A cross between a modern retelling of Mark Twain's tale and the Sword in the Stone, but where Twain's protagonist runs afoul of the wizard Merlin, Jeff Warren becomes Merlin himself, not through magic or the occult, but with basic science and the memory of a few scouting projects. Jeff Warren is an American college student visiting a friend in an English research lab. Watching them run an experiment, he takes a small step back, away from the machine that takes him 1500 years into the past. Stranded there, with no hope pf getting home, Jeff must first learn how to survive in a world with no modern technology, where he has no current skills, and even the English language he speaks won't exist for a millenia. The village takes him in and he finds friendship and even love. To repay them for their kindness, Jeff begins to use what he can remember from science classes to "invent" some things, prompting the villagers to call him Wizard. But even his inventiveness may not be enough when armed Irish raiders come to town. Even worse when an ambitious Saxon king learns of the existence of his young friend Arthur.