Full Details
WoGF Review: In War Times by Kathleen Ann Goonan
In his youth, Barry F. (bazhsw), really enjoyed reading science fiction and fantasy, and then stopped for the best part of twenty years. In 2012 Barry made a committment to “read more science fiction” and decided the Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge would be his launchpad.
Editor’s Note: We’re playing catch up here on WWEnd after WorldCon last weekend. This review counts for August.
Sam Dance is a soldier in the US military just prior to the United States entry into the theatre of war in World War II. He is seem as someone with particular talents and early on in his career is extracted from his duties and placed into classes of physics, chemistry and other scientific matter.
During this time he is seduced by his enigmatic lecturer from Eastern Europe, Handtz who places into his custody a device which she hopes he will use. It’s quickly clear that the device is something highly prized by the US, Communist Russia and Nazi Germany. It’s a device that has potential for great good and also would be disastrous for humanity in the ‘wrong hands’ – which seems to be everyone apart from Dance.
The device is capable of combining the consciousness and biology of DNA to create parallel and alternative timelines that mesh at a nexus and carry on in alternate directions. An analogy is made throughout the book of jazz musicians who individually do their own thing in a piece of music whilst still playing the same underlying structure, coming together in the same place where necessary and then departing. The analogy is made a little too often for my liking as it seems every fifty pages or so we are introduced to the idea.
