Authors: Kathleen Ann Goonan
Tags: #Fiction, #Alternative History, #Science Fiction, #General
In War Times
“
In War Times
is a novel of great historical reach—from the Battle of the Bulge to the Kennedy assassination and beyond—and profound ambition, expressed with an unmistakable ease of execution and a master’s sureness of touch. Kathleen Goonan has come through to the kind control that makes every startling fresh development, and this novel bristles with astonishing moments of development, seem inevitable. Not only does Goonan know that Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie changed the world, she understands that every vision of the future conceals a deep yearning for one’s own specific past. That’s real wisdom.”
-PETER STRAUB
“Kathleen Ann Goonan has done it again—infused her fiction with both a deep understanding of emerging technologies and the yearnings and perfidies of the human heart.
In War Times
is a labor of love, a fact made evident on every page by the immediacy of its characters. I feel like I know these people. It’s a darn good story, too, that will keep you up well past bedtime.
-DAVID MARUSEK
“Kathleen Ann Goonan goes against the grain of a lot of twenty-first-century SF by using sci-fi tools to create serious novels of ideas, and she’s done it again: this is a truly humanist, and feminist, take on what’s important for our future.”
-GWYNETH JONES
“An authentic classic.”
-BOOKLIST
(starred review)
T
HE
N
ANOTECH
Q
UARTET
Queen City Jazz
Mississippi Blues
Crescent City Rhapsody
Light Music
The Bones of Time
CopyrightThis is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
IN WAR TIMES
Copyright © 2007 by Kathleen Ann Goonan
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Edited by David G. Hartwell
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Goonan, Kathleen Ann. In war times / Kathleen Ann Goonan.—1st ed. p. cm. “A Tom Doherty Associates Book.” ISBN-13:978-0-7653-1355-3 ISBN-10:0-7653-1355-3 I. Title. PS3557.062815 2007 813'.54—dc22 2007005165 |
First Edition: May 2007
Printed in the United States of America
0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is dedicated to Thomas Edwin Goonan
and to all of those who served in World War II
.
F
IRST AND FOREMOST
I thank my father, Thomas E. Goonan, for his invaluable contributions and unflagging patience in helping me create
In War Times
. My mother, Irma K. Goonan, with her good cheer and wonderful sense of humor, helps me through each day. Thank you, Mom and Dad.
Thanks to Pam Noles for her ability to hear the unstated harmonies in the story through countless rereadings, helping to make them resonate, and passionately believing in the book. Thanks to Sage Walker and Steve Brown, my staunch past and present readers, whose clarity and responsiveness are invaluable.
Mimi and Jim Rothwell took time from their very busy lives to scan my father’s wartime photos. Thank you!
David Hartwell, editor extraordinaire, worked unflaggingly on the manuscript, helped create a novel from a mountain of stories, and supported the book with great dedication. Denis Wong, his assistant, gave feedback and took care of details; he has my gratitude. I also thank Tom Doherty for his support.
Nat Hentoff kindly gave me permission to quote Charlie Parker’s epiphany from his and Nat Shapiro’s classic,
Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya
, published in 1955. Mr. Hentoff’s long career in jazz and support of jazz is well known; my father recalls reading his columns in
Downbeat
.
I also thank Sir Max Hastings for writing
Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-45
, which illuminates a part of WWII that is often glossed over, and for generously giving me permission to include a quote from it. Another important book was Gregor Dallas’s
1945: The War That Never Ended
. Research on the VMA2 gene included in
The God Gene
by Dean Hamer influenced the “Midway” chapter.
Permission to quote Lewis Thomas’s
Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony
was given by Penguin Press; the
San Francisco Chronicle
gave me permission to include a quote from Dizzy Gillespie.
The poem “On Hearing That His Friend Was Coming Back from the War,” by Wang Chien, was translated by Arthur Waley and appears in
More Translations from the Chinese
(Knopf, 1919).
I am also grateful to the authors of the fifty or so books I read for background; they are listed at www.goonan.com.
A Woman in Berlin
, for instance, published anonymously, is a harrowing picture of Berlin during and after the Battle of Berlin in 1945; many other books corroborate the details included by the author.
Tuxedo Park
, by Jennet Conant, is an intimate and detailed account of how private enterprise, universities, and the government worked together to develop the top-secret SCR-584 and the M-9 fire director.
The Birth of Bebop
, by Scott DeVeaux, is an important work of scholarship upon which I depended.
Murray Juvelier flew in an observation plane that accompanied the
Enola Gay
on August 9, 1945; I would like to thank him for the time he took to talk to me in Fort Lauderdale. He gave me invaluable details about the planes, the flight, and the experience.
I strove for an accurate accounting of real events, but any mistakes are my own, not those of my sources.
My most heartfelt thanks, as always, to my husband, Joseph Mansy. He is the boy who went inside the Messerschmitt caves near Oberammergau, Germany, when his father taught at the NATO school there.
Everything is determined by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust—we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.
—
A
LBERT
E
INSTEIN
The Saturday Evening Post
October 26, 1929
∞
[Bergander] and his family listened avidly, if perilously, to the BBC. He heard the famous “black propaganda” broadcasts of the British journalist Sefton Delmer, and—far more effectively from the Allied viewpoint—Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman. To young Bergander, American music possessed the status of holy writ. He thought: people who make music like this must win the war.
—
S
IR
M
AX
H
ASTINGS
Armageddon: The Battle
for Germany, 1944-45
Stateside: 1941: Physics and Jazz
1: Washington, D.C. December 6, 1941
3: Camp Sutton, North Carolina January 1942
4: Aberdeen Proving Grounds February 1942
Wartime England: January 1944-January 1945
7: Tidworth, England January 1944
Germany: The Angels of Electricity: January 1945-August 1945
18: The D & W Telephone Company
31: Atomic Toasters and Little Green Army Men
38: The Gypsy and the Game Board
1941: PHYSICS AND JAZZ
I remember one night before Monroe’s I was jamming in a chili house on Seventh Avenue between 139th and 140th. It was December 1939. Now, I’d been getting bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used all the time at the time, and I kept thinking there’s bound to be something else. I could hear it sometimes but I couldn’t play it.
Well, that night, I was working over Cherokee, and, as I did, I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I’d been hearing. I came alive.
—
C
HARLIE
P
ARKER
Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya
∞
I knew we were making something new. It was magic. Nobody on the planet was playing like that but us.
—
D
IZZY
G
ILLESPIE
San Francisco Chronicle
May 25, 1991
Washington, D.C.
December 6, 1941
D
R. ELIANI HADNTZ
was only five foot three, though she had seemed taller in the classroom, and Sam had not suspected that her tightly pulled-back hair was a mass of wild black curls until the evening she sat on the edge of his narrow boardinghouse bed. A streetlamp threw a glow onto her pale breasts, she reached behind her head and yanked out the combs, made crooked by the intensity of their lovemaking.
Her loosened hair cascaded down her back and hid her face. She took a deep, shuddering breath, and sat with her elbows on her knees, staring out the window.
When Sam reached out and ran a finger up her spine, she flinched.
He had no idea why she was here.
Sam Dance was an uncoordinated soldier. To someone less good-natured, his last name, chosen by an immigration officer on Ellis Island a few generations back, might have seemed like a cruel joke. Because of his poor eyesight, the Army had not accepted him when he first volunteered in 1940, even with almost three years of chemical engineering classes at the University of Dayton under his belt. But while working as an inspector at a Milan, Tennessee, ordnance plant, he heard of an outfit in Indiana recruiting at a used car dealership trying to reach an enlistment quota. He hastened to their office, and was finally allowed to join the Army and serve his country.
Sam stood out because of his height. His intelligence was less visible, but must have been noticed by someone in the Army. Plucked from daily twenty-mile marches through inclement weather in North Carolina, he was sent to D.C. for an intensive course on a potpourri of esoteric subjects. The class met in a hastily assembled temporary structure on the roof of a War Department building.
The subjects, up to now, had been curiously disparate. Codebreaking, mechanical engineering, advanced calculus, and now theoretical physics rushed past, taught by an odd assortment of flamboyant Europeans with heavy accents and accompanied at the end of each week by a test.