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On the eve of Pearl Harbor, Sam Dance is given a packet of mysterious documents by one of his instructors at a top-secret high-tech seminar for exceptional Army personnel in Washington, D.C. Eliani Hadntz—a Viennese physicist and physician who has turned down an invitation from the U.S. to help investigate the possibilities of an atomic bomb, is working on an alternate possibility: a Device that, drawing on radical physics and the dawning age of DNA, might mitigate the human predilection for war.

Sam’s brother dies at Pearl Harbor. Sam is sent to Aberdeen Proving Ground to work on then top-secret short-wave radar. There, he meets “Wink” Winklemeyer, who loves jazz as much as he does. Together, they spent all of their free time seeing jazz luminaries of the day, including Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, who are playing a paradigm-shattering music they call Modern Jazz, or Bebop.

When sent to England to assemble and troubleshoot the M-9 fire director, which will eventually shoot down 99% of Hitler’s secret vengeance weapon, the V-2, Sam reveals Hadntz’s secret documents to Wink. As they become more aware of the unique horrors of Hitler’s war, they begin to work on assembling a working Hadntz Device. Sam also meets Bette, an OSS agent and his future wife.

The children of Sam and Bette will reap the whirlwind of the aftermath of WWII’s unfinished business, as the Cold War yields the Soviet portioning of Europe, the CIA, Vietnam, political assassinations, and the dissidents of the ‘60’s.

With meticulous research, and using the memoirs of her father, Thomas E. Goonan, who, with the 610th, is station in England and then follows on the heels of the Battle of the Bulge to be stationed in Germany before the surrender, Kathleen Goonan has written a novel that has won wide acclaim for its exploration of war, peace, and the sciences that have and will continue to shape history.

Recipient of the 2007 John W. Campbell Memorial Award

“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

"Paralleling the evolution of modern jazz with the creative ferment of science, Goonan delivers a bravura performance."
-PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY, STARRED REVIEW

"A complex, low-key, thoughtful and often dazzling journey through worlds that might, and perhaps should, have been."
-KIRKUS REVIEWS, STARRED REVIEW

Best Science Fiction Novel of 2007
-AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, RUSA COUNCIL CHOICE

“In War Times is an engaging and elegant extrapolation.”
-KELLY LINK

“Only Kathleen Goonan could have created this complex interweaving of jazz, physics, love, and war.”
-JOE HALDEMAN

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?
-SARAH FLOWERS, SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL

A narrative that has hardly a single flaw of pacing, setting, or characterization, and will be intelligible, not to say fascinating, to readers far beyond the ranks of WWII buffs. An authentic classic.
–BOOKLIST, STARRED REVIEW

One of those rare books whose ideas live in your mind long after you’ve finished and make you think about them long afterward.
–SF SIGNAL

It's hard to label In War Times as simply either an alternate history or a science fiction novel. The alternate realities are grounded in our own, Goonan uses excerpts from her own father's recounting of his experiences in World War Two to flesh out the reality of Sam's life, and at the same time speculations in the relationship between physics and biology make Eliani Handtz seem like someone well ahead of her own time. The result is a novel which feels based in reality but also causes the reader to constantly question to just what extent the reality of In War Times matches our own. The underlying theme, that human nature is flawed, and can be helped by a greater understanding brought on by a confluence of quantum physics and genetics, fills the novel with a wistful longing for a better world that may or may not be just within our reach. In War Times is a novel that suggests things could be better, but that there is also a price to pay for achieving it. The characters and their lives are a search for that better world, and the combination of music, the realities of war, stylish writing, and a glimpse into what our world possibly could be, make In War Times a thought-provoking, captivating novel, and Kathleen Ann Goonan's best work yet.
–GREG L. JOHNSON FOR SFSITE.COM