Trisha Shetty (Editor)

The Lincoln Train

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Language
  
English

Publication date
  
April 1995

Country
  
United States of America

Publication type
  
Originally published
  
April 1995

Genre
  
Science Fiction

Published in
  
Fantasy & Science Fiction

Awards
  
Nominations
  
Nebula Award for Best Short Story, Sidewise Award for Best Short-Form Alternate History

Similar
  
Maureen F McHugh books, Hugo Award for Best Short Story winners, Other books

"The Lincoln Train" is an alternate history short story published by Maureen F. McHugh, published in 1995. It is collected in volume 31 of the Nebula Awards anthologies, in Alternate Tyrants, and in Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction.

Contents

Plot summary

The story follows Clara Corbett, a teen-aged girl from Mississippi who is being forcibly removed from her home following the end of the American Civil War. As she and her neighbors board the train that takes them to St. Louis, they begin to realize that perhaps everything will not turn out as the government claims.

Alternate history

The point of divergence occurs on April 14, 1865, when John Wilkes Booth's bullet fails to kill Abraham Lincoln, but renders him a vegetable, and incapable of governing the nation. US Secretary of State William H. Seward is widely believed to be the true national policy maker. Seward instigates a harsh policy of removing all Southerners who had owned slaves to the western territories in a neo-Trail of Tears, where many of them are left to die of starvation and disease. The brevity of the story, and the limit of its narrative viewpoint to one young girl in a remote province, do not allow this alternate history to be examined in any great depth.

Author's comment

In her letter accompanying the story in volume 31 of the Nebula Awards collection, Maureen McHugh states that she originally intended to write a story from Lincoln's perspective, but after reading his speeches and letters, felt incapable of "capturing the man on paper," and so kept him "offstage."

Reception

"Train" won the 1996 Hugo Award for Best Short Story and the 1996 Locus Award. It was also nominated for the 1996 Nebula Award for Best Short Story.

Historical inaccuracies

Several references are made to Oklahoma Territory, but no such entity existed until 1890.

References

The Lincoln Train Wikipedia


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