Take A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, run it through a LitRPG filter, and you’ve basically got Trash Alchemist. That’s the pitch, and it’s a good one. The execution doesn’t hold up its end.
I finished Book 1 of the Trash Alchemist Series a few days ago and landed on three stars on Goodreads, which — compared against the other LitRPG I’ve worked through lately — is probably me being generous.
The premise is the best thing going for it: a modern guy dropped into a fantasy world where magic runs the show, applying actual chemistry and physics to a setting that’s never had to think that way before. That’s the appeal of the Connecticut Yankee structure in general — knowledge as the disruptive weapon instead of a sword — and when the book leans into it, it works. Watching someone route around a broken magic system with periodic-table logic instead of a spell list is a genuinely fun hook, and if you’re the kind of reader who likes seeing real-world science smuggled into a fantasy setting, that part delivers.
The problem is everything holding that premise together.
The book reads like it was assembled from paragraphs written at different times and stapled together after the fact, and it shows. The clearest example: the protagonist’s assistant gets kidnapped. Then he’s not kidnapped. Then he’s been captured by pirates. Then our hero is talking to him again like nothing happened. Then it turns out the hero had to go save his life at some point in there. None of it tracks as a sequence — it reads like contradictory drafts of the same subplot that never got reconciled before publication. Layer onto that a typo count that’s high enough to notice, and the whole thing feels like it shipped a draft too early.
The bigger issue, for a LitRPG specifically, is the magic system. The setting is built entirely around mana and spellcasting — that’s supposedly the foundation the whole society runs on — but the actual use of spells in the book is thin, almost incidental. Meanwhile non-magic approaches (our alchemist’s science-over-sorcery angle) are consistently stronger and more useful than the system the world claims to be built on. That’s not a minor inconsistency. If your entire civilization is structured around magic, and magic keeps losing to a guy applying high school chemistry, the world doesn’t hold together the way it needs to. It’s the kind of gap that a tighter developmental edit should have caught, because it undercuts the very premise the book is selling.
I want to be clear that this isn’t a bad-premise problem. It’s a needed-another-pass problem. The core idea — modern scientific knowledge as an isekai power fantasy, applied by someone who actually understands chemistry and physics instead of just knowing “modern stuff” in the abstract — is one of the more interesting takes on the genre I’ve come across. Mark of the Fool proves how much a strong magic-system foundation can carry a LitRPG even when the protagonist starts from nothing; Trash Alchemist has the inverse problem, a protagonist with a strong toolkit dropped into a magic system that doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. And if you want to see what LitRPG looks like when the pacing and internal logic actually get the polish this book is missing, Beware of Chicken is the standard I’d point you toward instead.
Three stars is fair for a book with a real idea at its center and a plot that can’t keep its own subplots straight. If a proper editing pass ever tightens the continuity and the magic-versus-science balance gets some internal logic, there’s a genuinely good series underneath this. As it stands, I’d recommend it only to readers specifically chasing the Connecticut-Yankee-in-a-fantasy-world angle who can tolerate some rough plotting to get there. Everyone else has better LitRPG waiting on the shelf.