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A review by skyring
Bring the Jubilee by Ward Moore
4.0
I read this years ago, when I devoured the whole corpus of SF. I enjoyed it then, and when I picked it up again after decades on the shelf, I was surge I'd like it even more.
I now know a great deal more about America and I've been to Gettysburg. I'm not entirely sure that possessing Little Round Top would have swung the whole war, but it would certainly have changed the entire tone of the battle if Lee had secured it on the first day.
But we don't get there for a long while. Moore takes his time, setting the scene, filling in the history of the defeated North and giving us tantalising glimpses of affairs in the wider world. It's a hard life in what's left of the USA, and the penniless protagonist is lucky to find shelter and employment with an oddbod bookseller.
Drawn into shadowy affairs, things turn sticky, and has he really escaped to a better place when he falls in with some arcadian academics? There's sex and spice, history and conflict before the fateful trip into the past, to stand at a turning point in history.
I love time travel stories. Apart from the sense of anachronism - "Good morrow, milord, can'st inform me whereabouts of a batterymonger?" - there are all the delightful possibilities and paradoxes. What happens if you accidentally - or deliberately - kill your own ancestor? If you can change the past, will you also change the future, or is the universe self-repairing?
Moore sketches in the outlines of this puzzling world that is at once past and future. The 1930s as they never were. But might have been. And he gives us enough details to illustrate how odd it could have been. If the USA had not been a prosperous and inventive hub of industry during the latter Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, what technologies might have gone undiscovered? No Henry Ford to bring motoring to the masses.
No Wright Brothers to bring us flight. No Edison, no Bell to harness electricity.
I'm reminded of Stephen King's recent expedition into time travel, where we find out what ramifications JFK had on the world. A single point in time where history teeters. A man in a Dallas warehouse, another in a peach orchard. Ordinary people in ordinary places, and yet the world forks.
This is one of the classics of science fiction and time travel. It is - paradoxically - timeless.
I now know a great deal more about America and I've been to Gettysburg. I'm not entirely sure that possessing Little Round Top would have swung the whole war, but it would certainly have changed the entire tone of the battle if Lee had secured it on the first day.
But we don't get there for a long while. Moore takes his time, setting the scene, filling in the history of the defeated North and giving us tantalising glimpses of affairs in the wider world. It's a hard life in what's left of the USA, and the penniless protagonist is lucky to find shelter and employment with an oddbod bookseller.
Drawn into shadowy affairs, things turn sticky, and has he really escaped to a better place when he falls in with some arcadian academics? There's sex and spice, history and conflict before the fateful trip into the past, to stand at a turning point in history.
I love time travel stories. Apart from the sense of anachronism - "Good morrow, milord, can'st inform me whereabouts of a batterymonger?" - there are all the delightful possibilities and paradoxes. What happens if you accidentally - or deliberately - kill your own ancestor? If you can change the past, will you also change the future, or is the universe self-repairing?
Moore sketches in the outlines of this puzzling world that is at once past and future. The 1930s as they never were. But might have been. And he gives us enough details to illustrate how odd it could have been. If the USA had not been a prosperous and inventive hub of industry during the latter Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, what technologies might have gone undiscovered? No Henry Ford to bring motoring to the masses.
No Wright Brothers to bring us flight. No Edison, no Bell to harness electricity.
I'm reminded of Stephen King's recent expedition into time travel, where we find out what ramifications JFK had on the world. A single point in time where history teeters. A man in a Dallas warehouse, another in a peach orchard. Ordinary people in ordinary places, and yet the world forks.
This is one of the classics of science fiction and time travel. It is - paradoxically - timeless.