β Scribed by Goonan, Kathleen Ann
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
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 science and engineering, and he is plucked from the daily grunt work of twenty-mile marches by his superiors to study subjects like code breaking, electronics, and physics in particular, a science that is growing more important to the war effort. While studying, Sam is seduced by a mysterious female physicist that is teaching one of his courses, and given her plans for a device that will end the war, perhaps even end the human predilection for war forever. But the device does something less, and more, than that.
After his training, Sam is sent throughout Europe to solve both theoretical and practical problems for the Allies. He spends his free time playing jazz, and trying to construct the strange device. It's only much later that he discovers that it worked, but in a way that he could have never imagined.
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.
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"βmelding physics and biologyβto 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 Β© Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Adult/High SchoolβThis 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 deviceβand the plans for itβthat 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.β Sarah Flowers, Santa Clara County Library, CA
Copyright Β© 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
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