Bring the Jubilee

Ward Moore

2 ideas

1. The historian who unmade Gettysburg

   In a 1950s where the South won the 'War of Southron Independence,' the historian Hodge Backmaker uses a time machine to travel to Gettysburg in 1863, planning only to observe. His presence near the Round Tops causes a Confederate force to misjudge the situation, and the officer leading it, an ancestor of the family whose estate would later house the time machine, is killed. The Confederates fail to take the high ground, the Union wins, and Hodge is stranded in a timeline that no longer contains his world, his machine or the people he loved.

2. A settled present rests on contingency

   Hodge's world largely treats Southern victory as settled history, though Hodge himself argues for the fortuitousness of events and disputes the point with Polk. The novel then shows that this order depended on a single chance encounter at Gettysburg, undercutting any reading of that outcome as inevitable.

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