Bring The Jubilee

Science fiction likes to play with history. Look how fragile our world is, just one small change there, or there, or there, and things would be ever so much worse. Of course, because we like doing it doesn't always mean that we do it well. But here's a book that does it very well indeed.Robert E. Lee won the Battle of Gettysburg, and as a result the Union surrendered and the United States were split in two. In the south, the Confederacy is now a global powerhouse gearing up for a war with the German Union (which won this version of the First World War), a war that will almost certainly be fought out in the territory of the United States. In the north, what remains of the United States is impoverished and kept subdued by the South.The story concerns Hodge Backmaker, who arrives in the backwater of New York in hopes of getting into a university to study history. He is robbed of his possessions, and ends up working in a bookshop that is the cover for an underground organisation aimed at restoring the North. In time, Hodge comes to the attention of an eccentric community near the former battlefield of Gettysburg, a place where they have invented a time machine. While studying the War of Southron Independence, Hodge is given the opportunity to travel back in time and witness the climactic battle. But when he gets there he accidentally delays the Confederate forces on their way to Little Round Top, and changes the outcome of the battle. Why It's On the ListThere had been occasional works before that imagined a Southern victory in the Civil War, but it was only with Bring the Jubilee that this became one of the key themes in alternate histories. This was one of the most influential of all alternate history novels, at the same time shaping the subgenre and showing how it should be done.