, with capitalized letter that affects the island of Nantucket and its near surroundings, including an United States Coast Guard ship, and it transports the island and its inhabitants back in time to the Bronze Age, approximately the year 1250 b.C. The entire island is then forced to organise in ways they would have never thought possible, but the real problems begin when Lieutenant William Walker, which was part of the Coast Guard ship's crew, realizes that, using modern technology, he could become a king among the technologically backwards societies in the rest of the world. From there, the inhabitants of Nantucket will have to not only establish ties with other cultures, but they will also have to start a great alliance against Walker and his accomplices, who seem to be ready to conquer the entire world unless they are faced and stopped (the events that take place in the world they leave behind are told in the novel series Emberverse).
Although a most specific term for this could be Mass Teleportation (or Mental Time Travel for certain individual cases), the uchronic community adopted the term ISoT to signify those stories in which a person, group of people or territory travel in time and space (and, sometimes, even between dimensions), ending up in strange situations that cannot be solved immediately.
It must not surprise you that Island on the Sea Of Time was not the first novel that deals with this kind of situation. Maybe, the first novel to make use of time travel as a starting point of great changes taking place in the past might be A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain. After a brief introduction of the narrator's visit to a certain castle, a man born in Hartford (Connecticut) called Hank Morgan meets the narrator and tells him his story: after suffering an attack while trying to stop a fight between two subordinates in the factory he works at, Hank woke up in the 6th century, in the mythological King Arthur's England. Arrested and condemned to death by burning, Hank only gets saved after he makes Arthur and the rest of his court (including Merlin) that a solar eclipse was actually him using his powers to block the sun. This "miracle" does not only free him, but makes Arthur decide to turn him into one of his main councilors. Hank, using his industrial knowledge, manages to make gunpowder (which he uses to reduce Merlin's influence in Camelot) and later begins an industrialization program, creating schools to teach children modern ideas, and factories that give work to the people and produce modern tools and weapons. His efforts (including a successful attempt to stop slavery, after Arthur sees first hand the reality of this institution), however, end up being in vain, because, during a period in which Hank and his wife Alisande are out of the country, Arthur discovers his wife Guinevere's infidelity with Lancelot, who rises in arms against Arthur: the latter dies at the hands of Sir Mordred, and the Church forces everyone to destroy any trace of the advances produced by Hank. Finally, Hank is gravely injured after a fight against an enormous knight army, and Merlin spells him to sleep for 1300 years, just enough to wake up, tell his story, and finally die with his wife's name on his lips.
Another famous novel of this kind is Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp, in which an American archaeologist called Martin Padway is transported back in time from 1938 to 535, appearing in Rome at the time Italiy is being controlled by the Ostrogodes, some time before it becomes invaded by the Eastern Roman Empire. However, Padway manages to introduce several technological improvements and political ideas that allow him to strengthen the Italo-Gothic Kingdom and reject the attacks from the Byzantines first, and later from the Lombards in the north, beginning to plan for later developments (such as the Discovery of America) to prevent the Darkness from falling.
We also have the novel series Sixteen Thirty-Two (1632), which begins with an Event that takes Grantville a (fictitious) West Virginia village to the center of Germany in the aforementioned year, right in the middle of the Thirty Years' War. Conscious of the great technological imbalance they are introducing, the townspeople decide to follow Mike Stearns' suggestions: to begin the American Revolution a hundred and fifty years ahead of schedule. Soon, Grantville becomes the neuralgic center of a new nation, thanks to the support of Swedish king Gustav Adolf II. The book is very well written, showing how all the advances introduced by the people of Grantville have their advantages (such as working heavy-than-air planes in 1634) and inconvenients, these being caused particularly as Grantville's schoolbooks and the inventions brought to the past begin to spread between Grantville's allies and enemies.
But, beware, that this is not only about appearing in historical, ancient periods: AlternateHistory.com, the main webpage where alternative history writers meet, has a great number of ISOT stories where real people or nations appear in the middle of the story in books or videogames, or even creating what is called a crossover (basically, fictitious characters of two different "worlds" directly interacting). I am currently helping to write an ISOT in which the United States, after voting for Obama for a second time, suddenly appears in the world of George Orwell's novel 1984, and becomes involved in the hard task of freeing the entire world from the tyranny of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. Another story that is currently gaining much interest is A Connecticut Yankee in King Robert's Court, in which two people from the beginning of the 21st century suddenly become two characters in the A Song of Ice and Fire books, which are Edmure Tully (Catelyn Tully-Stark's young brother) and Myranda Royce (a young noblewoman that lives in the Vale of Arryn).
I hope that you have liked this, and that it will incite you to read more about alternative history.
I hope to see you next week!
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