Book Review: In War Times

Kathleen Ann Goonan
2007
Awards: Campbell
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

This book is subtitled “An Alternate Universe Novel of a Different Present.” But it really is an ordinary history in which the main character is given occasional peeks into other timelines, loses friends to other timelines, and is tantalized the entire book with the possibility of being able to alter his own timeline, but never actually alters it until the very, very, very, very end. It is frustrating and disappointing if you’re a fan of alternate histories and were expecting to read one.
   
At the start of In War Times, the main character, Sam Dance, is a young American soldier in 1941 just before the U.S. enters World War II. Dance has high aptitudes for physics, chemistry, and engineering, so the Army is making him take advanced classes in all three. One of his professors, Russian émigré Dr. Eliani Hadntz, gives him all of her top-secret notes about developing a machine that could, theoretically, alter the path of history so as to eliminate all wars, and then rushes off to Hungary to try to rescue her daughter who is trapped there.

Dance doesn’t actually read Hadntz’s notes until several months later, when Pearl Harbor is bombed by the Japanese and his brother, stationed on the U.S.S. Arizona, is killed in the attack. Bereft, Dance reads everything Hadntz gave him, thinking that maybe by building her machine he can somehow bring his brother back.
   
Then the Army activates Dance and he is sent to a variety of bases on the U.S. East Coast and in Scotland. Along the way he collects a group of buddies, the best of whom is Al “Wink” Winklemeyer. Wink and Dance bond instantly over jazz, which they both play, and there are interminable paragraphs describing their rapturous enjoyment of the music. They are rapturous whether the music they hear is recorded, played by themselves, or played live by jazz superstars of the 1940s, many of whom they get to see in New York while posted nearby, and which are listed in such rapid succession and such variety that it seems like Goonan is just trying to name every jazz musician who played in New York in the 1940s. This probably would have seemed far more cool if I was at all interested in jazz.

During this entire time, in what will prove to be a recurring pattern of inaction and procrastination, Dance shelves Hadntz’s notes and does nothing about the machine at all.
   
Eventually Dance and Wink are stationed in Tidworth, England, where the Army is preparing for Operation Overlord, and the two are put in charge of a machine shop for repairing radar equipment. Hadntz reappears, visiting from a more peaceful, more socially advanced alternate timeline in which she now lives, to urge Dance to get cracking on building the time-warping machine. He figures she’s right and, after all, he has a machine shop at his disposal, so he tells Wink about it and enlists his help.

Hadntz’s notes are only at the initial theoretical stage, so Dance and Wink do a lot of musing about how the machine might actually work. None of it is much to hang your hat on. They have a vague sense that it is some sort of “fusion of the organic with the quantum”—that it goes back in time and changes the structure of people’s DNA, and that by changing people’s DNA it changes their consciousness, and that by changing consciousness, it changes all of history. Their theory is that if they can go back and change people’s DNA to make them innately peace-loving, it will remove wars from history.
   
And Wink and Dance can’t help but do a lot of comparing of alternate histories to modern jazz: how the various merging and dividing timelines of history may be like the parallel intertwining refrains in the clashing but somehow complementary scales of be-bop. Again, this might have been more interesting if I cared about jazz.

Anyway, they get a prototype built, and we then experience the first of several occasions where they turn on the current version of whatever the machine is at the time, they have either a blackout or a surreal sense of time being suspended, and the machine itself physically changes, but nothing appears to happen to their timeline.

Their activation of the machine does block everybody’s radar, however, so they draw the suspicion of the OSS. The scrutiny makes them put aside the project and the machine sits on a shelf for several months as the war goes on.

Frustrated, Hadntz reappears to Dance from her alternate timeline to give him an inspirational tour of the horrors of the concentration camps, whereupon he is again recommitted to building the machine. He and Wink, now stationed at a base in recaptured Germany, build a revised version of the machine, turn it on, and again have nothing noticeable happen. Dance puts the machine aside yet again for several more months.

Through machinations either by Hadntz or the OSS, Dance is then forced to witness the A-bomb being dropped on Japan, which re-recommits him to building the machine before he shelves it again.

After the war is over, Dance does find that some things have actually changed. For example, according to everyone else in his timeline, Wink died while they were in Germany. But the Wink he knows is actually still alive in an alternate timeline (the same timeline as Hadntz). Alternate-timeline Wink is able to visit him occasionally during Army reunions.

At this point the storytelling speeds up and the next twenty years fly by in very few pages. Dance marries one of the OSS agents and they have three kids. The family lives through the partition of Germany, the space and nuclear arms races, the civil rights movement, and hippies. Dance goes through it all in a kind of stupor, frequently agonizing about the machine, which is hidden in a trunk in his attic, but not actually working on it.

Then suddenly, in the late 1960s, with about twenty pages to go in the book, Wink visits Dance one final time to tell him that their timelines are converging and that both will be destroyed unless he changes his to be more peaceful. Simultaneously, Dance’s oldest daughter gets hold of the machine and takes off with it to stop the Kennedy assassination. And at last we finally see some history-changing-related action from the machine—although it is really in the form of machine-assisted time travel, and the only warping of history comes from the actions of humans, not the machine.

It all ends up seeming like Goonan really just wanted to write a wartime history about an American soldier. And, indeed, her postscript reveals that Dance’s diary entries, which appear throughout the book, were all taken verbatim from her father’s real WWII journal. Which is clearly where her inspiration comes from, and which is touching and certainly adds authenticity.

But maybe it would have been better to write a straightforward wartime story in honor of her father, even a fictionalized one, rather than trying to stuff it into this thin skin of alternate history. The machine ends up being an awkward writer’s device, an almost inert and irrelevant accessory. And the alternate timeline is only glimpsed occasionally, rather than being baked integrally into the story. It is most unsatisfying.

This unsatisfying feeling is exacerbated by the descriptions of New York, London, and Berlin. They are filled with the kinds of superficial details that you might find in brief read of an encyclopedia entry or a travel guide, rather than the kinds of surprising color you might get from someone who was actually there or had done really intensive research on the period.

It also didn’t help any that the 2007 hardcover edition I read had numerous editing mistakes. There were several places where commas or periods were missing or the wrong words were used (e.g. “were” was used for “we’re” and “sun” was used for “gun”). And in one place the German word for no, nein, was misspelled as nien.

For an alternate history with real bite, I’d recommend The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick instead. And for a really well researched science fiction story set during World War II England, I’d recommend either Fire Watch or Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis.