Bring the Jubilee
First edition, 1953
Bring the Jubilee (1953) is Ward Moore's alternate history novel and one of the foundational works of the genre. Set in an America where the Confederacy won the Civil War, the novel follows Hodge Backmaker, a historian who becomes stranded in our own timeline after accidentally altering the outcome of the Battle of Gettysburg. Cited as a direct influence on Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, Moore's novel preceded it by nearly a decade.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth-backed boards. New York: Farrar, Straus & Young, 1953. Pringle, Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (11). #11346.
Fine in near fine dust jacket with some rubbing along spine folds and minor wear.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth-backed boards. New York: Farrar, Straus & Young, 1953. Pringle, Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (11). #11346.
Fine in near fine dust jacket with some rubbing along spine folds and minor wear.
Additional Details
Bring the Jubilee is set in an America where the Confederacy won the Civil War, and Moore imagines the United States as a diminished, poverty-stricken collection of twenty-six northern states while the Confederate States have risen to global dominance. The narrator, Hodge Backmaker, is born into this world in 1921 and narrates his life from the perspective of 1877, a date whose significance only becomes clear at the end. In the alternate America Moore constructs, the North is not simply defeated, it has been completely stunted into a backwater of horse-drawn transport and economic stagnation while the South and its European allies flourish and shape the modern world. Hodge grows up in this environment, makes his way to New York City as a young man, falls in with a nationalist underground called the Grand Army, and eventually finds his way to Haggershaven, a rural Pennsylvania cooperative of scholars and researchers where he spends the better part of two decades as a historian specializing in the war.
The novel's first two-thirds read as a melancholy picaresque, Hodge drifting through a world he studies but cannot change, accumulating relationships and disappointments in roughly equal measure. It is only in the final section that the novel's true interest emerges. When Barbara Haggerwells perfects a time machine and Hodge uses it to witness the Battle of Gettysburg firsthand, he inadvertently intervenes in the fighting, causing the death of a Confederate officer whose presence at Little Round Top would have secured a Southern victory. Instead the Union wins. History reshapes itself around this intervention, and Hodge finds himself stranded in our timeline, with no means to get back to his own time. The world he came from has been presumably erased from existence. The man who once argued that the Confederate victory was historically inevitable, and that no individual action could have prevented its outcome, ends up disproving his own life's work in a single afternoon at Gettysburg.
Bring the Jubilee is cited as a direct influence on Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (1962), which similarly asks what it would mean if history had gone the other way. Moore's novel preceded it by nearly a decade and established much of the template Dick would later refine.
The novel's first two-thirds read as a melancholy picaresque, Hodge drifting through a world he studies but cannot change, accumulating relationships and disappointments in roughly equal measure. It is only in the final section that the novel's true interest emerges. When Barbara Haggerwells perfects a time machine and Hodge uses it to witness the Battle of Gettysburg firsthand, he inadvertently intervenes in the fighting, causing the death of a Confederate officer whose presence at Little Round Top would have secured a Southern victory. Instead the Union wins. History reshapes itself around this intervention, and Hodge finds himself stranded in our timeline, with no means to get back to his own time. The world he came from has been presumably erased from existence. The man who once argued that the Confederate victory was historically inevitable, and that no individual action could have prevented its outcome, ends up disproving his own life's work in a single afternoon at Gettysburg.
Bring the Jubilee is cited as a direct influence on Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (1962), which similarly asks what it would mean if history had gone the other way. Moore's novel preceded it by nearly a decade and established much of the template Dick would later refine.
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