Bring the Jubilee
Critique • Quotes
First editionFirst publication
Novella version in 1952 in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
First book publication
1953
Literature form
Novel
Genres
Science fiction, alternative history
Writing language
English
Author's country
United States
Length
Approx. 80,000 words
Notable lines
Although I am writing this in the year 1877, I was not born until 1921. Neither the dates nor the tenses are error—let me explain:
First lines
I have often noticed that men not strikingly brilliant themselves attribute masculine minds to intelligent women on the consoling assumption that feminine minds are normally inferior.
One of the most pernicious of folk-sayings is, 'I cannot believe my eyes!' Why particularly should you believe your eyes? You were given eyes to see with, not to believe with. Believe your mind, your intuition, your reason, your emotion if you like - but not your eyes unaided by any of these interpreters. Your eyes can see the mirage, the hallucination, as easily as the actual scenery.
"Specialization, the division of labor, is certainly not cheap in anything but dollars and cents. And it's unquestionably wasteful in terms of equality."
I also began to understand the central mystery of historical theory. When and what and how and where, but the when is the least. Not chronology but relationship is what history deals in. The element of time, so vital at first glance, assumes a constantly more subordinate character. That the past is past becomes ever less important. Except for perspective it might as well be the present or the future or, if you can conceive it, a parallel time. I was not investigating a petrification but a fluid. Were it possible to know fully the what and how and where one might learn the why, and assuredly if one grasped the why he could place the when at will.
"Ay, we are alike, you and I. The books, always the books. And for themselves, not to become rich or famous like sensible people. Are we not foolish? But it is a pleasant folly and a sometimes blameless vice."
We are too impressed with the pattern revealed to us—or which we think has been revealed to us—to remember that for the participants history is a haphazard affair, apparently aimless, produced by human beings whose concern is essentially with the trivial and irrelevant. The historian is always conscious of destiny. The participant rarely—or mistakenly.
The Confederates could have occupied this position but they failed to do so. It was an error with monstrous consequences.
Last lines
Critique • Quotes
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