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What a great little book.
There are lots of alternate history novels of the Civil War, but instead of asking "What if the South won?" this one asks, "What if Brown and Tubman's raid on Harper's Ferry in July 1859 had succeeded?" A hundred years later, an archaeologist is returning her great-2x-grandfather's papers to the museum of the revolution in Harper's Ferry, going on the ground in a hydrogen-powered car rather than by airship because she hates flying -- because her husband was killed years ago on humanity's first voyage to Mars. The other storylines follow that same great-great-grandfather watching the war break out as an enslaved Black child in Harper's Ferry and a white abolitionist doctor trying to get medical supplies from Philadelphia to the Army of the North Star in Virginia, told by letter.
( In which John Brown's body is not moldering in the grave )
Anyway. I've had this book on my shelf for ten years, and I was surprised at how moving I found it once I did finally pick it up. (I have the original 1988 paperback, bought for a dollar, but the current ebook edition has a foreword by Mumia Abu-Jamal, who admits that he cried reading it. I did too, at the end.) It's a quick read, and a good one.
There are lots of alternate history novels of the Civil War, but instead of asking "What if the South won?" this one asks, "What if Brown and Tubman's raid on Harper's Ferry in July 1859 had succeeded?" A hundred years later, an archaeologist is returning her great-2x-grandfather's papers to the museum of the revolution in Harper's Ferry, going on the ground in a hydrogen-powered car rather than by airship because she hates flying -- because her husband was killed years ago on humanity's first voyage to Mars. The other storylines follow that same great-great-grandfather watching the war break out as an enslaved Black child in Harper's Ferry and a white abolitionist doctor trying to get medical supplies from Philadelphia to the Army of the North Star in Virginia, told by letter.
( In which John Brown's body is not moldering in the grave )
Anyway. I've had this book on my shelf for ten years, and I was surprised at how moving I found it once I did finally pick it up. (I have the original 1988 paperback, bought for a dollar, but the current ebook edition has a foreword by Mumia Abu-Jamal, who admits that he cried reading it. I did too, at the end.) It's a quick read, and a good one.