Accidental travel is aspeculative fictionplot device in which ordinary people accidentally find themselves outside of their normal place or time, often for no apparent reason, a particular type of the "fish-out-of-water" plot. In Russianfandom, the trope is known under the termpopadantsy, plural form forpopadanets, female:popadanka,[1] a person who accidentally finds himself elsewhere/elsewhen.[a] The Russian term bears ironical flavor, becausepopadantsy have become a widespread cliche in Russianpulp science fiction.[2] Russian critic Boris Nevsky traces this plot device to at leastGulliver's Travels (18th century).[2]
The accidentaltime travel trope is specifically known astime slip. A classical example of time slip isMark Twain'sA Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), which had considerable influence on later writers.[3]
Other kinds of accidental travel includespace travel (e.g., through accidentalwormholes, portals (portal fantasy,isekai) or other spatial irregularities, or a catastrophic spatial event), travel to analternative universe, anRPG universe (litRPG), or into analternative history.[2]
An early example of catastrophic space travel isHector Servadac (1877) by Jules Verne, where a piece of the Earth with severalEarthlings is ripped off by a comet. InLes Robinsons du cosmos (The Robinsons of the Cosmos [ru]) (1955) byFrancis Carsac, pieces of France and the US with plenty of population are ripped off and planted on an alien planet during a collision of two galaxies.
In 1912Edgar Rice Burroughs inventedJohn Carter of Mars, who mysteriously lands on Mars from a sacred cave where he was hiding from the Apaches.
Still another way to land somewhere is to beabducted or invited by aliens to live in an advanced star-faring civilization. Common cliches include becoming a slave, or a warrior, or a dying person getting a second chance, with the subsequent social advance.[citation needed]
A particular kind of effortless accidental travel is finding oneself in some other place or time occupying someone's else mind, viaidentity transfer,body swap (mind swap) or mind/body sharing.[2] Carsac wrote the story with the trick of this type as well: inTerre en fuite (1960) a scientist hit by lightning suddenly becomes a genius and before his death he reveals that his mind melded with the mind of a scientist from far future. However most of the novel is the description of the future of the Earth expecting the Sun to turnsupernova. Three years earlierJohn Dickson Carr used this version of the device in the detective genre in hisFire, Burn!, which transports a 1950s detective's consciousness to the early days of the Metropolitan Police in 1829.
In Japanese fiction, the genre of accidental transport into aparallel universe orfantasy world is known asisekai.[4][5]
Around the break of the millenniumpopadanstvo gained an immense popularity inRussian science fiction and fantasy. Responding to the demand, the supply of the novels of this type skyrocketed, with an inevitable drop of the overall quality and degeneration of the inventiveness of the writers into a series of clichés.[1][6]
A significant number ofpopadanstvo occur at a key moment in the Russian past. Armed with modern knowledge, they turn the tide to the glory of the Motherland, i.e., apopadanets becomes aprogressor, creating an alternative history.[7] It was suggested that this phenomenon of Russian science fiction is characterized by two motivations: "Mary Sue"-type drive to self-fulfillment and patriotic nostalgy over the times ofSovietsuperpower (Communist nostalgia).[8][9] Russian political scientistBoris Vishnevskiy considers the phenomenon ofpopadanstvo to be the manifestation of post-Soviet Russianrevanchism, which, he thinks, has become the cornerstone of Russian politics underVladimir Putin.[10]
In 2024Eliot Borenstein, published a bookUnstuck in Time: On the Post-Soviet Uncanny aboutSoviet nostalgia in Russian literary fiction. Chapters 1 and 2 are devoted topopadantsy who want to change the future. He calls these "Time Crashers". (Cornell University Press offers a free e-book online).[11]
A typical Russian popadanets is one of the three types: aneveryman, a commando, or areenactor, with all undergoing a social lift after travel.[12][6]
While a Russian popadanets used to be a male, since 2000s a flood of pulp fiction emerged featuring femalepopadanka hero, typically in the form ofromance fiction, where popadanka becomes a mighty sorceress or becomes a bride of a mighty man: a king, a sorcerer, an elf, a vampire, etc., often via an "academy of magic". The livelib.ru website featured 360 books about females landed in a magical world published in 2016, 422 in 2017, and 433 in 2018.[12]
In 2016Sergey Lukyanenko wrote a parody short story,Vitya Solnyshkin and Iosif StalinВитя Солнышкин и Иосиф Сталин.Young pioneer Vitya chances to meetJoseph Stalin and explains that he is in fact from the future. Stalin is not at all surprised: for years now time travelers swarm to advise Stalin, but comrade Stalin does not rush to follow their advice: he is quite sure thatAdolf Hitler andFranklin Roosevelt have similar "advisors" as well, and with all these conflicting advices, the history stays in old tracks.[13]
A considerable subgenre ofpopadantsy was spawned by theMMORPGEVE Online, about persons who find themselves in the interstellar world of EVE Online, often captured byspace pirates-slave traders. Most of the stories of this kind are of low literary quality, not to say that the idea of "accidental travel" does not fit well into the philosophy ofEVE Online. Still, some people may find these stories quite entertaining.[14]
"Isekai" means (roughly) parallel world, and has come to denote the sub-genre of story in which a person from the real, mundane world finds him or herself in a radically different world; this parallel reality
both of those shows are what are called isekai, or "accidental travel" stories, in which the protagonist is transported to a fantastical otherworld
