In War Times is a novel for alternate history fans. But it's not quite a straight alternate history. In the first place, its story is the creation of an alternate history by the intentional establishment of a point of divergence. In the second place, and more unusually, the new history doesn't just develop on its own line, with no hint of “what might have been”; rather, the old and the new history remain in contact, though increasingly tenuously so, and people can travel back and forth between them. And, unusually, Goonan's viewpoint character is an inhabitant of the old history—in other words, of our history.

Goonan has made herself known as a writer partly though the inspiration of much of her fiction by jazz. That continues in this book. Jazz seems to be a metaphor for the interaction of the two histories; but, in addition, the creation of jazz is a metaphor for the creation of the second history. And, in addition, the viewpoint character is a talented jazz saxophonist, and spends part of his time interacting with historic jazzmen.

The starting point of In War Times is the early days of World War II. Sam Dance, a physical chemistry student serving in the army and being trained in advanced science and technology, is recruited by a brilliant woman physicist from Hungary to help her alter the course of history through devices based on quantum mechanics. She leaves one of the devices with him, and he carries it with him during his service in World War II, largely as a specialist in a new technology called radar. From time to time he gets evidence that something mysterious is happening with it. The story continues after the war ends, with the mysterious devices continuing to influence his family, and eventually drawing then into an attempt to change the course of history in his own timeline.

Goonan's hypothesis seems to be that there is a hidden impulse to brutality, violence, and authoritarianism in the human psyche—but one that can be changed through intervention at the quantum level. In a discussion midway through the novel, a visitor from her alternate timeline discusses the changes as involving biochemical modification of the human brain to enhance empathy and keep the adult brain actively learning. This leads to social change including general peace, investment of money in technological growth rather than war, and a free market economy with universal access to information—a vision that libertarians will find sympathetic. In many ways it's a return to the historical trends of the nineteenth century, which were so tragically disrupted by the Great War.

Regrettably, this book has a minor flaw: the author doesn't get her history of science quite right. For one example, Sam Dance visits a warehouse in London in 1944 where he finds and buys a rock labeled U-235—but the isotopic separation techniques that could yield pure uranium-235 cost millions of dollars and were top secret then. Shortly after, Goonan mentions a series of lectures being given in Glasgow, under the title "What is Life?" by a physicist named Schopenhauer—but the physicist's actual name was Schrödinger; Schopenhauer was a famous pessimistic philosopher of the 19th century. Later on, in 1945, after the German surrender, two characters discuss the new discipline of molecular biology, which one of them learned about in premed; the term was coined in 1938, but it didn't come into general use until after Watson and Crick, and it doesn't seem likely that an undergraduate would have learned about it. I kept thinking that perhaps these changes pointed to the story taking place in a different timeline, but that seems not to be the author's intent. They don't lead into a different tonality; they're just the author getting a few notes of the history wrong. The novel was still interesting to read, but I kept getting distracted by minor details. It's too bad her editor didn't catch them.

Even so, I think LFS members will find this book worth reading. Unfortunately, it's not longer eligible for a Prometheus Award nomination.