Want a NOOK? Explore Now
Kathleen Ann Goonan introduced Sam Dance and his wife, Bette, and their quest to alter our present reality for the better in her novel In War Times (winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel and ALA’s Best Science Fiction Novel of 2008). Now, in This Shared Dream, she tells the story of the next generation.
The three Dance kids, seemingly abandoned by both parents when they were younger, are now adults and are all disturbed by memories of a reality that existed in place of their world. The older girl, Jill, even remembers the disappearance of their mother while preventing the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Goonan has created a new kind of utopian SF novel, in which the changes in history have created a present world that is in many ways superior to our own, while in other worlds people strive to prevent their own erasure by restoring the ills to ours. This Shared Dream is certainly the most provocative SF speculation of the year, and perhaps the decade.
One of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2007The American Library Association’s Best Genre Novel of the Year
“While This Shared Dream is plenty exciting and expertly paced, there’s a quietness, a gentleness, throughout. Its characters talk far more than they act. They aren’t just action figures; they’re real people, damaged yet striving, and we come to care deeply about them. Such is the power of art — the real, not imaginary, empathy-creating device. Living up to its title, “This Shared Dream” is ultimately a novel about connectedness, in every sense, and the possibility of greater harmony in what used to be called the family of man. Little wonder that Goonan’s overarching metaphor for earthly felicity is improvisational jazz, the true music of the spheres.”— The Washington Post“A complex…thoughtful and often dazzling journey through worlds that might, and perhaps should, have been.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“[Goonan] can take all the credit for 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 World War II buffs. An authentic classic.”—Booklist, starred review
The outsider nature of In War Times derives from the old controversies of mainstream versus genre, of subtlety versus flash, of humanism versus technophilia. Although it should be said right from the outset that this is a problem of perception, not reality, since Goonan's superb book actually unites and transcends all these antinomies with skill and zest. Yet to a superficial reader, it seems to lean away from pure science fiction while still containing a core of speculative imagination. Its territory is awkwardly situated between two literary camps.
Goonan's novel covers the years 1940 to 1980. It's the saga at first of loner Sam Dance and, eventually, his family too, after he marries vivacious OSS agent Bette Elegante. Sam is a young man when WWII breaks out, tasked with secret radar work for the Army. But he also has a mission that's even more hidden. He's been covertly entrusted with half–formed plans and clues about a weird gadget, developed by the mysterious scientist Eliani Hadntz. The Hadntz Device could literally remake the world, using quantum linkages between the brain and matter to alter history and shift the entire planet into new, more welcoming timelines.
Mining her own father's actual WWII experiences, Goonan achieves a deep and rich verisimilitude for all the wartime passages. She crafts a beautiful correspondence between jazz music and quantum physics (shades of Richard Feynman's bongo playing!). Her unique interpretation of the many–worlds theory is genuinely speculative. She builds living characters beautifully from the ground up, making us feel intensely for Sam and company. Her utopian themes are inspiring. And her sly depiction of warping realities is worthy of Philip K. Dick. In short, this novel reads like Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, seeded with Christopher Priest's The Separation and watered with some of Michael Moorcock's multiversal inventions. It should really be on every fan's shortlist of best books of the past decade.
This Shared Dream, while fully as expert and enjoyable as its predecessor, feels necessarily different. In War Times was all about the exciting quest, with victory uncertain; This Shared Dream is all about protecting and extending what was won, inglorious maintenance duty. The challenges and price of defending an achievement are different than those of winning the prize in the first place.
The year is 1991, and Sam and Bette have been separated from their loved ones by the reality shifting their work has brought about. On the timeline they are now sundered from, their three children –– Jill, Brian and Megan –– are all adults with families of their own. But only Jill remembers, in nebulous jigsaw fashion, that the world was ever different. The dissonance is driving her crazy and ruining her personal life. But otherwise, the world is ticking along nicely (no AIDS, no war, universal education through smartbooks). The Hadntz Device is now distributed in consumer products that conduce toward peace, stability, equality, and empathy. HD–50, an upgrade that enforces instant empathy, looms on the horizon. (Goonan has some sharp things to say about thrusting goodness onto people against their will.) But the speed bump in the path to paradise is an elderly unreformed Nazi who wants to use the power of reality alteration for his own nefarious purposes. He'll be as much a threat to Jill and family as the disbelief the rest of the world has in her revelations.
The narrative is split mainly among the viewpoints of Bette and her three children, making for a more diffuse story than previously. But Goonan employs the multivalent perspective to get across a good portrait of her proto–utopia: a bold undertaking often shirked by SF writers. Additionally, there's a kind of mythic, familial John Crowley ambiance, as the doings at the ancestral Dance homestead, Halcyon House, resonate with the magical affairs at the Drinkwater manse in Little, Big.
Goonan also gets a good Henry Kuttner vibe going –– recall that writer's classic "Mimsy Were the Borogoves," in which toys displaced from the future cause children to evolve strangely. Goonan's take: "The essential agents in Hadntz's Device, which fostered altruism, were also in the cereal toys she had just sold to General Mills. These agents were transmittable through touch, and through the very air. They formed networks, which would grow. Their molecular design came from another timeline, one in which engineering had accomplished molecular replication. Should one be cut in two, each would regenerate a complete figure. This practically guaranteed worldwide distribution in a short period of time."
The story, much of which unpacks lost memories in a solidly constructed Washington, D.C. venue, nonetheless manages to convey a sense of urgency about humanity's evolutionary path. Goonan uses the word fragile often, hinting at the house–of–cards nature of civilization. The urgent necessity for our species to master its worst impulses and take charge of its own destiny –– a core tenet of the SF genre –– has seldom been conveyed with such emotional and intellectual force.
Author of several acclaimed novels and story collections, including Fractal Paisleys, Little Doors, and Neutrino Drag, Paul Di Filippo was nominated for a Sturgeon Award, a Hugo Award, and a World Fantasy Award –– all in a single year. William Gibson has called his work "spooky, haunting, and hilarious." His reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, Science Fiction Weekly, Asimov's Magazine, and The San Francisco Chronicle.
Excerpted from This Shared Dream by Kathleen Ann Goonan Copyright © 2011 by Kathleen Ann Goonan. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Overview
Kathleen Ann Goonan introduced Sam Dance and his wife, Bette, and their quest to alter our present reality for the better in her novel In War Times (winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel and ALA’s Best Science Fiction Novel of 2008). Now, in This Shared Dream, she tells the story of the next generation.
The three Dance kids, seemingly abandoned by both parents when they were younger, are now adults and are all disturbed by memories of a reality that ...