Bring the Jubilee

Ward Moore

1952

The South had won its independence in the War of Southron Independence in the 1860s and since then had gone from strength to strength, to the point where everything to the south of Virginia was under their domination. Elsewhere, great empires dominate the rest of the planet and by the 1930s great cities are dominated by massive skyscrapers of fourteen stories and airships travel the skies.

But Hodge Backmoor, born in the 1920s, and his family don't share this wealth for they live in the defeated North that had been forced to beggar itself in paying reparations to the victorious CSA. The once proud Union is virtually a pensioner of the rest of the world. Soldiers of the Great Powers enforce the justice of their masters in the back streets of the Union and its citizens are forced to indenture themselves to the corporations in order to survive.

Poor, but too proud to indenture themselves into a life of virtual slavery, Hodge's parents turn their hands to anything that might bring in the dollars necessary to survive. Hodge is a dreamer, not sharing his father's smithing abilities, nor yet his mother's abilities on the loom or in the garden. All he is fit for is reading, a vastly underrated ability in this North!

Unable to stand the conditions in his rural community, Hodge decides to set out for New York, a vast metropolis of a million souls, the largest city in the Union. Once there, though, he's almost immediately mugged and his worldly wealth stolen.

Through an act of apparent charity, he is introduced to Mr Tyss, a printer, who allows Hodge to indulge his desire to read. As Hodge uncovers the depths of Tyss' involvement in the Grand Army, a band of desperardos claiming to fight for the glory of the fallen North, he finds himself in a difficult and dangerous position!

Finally forced to leave Tyss, Hodge finds his way to the Haggershaven where he is allowed to develop his interest in history - particularly the War of Southron Independence. But doubts about his sources make him easy prey for a physics colleague when she suggests he try out her newly developed time machine.

Who could resist such a suggestion: to go back and see the action first hand? Hodge barely hesitates and soon finds himself in 1863, in time to oversee the battle of Gettysburg. He has promised not to interfere, but he wasn't there originally and the Butterfly's wings stir up a storm that swept away Hodge's past.

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This is one of only four Science fiction books written by Ward and has a warranted reputation as a classic in the field of Alternate History. There is no attempt to make this civilisation anything like the one that the author has come from and the people in that world are not just like their counterparts in this history.

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This is part of the Science Fiction Masterworks series.

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