Customer Reviews

Bring the Jubilee (Classic Science Fiction)

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Ever since the American Civil War ended in victory for the South, the Northern states have been a poor, backward region, largely populated by impecunious yokels. Hodge Backmaker is a country boy with less practical skills than his fellows; someone more at home with books than the outdoor, workaday environment.

In "Bring the Jubilee" Backmaker recounts his life, describing his move from Wappinger Falls to a squalid New York, where he works in a book shop for a few years. After some uncomfortable dealings with an underground army he then becomes involved with the intellectual thinktank at Haggershaven, where his fascination for history eventually leads to academic prestige.

Ward Moore has written an interesting scenario here. Along with the rewrite of American history, passing references are made to men like Carl Jung and Picasso, their destinies skewed by the differences that make alternate worlds possible. While taking part in the first experiments in time travel, Hodge Backmaker will unwittingly change their lives when he makes a field trip to Gettysburg in 1863...

There's no doubt that alternate histories are a fascinating subject for writers to tackle. So many of them have fun changing history, usually making our world look like the better one. Maybe it helps us forget the reality of our own problems; taking solace in the fact that there's always someone worse off than ourselves. A number of people have compared "Bring the Jubilee" with "Pavane", the praise for both books being fairly equal. It's hard to say which is better, since they deal with two different periods of history. Like most novels, they both have their share of romance, which almost seems a requirement for the protagonist. Nevertheless, they both come highly recommended.

Written decades before Harry Turtledove's Civil War alternate history novels, Ward Moore's 'Bring the Jubilee' is the story of an America divided. In 1863, the Union loss at Gettysburg paved the way for southern independence and left the United States a backward, third world country. The novel's protaganist, Hodge, leaves his rural home for what he hopes will be a better life in New York City and eventually finds himself in a community of scholars where his final destiny awaits him. The characters, situations and philosiphies of 'Jubilee' remind the reader of another great Science Fiction author, Robert Heinlein. Moore has the same wonderful ability to convey the complex ideas of life and society that make Heinlein's novels so compelling. Also wonderful is Moore's explanations of temporal theory and his understanding and presentation of the Battle of Gettysburg. If you enjoy alternate history then 'Bring the Jubilee' will not disappoint.

The summary says it all. The first 2/3 of the book are terribly depressing and relatively lacking in action. The last third is pretty good, though not good enough for me to keep the book - I got rid of it because I know I'll never force myself to read THAT again. The author simply spends too much time setting the background. He could easily have pared it down to short story or novella length and had it appear in a collection of alternate history stories

Ward Moore's "Bring the Jubilee" has become a time-honored classic. Like Arthur Miller's "A Canticle for Leibowitz," it is one of the "great books" not only of science fiction but of historical fiction in general. Both novels, I imagine, have become required reading for students of history.

The premise of "Bring the Jubilee" seems absurd: in the 1920's of an alternate universe, the U.S. is a backwater dominated by the Confederate States, which have become a superpower. But the premise is entirely logical when seen as metaphor: the Confederacy's victory in the "War of Southron Independence" has blighted world history and trapped the characters of the novel in a world gone wrong.

Ward Moore compellingly creates that most difficult of characters, the "passive hero." Hodgins Backmaker, born on a poor farm in downstate New York, is a lovable, dreamy bumpkin whose every effort is ineffectual, every wish and dream frustrated by events or by his own bumbling. Resolving philosophically that inaction is the best policy, he becomes a scholar of American history.

A fierce femme fatale, genius of the time machine, sends Hodgins back to witness in person the battle of Gettysburg. Faced with decision at a crucial moment, Hodgins discovers, too late, that even inaction is action. By his sheer presence he changes the course of events and is stranded in our timeline.

Ward Moore thus works a supremely ironic twist on the "great man" theory of history: an ordinary, even a mediocre person can affect history simply by being in the right place at the wrong time.

"Bring the Jubilee" would have been merely a curiosity were it not for Ward Moore's talent in bringing his characters to life. Not only does he paint in many adroit, small strokes the curious culture of this alternate universe, he also communicates his characters' emotions with delicate craftmanship. Hodgins Backmaker is conceivably among the few characters in literature that can be considered a "real" person.

Canadians might take a lesson from "Bring the Jubilee," not only Quebec sovreigntists but their opponents, as well as anti-federalist English in all provinces.

This is an ambitious, often thought-provoking, but ultimately disappointing attempt to envision what the United States--and the world--would have been like had the Confederacy won our Civil War. It's not done as badly as Turtledove's "Guns of the South," which trivializes the whole conflict, because this author neither invents a silly device by which the South triumphs, nor minimizes the consequences of a Southern victory. No, Moore is dead serious about the consequences to history of a Union loss; perhaps he even goes overboard, because the 20th century he writes about is a lot like a Dickensian 19th, dark and backwards, with horsedrawn wagons, widespread illiteracy and ignorance, indentured servants, voteless women, aliens who cannot be naturalized. Even the advance of science has been halted--the invention of the airplane apparently was not possible in a world without a triumphant Union; nor are there motorcars or even the effective harnessing of electricity. And maybe that's the chief problem with Ward's book: he tries to tell too big a story. He shares one failing with Turtledove: his tale is populated with characters who remain wooden, who never come to life or bring the story to life, despite his clearly earnest efforts. The whole story could have been confined to what I believe is Moore's penultimate chapter, in which the narrator, a historian turned time traveler, hops into a time machine to observe Gettysburg firsthand. What results is tightly written, exciting, emotionally involving, gripping--everything the rest of this book is not. "What if the South had won the Civil War?" continues to be a provocative subject, and I still hope to find it rendered successfully in a book I've yet to read; "Bring the Jubilee" is not that book.

Pleasantly, this book has aged well. Even after fifty years it still is vital and reads well. What sets it apart is that it was written so long ago and therefore was far ahead of others of it's time. This is no "War of the Worlds" or "John Carter of Mars". This is a tale with a warning. What also sets it aside is that it is set in an alternate time, from which the "mistake" sets things back on our timeline.

Hodge Backmaker is from Wappinger Falls, New York, where his family our poor dirt farmers, but free men. The North is still reeling from loosing the Civil War and there is no hope that the economy will turn around anytime soon. So Hodge makes his way to New York City where he ends up spending six years working for a printer. By happenstance (it's a little forced) he ends up on an intellectual commune (think Chattequa Society meets Kibbutz). There he spends his time studying the last year of 'his' civil war where the south routed the north at Gettysburg.

There is a genius living at the commune who Hodge has had an affair with. She builds a working time machine and Hodge goes back to see the climactic battle that he has written so much about. Read the book to find out what happens. It's definitely one of those time paradoxes.

Zeb Kantrowitz

I approached "Bring the Jubilee" as one of the classic works of sf in general and alternate history in particular. I came away with a vague sense of disappointment. Perhaps the defects register with me more because I read the book length version first, and only later found the original (and far superior) novelette. This may have brought the difference in quality into sharp relief.


The story is set in an alternate world where the South won the civil war. As a result, the defeated North suffered a hyperinflation similar to 1920s Germany, which aborted the industrial expansion and scientific progress of the later 19th Century. Three generations later, the "rump" United States is a backward, rural country very much akin to William Faulkner's South, whose people are similarly fixated on "The War" which ruined everything for them. In this world the North, not the South, is where the lynchings are (negroes have been scapegoated as the cause of the war), where the poor folks live by share cropping or indentured labour, and the Grand Army (read "KKK") engages in terror tactics. Its women still don't vote. The Confederacy, OTOH, is booming, prosperous and has expanded over the Americas into a vast Empire, whose non-whites are humanely treated but denied full citizenship.


Well, fair enough, even if debatable, as far as the United States is concerned. But Moore doesn't leave it there. The United States' backwardness has somehow "infected" the whole world. The telephone was never invented (they use morse code telegraphy instead) and heavier than air flight is still a dream. The dirigible balloon is the latest thing. Such cars as exist are steam-powered, and of limited value due to the lack of roads. Electricity has never been harnessed, though the biggest cities have gas lighting. This could do with explanation. Men like Bell and Edison were already well into their teens in 1863, and even if they couldn't pursue their careers in the ruined US, could they not have done so in Canada or elsewhere? And even if they did not, could the same or similar inventions not have been made in Britain, or Germany or even France, all of which made important contributions to science and technology in this period? Germany, in particular, turned out scientists and technologists by the busload, despite having a social system in which Jefferson Davis would have looked like a dangerous radical. 19C America was no doubt a land of opportunity, but the only one? If this Limey may be so bold, that is surely carrying American exceptionalism a bit too far.


Thus the novelette. Despite the grumbles above, it made an interesting yarn and would probably merit four stars if not five. But the book is another matter. It has been "padded" out to novel length and the padding shows. It is clumsily done in a manner sometimes inconsistent with the original material. Perhaps the most glaring example is the Holocaust. In this world, Germany is booming and powerful, with none of the traumas of our 20C which brought Hitler to power, yet the Holocaust still happens (and still in Germany, not the more probable Tsarist Russia), and indeed contrives to happen a generation earlier, when Hitler, if born at all, would be still an adolescent. This might be ok if some rationale for it were offered, but we get none - just the bald statement, totally without explanation. The problem is compounded by our being told, some chapters earlier, that the Confederacy welcomes immigrants. Why did the Jews not flee there? Perhaps the welcome did not extend to Jewish immigrants, but again we aren't told so, and it is not obvious that the country which had Judah P Benjamin in its Cabinet would take such an attitude.

To crown it all, mention is made of a parallel genocide of Chinese and Japanese Americans, of whom apparently only a handful survive. Yet California, where the vast majority of them lived, is in the Confederacy, where such things allegedly didn't happen.


Moore's problem, I suspect, lay in trying a bit too hard to make the alternate world unmistakably worse than ours, as indeed, in many ways it is. But if its defects were offset by not having the Holocaust, then our world's superiority would be far less clear cut. Moore, I think, avoided this at the expense of consistency and credibility.


One final complaint. Apart from its own defects, this new material is added at the expense of useful parts of the novelette, which included helpful information about the growth both of the CSA and its rival, the German Union, and about the recent Emperors' War. In the book, these omissions make the history harder to follow.


Sorry to be so negative about what is, overall, a fair novel, but that's the problem. It is only good when with a bit more work it could have been great. My advice would be to get the novelette (in "The Fantastic Civil War" and maybe elsewhere) and go on to the novel if you're a completist.

The author's vision of what the world might have been like if the South had won the war is fascinating. The characters are believable and the last part of the book is impossible to put down. This book was hard to find but the effort was worth it. Readers who like this book might also like Fatherland, which takes place in Germany in 1964 in a world in which the Nazis won WWII.

This is an alternate history of a U.S. where the South won the Civil War and the North is its vassal/client-state--which results in the industrial revolution never occurring. Set in the 1930s-50s, the story follows a young boy growing up in rural Pennsylvania who moves to New York (which is still "the big city") where he does a little growing up. Unfortunately, too much time is spent in his head, and not enough detailing the alternate world around him. He becomes a autodidact Civil War scholar and eventually is accepted in a sort of academic commune. Moore concentrates a bit too much on showing how things might have been, and pounding the fickleness of history into the reader's head, at the expense of a decent story. It's somewhat interesting to see how the hero develops, but he's kind of frustrating character, and in the end you know what he's going to do. The book is OK, but not as special as it's made out to be.

The book is less about an alternate history of the South than a very interesting narrative of personal development and the consequences of one's actions.

The book focuses on topics such as fate and free will. Throughout the narrative, the protagonist has conflict about whether to take action in the face of adversity. The narrative makes clear through different scenes that significant (life changing) consequences can result from both inactions and actions. Some readers may become lost or confused by the narrative, impatient with the pace of the events, but the story is well woven to provide a multitude of layers and themes. Patient readers will appreciate the story for what it is.

The end of the story is somewhat tragic, but the causality of the events are orchestrated into an inevitable outcome due to the very nature of the protagonist. This is a very clever element of the narrative when considering that the profession of the protagonist is a historian.

Would recommend.