Bring the Jubilee

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A what-if and when-if classic

Bring the Jubilee is one of those modern works declared a classic within certain genres but, despite repeated reprinting, largely forgotten by the general reading public. Which is ironically appropriate in this case perhaps, as Ward Moore's novel has to do with changing history. Did someone go back in time to remove copies of Bring the Jubilee from book stores?

This book deserves an readership at least as wide as that of other classics of the early 1950s, a fertile period in science fiction's Golden Age.

Part of the problem may be confusion over which genre or subgenre Bring the Jubilee belongs in. It's been called a classic in the science fiction field mainly because it involves time travel. This is teased at the very beginning of the novel with the line: "Although I am writing this in the year 1877, I was not born until 1921."

But time travel occurs only once in Bring the Jubilee—about three-quarters of the way in. Narrator Hodge Backmaker (there's a multiply meaningful name for you) is sent from 1952 to witness the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863.

Alternatively...

Most of the narrative is Hodge recalling the time before he made that fateful trip—his life, his education, his work and his loves in the "Twenty-Six States" of America that existed since the South won the Civil War. This of course is what gives Bring the Jubilee its reputation as a work of alternative history. Others have named it a tale of parallel worlds.

After Hodge's trip back in time, the war and postwar period he encounters is detailed through his eyes. As he inadvertently changes the war's outcome to match the history we are familiar with, this part of the novel comes across as straight historical fiction.

It's all worked out very carefully. Moore writes popularly and thoughtfully from Hodge's down-to-earth perspective without any scientific gobbledygook to explain how the time travel is accomplished or any philosophical maneuvering to get around time paradoxes. Hodge is not one of those talky, technology-obsessed heroes of other science fiction classics of its time. (See Isaac Asimov's novel The End of Eternity, which came out two years later, for those kinds of science fiction characters in an intricately related adventure through time.)

And he's not one of those scifi protagonists who finds miraculous escape from his difficulties by calling up near-occult powers of scientific knowledge. Rather he's stuck in the disaster of his own making and has to live with the consequences.

It all hinges on this

I'm not convinced the fate of the world and millions of people could be so radically changed by the relatively rather small cause that it was in Bring the Jubilee. You could claim the later-developed chaos theory or so-called butterfly effect as justification for this occurrence. (See Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder", published the previous year, for the most famous story based on this idea.) I still don't think it's credible in this case though.

But my skepticism is beside the point. The hinging of the plot on this particular device is necessary to develop a story focused not so much on science and technology but on racism, love, politics—these and more issues of the kind any literature deals with.

The title by the way comes from "Marching Through Georgia", a real song celebrating the Union's victory in the Civil War. Its chorus begins:

Hurrah! Hurrah! we bring the Jubilee!
Hurrah! Hurrah! the flag that makes you free!"

The "Jubilee" is a Biblical reference to the releasing of indentured servants, roughly parallel to the freeing of slaves.

— Eric

 

Critique • Quotes

See also:

Caves of Steel

Rogue Queen

Riverworld

Ender's Game

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