Bring the Jubilee
Ratings8
Average rating3
The first alt history book? Perhaps. Proto-steampunk? Fo' sho'.
Ward Moore relates a tale of an alternative reality 1950s USA, where, 90 years ago, the Union lost the Civil War and now a divided North America struggles to get by. The industrialized North has decayed into a decrepit, poverty-stricken smogfest (hence the steampunk), while the South/CSA is put-putting along with slavery and agricultural stuff. Protagonist is a bookish history student who wins a scholarship to study at a fancy Dead Poets Society-esque college in rural Pennsylvania. There, he hits it off with a lady physicist, who... has invented a time travel machine! Hilarity ensues. Well, not really.
This book is a work of American literature primarily devoted to the study of individual characters and their interaction; but it's also a work of science fiction set in a very different USA in which the Confederacy won the War of Southron Independence (as the people in that world call it).
There are many novels that emphasize character in the way that this one does, but science fiction is usually a form of literature that emphasizes ideas and story more than character. The risk in this novel is that it may fail to satisfy either readers of science fiction (who may be bored by the emphasis on character at the expense of story) or readers of more traditional literature (who may be alienated by the alternative world).
I'm primarily a reader of science fiction, so I find the story somewhat slow and not very eventful for most of its length. However, by compensation, the quality of writing is unusually high, and the characters have unpredictable minds of their own, like real people. The book is not hard to read, and it makes a powerful impression on me, because the alternative world and the various predicaments of the main protagonist (Hodgins Backmaker) are so vividly and capably described.
Although I'm impressed, I don't think I can give it an impressive rating. Firstly because I prefer novels to have a happy ending, which this one lacks; and secondly because I can't really believe in Moore's alternative world, however plausibly he brings it to life.
I can believe that a small change in history could enable the Confederacy to win the Battle of Gettysburg. What I cannot believe is that it would then win a military victory over the USA so complete that it would be able to demand and extract war reparations, at such a cost that the USA would be sunk in miserable ruin for the next century.
In the Civil War, as it's mostly called in our world, the USA had great advantages over the CSA in almost every way. The loss of one battle, or even a series of battles, wouldn't deprive it of those advantages or seriously damage its ability to continue the war. The CSA could hope that the USA would grow sick of war and agree to make peace (which I think came close to happening at times); but it couldn't hope to conquer the USA, and indeed never aspired to do so.
Thus, although this book is written in the form of science fiction, I can accept it only as fantasy: an imaginary world that never could have been. I think that's a better way to look at it, because one doesn't have to believe in fantasy.
I remain puzzled at Moore's motivation for creating this imaginary world, and writing about it with such care. Maybe he just thought it would make a good setting for the sort of characters he wanted to write about. It's certainly not a Confederate fantasy; it's told entirely from the US point of view, and Hodgins Backmaker is a patriot, despite the miserable state of his country.