Bring the Jubilee

De: Ward Moore

Narrado por: Jim Seybert

Duración: 7 h y 38 m

Resumen del Editor

In the world of this novel, said to be an inspiration for Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, the Confederacy has triumphed and become an imperialist nation. What is left of the United States has been drained of its resources and is trapped in a depression. Hodge, a young man living in a village in rural New York with his parents, decides to head to the city to escape his otherwise inevitable future of poverty and indentured servitude.

But the specter of war between the Confederacy and the other great global power, the German Union, haunts the entire region, and a nationalist terrorist group has other plans for Hodge. Before long, he is swept up in the politics of the day and becomes involved with a beautiful physicist who is working on a machine intended to change his fate—and the fate of the world.

Long before Harry Turtledove's The Guns of the South, Bring the Jubilee was the first novel to pose the question "What if the South had won the Civil War?" A counterfactual classic, it was included in renowned science fiction editor David Pringle's list of the 100 Best Science Fiction Novels.

©1955 Ward Moore (P)2023 Tantor

Bring The Jubilee is my second favorite Ward Moore novel

SOME SPOILERS

Although I love this novel, it's not my favorite Ward Moore novel. That honor goes to Greener Than
You Think (1947). But let me point out some things I love about BTJ.

Like Hodge, I love history. BTJ succeeded in whisking me from one fictional present-day to another, and both of them seem very real, but especially the second one.

The events that take place in both contemporary times and space are meticulously documented by protagonist Hodge. I don't much like Hodge, and I guess that I'm not supposed to. The narrator in GTYT (Greener Than You Think, Moore's masterpiece) is even more difficult to like; in fact, Albert Weener is impossible to like but easy to despise.

The absence of humor in BTJ makes it a harder book to read, or enjoy, than GTYT, a book so packed with sardonic humor that I can only compare it to Joseph Heller's Catch-22. But Weener is no Yossarian. Hodge doesn't have a chance to rise to the level of those two characters.

I am only able to barely care about Hodge, the content of his character, and his affect on the other people in his life. On second reading I still wonder why his friends bother with him at all. It'll take me a few more readings, I suppose, to see Hodge in a better light.

Frankly, I really want to talk about Albert Weener and Greener Than You Think, but I'm waiting for Audible to bring the novel to the airwaves. I've requested it for at least a decade, but I understand that more than wishing is required.

It'd be a brilliant opportunity for voice actors, I can promise you that.

Ugh… Not good

Dull dull dull. I could only listen to the first hour or so
Before I gave up.