β Scribed by Goonan, Kathleen Ann
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Kathleen Ann Goonan burst into prominence with Queen City Jazz, the start of her Nanotech Quartet. The Bones of Time, her widely acclaimed second novel, was a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2000. In War Times is deeply satisfying SF. Sam, the protagonist, is a young enlisted man in 1941 when his older brother Keenan is killed at Pearl Harbor. Seduced by a mysterious woman, Sam gives her plans for a device that will end not just the war, but perhaps even the human predilection for war.
Sam spends his war years trying to construct the device and discovers only later that it worked. Sam falls in love with a spy, and they both become involved in preventing the JFK assassination in the 1960s. Over the decades it becomes deeply meaningful that his world is strangely transformed by the enigmatic device.
Starred Review. This engaging alternate-universe tale posits a quintessential enigma of civilization: can technology be prevented from doing as much evil as good? Goonan (Light Music) traces the career of amateur saxophonist Sam Dance, a young soldier who receives plans for a strange electronic device from his physics instructor, Magyar Gypsy Dr. Eliani Hadntz, after she seduces him on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor. She intends her "time machine"Π²Πβmelding physics and biologyΠ²Πβto harness the human mind and rescue Europe from Nazi evil. As Sam experiences successive horrors of WWII, the love of jazz he and his friend Wink share enables them to build increasingly perfected models of Hadntz's device. Sam eventually plants the machines across the globe, hoping the technology will somehow cause various time-shifting realities and save humanity from its herdlike propensity for violence. Paralleling the evolution of modern jazz with the creative ferment of science, Goonan delivers a bravura performance. (May)
Copyright ΠΒ© Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Adult/High SchoolΠ²ΠβThis alternate history with multiple threads blends bebop, physics, molecular biology, politics, and ethics into a compelling story of one family's journey through the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. Sam Dance is a soldier who, in early December 1941, has been sent by the army to study physics and other esoteric subjects in Washington, DC. One of his teachers, an Eastern European woman, seduces him and gives him a deviceΠ²Πβand the plans for itΠ²Πβthat she says will change the course of world history. The next day, Pearl Harbor is attacked, and Sam spends the rest of the war trying to figure out what the object exactly does, and what his role is. This novel is full of thought-provoking ideas about people and conflict. Can people be changed at the molecular level to cause them to prevent war? Can societies thrive and prosper without war? What are the connections between music, especially jazz, and physics? Readers with some knowledge of World War II and of the postwar period will probably get the most out of this book, and they will enjoy seeing where events in the novel diverge from what really happened. But any reader who likes alternate histories; strong, appealing characters; and provocative ideas will find plenty to admire in Goonan's book.Π²ΠβSarah Flowers, Santa Clara County Library, CA
Copyright ΠΒ© Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
π SIMILAR VOLUMES
Kathleen Ann Goonan burst into prominence with Queen City Jazz, the start of her Nanotech Quartet. The Bones of Time, her widely acclaimed second novel, was a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2000. In War Times is deeply satisfying SF. Sam, the protagonist, is a young enlisted man in 1941
An Alternate Universe novel of a Different Present... Sam Dance is a young enlisted soldier in 1941 when his older brother Keenan is killed at Pearl Harbor. Afterwards, Sam promises that he will do anything he can to stop the war. During his training, Sam begins to show that he has a knack for sci