Goonan, Kathleen Ann: In War Times
In War Times
Writer: Kathleen Ann Goonan
Genre: Science Fiction/Alternate History
Pages: 346
I finished this book on Thursday, so I feel ridiculously late with this review. Bear with me, because another review is going up right after this one.
I first heard of this book on SciFi Weekly. The review intrigued me enough to stick the book on a private wish list on Amazon and then forget about it. After all, it's a hardback. I still have trouble buying hardback books of authors I've never read.
Then a couple of months ago, I was browsing through Barnes & Nobles SF/F section and noticed they had a couple of copies on the shelf. Cool, I thought. I ignored them.
But not too long after, I went back. I noticed the books again. And this time I did a double-take. I noticed, in the upper right-hand corner, a little sticker: autographed copy.
Again I thought, cool. But then a little fact wormed it's way into my brain: this is Knoxville, Tennessee. There are hardly ANY SF/F authors in the area, and why would anyone who DOESN'T live in the general area just happen to stop by Knoxville's Barnes & Noble to sign her books?
Realizing that Goonan just might be a local writer, I grabbed the book and flipped to the author page. Sort of right: I'm told she divides her time living in both Tennessee (doesn't say where, sadly) and the Florida Keys.
Now my interest is piqued. I mean, it's SF, it's a woman writer, and she is, for all intents and purposes, somewhat local. And it's SIGNED. So I grabbed the book.
Let the above be a lesson to you writers out there: never miss an opportunity to sign your books. You never know when that'll be the deciding factor for readers to buy them.
In War Times is an alternate history novel. I have to admit, I don't think I've read one of these suckers before. This one originally caught my eye because of it's WWII setting, a part of history that's always drawn my interest, even when I was a child.
When I first started reading, I realized after the first paragraph I was really going to like this book. After the first two pages, I knew that while I was really going to like it, it was going to be quite the slow read.
I feel bad. Granted, I'm far removed from my high school history studies, but I've retained so little. Particularly when it involves American history, which was a dreadful bore to me back at the time. This is all to say that given that this is an alternate history novel, I wasn't quite as well-versed in history as I liked, which prevented me from fully enjoying the little tricks Goonan was playing with time. Some things I recognized as an obvious difference from what I know, like when only one atomic bomb is dropped on Japan instead of two. But I know there were more subtle differences, differences I couldn't catch due to my ignorance. Alas.
The book, in many ways, is a survey of history, starting from the Pearl Harbor bombing and following character Sam Dance through-out the war. We learn a lot about the times through his eyes and his actions, and it's not all about war. Not only does Sam have an intense passion for jazz, but he and his friend Wink become involved on creating a device that could change not only the outcome of the war, but change the core of humanity. In the wrong things, this could be horrible. But Sam, as well as the woman who gave him the plans for the device, it's all about preventing human suffering. It's about changing history so that Hitler doesn't happen, Pearl Harbor doesn't happen, and on a more personal note, Sam's brother, who was stationed at Pearl Harbor, was never killed to begin with.
The device, known as the Hadntz device, is a tricky little thing. Eliani Hadntz has a single section in her POV, where we see the device for the first time, and we see what it does. And I'll be honest, had I not already had Ian McDonald's Brasyl under my belt, I might have been confused. However, I wasn't. I knew exactly what was going on, and this excited me.
The book focuses on the quantum theory surrounding the multiverse, which is, to my simple understanding, the string of parallel universes that surround us. Some universes, things are pretty much the same as ours, with slight differences, whereas in others, things are radically different. The Hadntz device is to show all these possibilities, and to somehow--though it's never really explained--change the course of history with its activation.
It's kind of confusing, and without the grounding of the real-time WWII events, I might have been completely lost, like I was in McDonald's book. However, Goonan does something genius, and she uses music theory--more specifically, the theory behind modern jazz--to explain how the parallel universes work, and how they can merge and diverge.
That is the pure genius of the book, IMHO. Granted, I was once a music major. Of course all of this is going to make sense to me, and I've always known (as does anyone who's ever studied music theory) that music is just as intricate and complex as any of the mathematics or sciences, so to create a parallel between jazz and physics, particularly quantum physics? Bravo.
This not an action book. It's actually a very quiet book, because Sam and his buddy Wink are engineers, so they don't see the face of battle. But what they do see tells a lot about the culture of the times, what Europe went through during the course of the war. It's heartbreaking, and I say this not just because of concentration camps (which we see very little of), but because of how people not involved in the war lived their daily lives.
And it doesn't simply focus on WWII, but also the Cold War that followed. And here's where I feel like an idiot, because I never realized until this book that WWII transformed into the Cold War, and how all of our actions led into the times that followed. Granted, how much of this is truly factual instead of somewhat counterfactual is a mystery to me, but I think the history in Goonan's book follows our own more closely than not.
So I certainly learned something. And because Goonan is an author that lived during those times of Kennedy's and King's assassination (and for that matter, Sam Dance was heavily but not completely based on her father, and she uses her father's journals as Dance's journals in the book), this book has a tremendous weight to it.
I adored Bette. It's another case that had I not already been familiar with the ways of spies (and silly enough, I understood Bette only because of my love for Alias, but really, despite the silly seriousness of that show, the characters there translated to this book), I may not have understood why Bette acted the way she did, but no matter. I understood her, and I wanted more. In fact, I'd absolutely love to see a book or novella detailing her experiences as paralleled to Sam's. Not only does she have more answers, but there were times I felt the Hadntz device was changing things ever-so-slightly, and I felt that Bette's experiences might be the key to understanding what goes changed when.
And interestingly enough, in the September 2007 issue of Locus, there's an interview with Goonan, where she reveals she's under contract to write a novel focused on a different character in this book's universe (multiverse?). Oh, how I want it to be Bette, but I suspect it's probably Wink.
The book broke my heart, but also rang with hope. Goonan's interview in Locus actually touched on a lot of what I got out of this tale, about hope and consciousness and humanity and the arts and sciences. The characters were real in a way that didn't need big, flashy action to reveal who they were. And the events of the story truly painted a strikingly vivid picture of the world as it used to be. And more frightening, it paints a vivid message about what the world is now.
It's a slow read. Don't expect to pick this up and get lots of action. It's soft SF, in a way. It's focused on character, on idea, but most important, on humanity. It's intellectual food for thought. And the parallels between jazz and quantum physics are simply the desert.
Fair warning: the more you know about this point in history (WWII through the Cold War, through King's assassination), the more you're going to get out of this novel. The more you know about music theory, particularly jazz, the more you're going to get out of this novel. And the more you know about quantum physics and the theory of the multiverse, the more you're going to get out of this novel.
This might be considered a flaw by some, but for me, it's a strength. It's a book to savor and enjoy, not to speed through. In many ways, the book is a portrait for what was, what is, what could have been, and what could be.
I look forward to reading more of Goonan's work. I'd love to see this book nominated for a Hugo.
Next up: Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr