Publications: Reviews

BRING THE JUBILEE by Ward Moore

Gollancz 2001 194pp £6.99

Nearly fifty years after its first appearance, it is good to see Bring the Jubilee made available again, this time as Volume 42 of the rightly praised SF Masterworks Series.

Ward Moore’s masterpiece belongs up there with such other classics as Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), Sarban’s The Sound of His Horn (1952), and Len Deighton’s SS-GB (1978). In other words, they are all novels which have successfully created and explored alternate universes -- and ones in which a war was won by those we know as the losers.

Bring the Jubilee is set in the USA long after its defeat by the Confederate States. That United States is still an impoverished and resentful backwater country, one in which people yearn for a world that can never seem to be. That is, until certain "metaphysical" speculations amongst dreamers in a second-hand bookshop eventually leads to the very alteration and deflection of history itself. Or a history.

Wise, beautifully written and elegiac in tone, this is a book that belongs in any halfway-decent library of sf.

Copyright (c) 2001 John Howard