Sam often reviews the papers given to him by Hadntz and collects parts for the Hadntz Device, eventually bringing Wink into the conspiracy. They are soon shipped to England, where they repair ordnance and prepare M-9s, as well as playing jazz at local clubs and covertly working on the device. A mysterious Maj. Elegante appears to know Hadntz and to be helping them. Hadntz herself also occasionally turns up to provide more information, and Sam is sent on a secret mission with her in Poland, where he sees the Nazi death camps and rocket factories. After the Normandy invasion, Sam and Wink travel through France and finally meet Maj. Bette Elegante, who travels with them and debriefs Sam on his experiences with Hadntz. Just inside Germany, Sam and Wink set up a telephone system and a Biergarten with live jazz while completing and improving their Device. When the Germans surrender, Bette shows up at the Biergarten and takes Sam on a secret mission to Berlin.

Sam is reassigned to the Pacific theater, where he is part of the crew on the Enola Gay who drop one of the atom bombs that ended the war. Back home after the war, he tries to contact Wink but learns he has been killed. Sam completes college and is working as a fire control engineer when, at an Army reunion, Wink appears. He lives in another timeline, where he survived and Sam did not. Bette also contacts Sam again, having spent the years since the war in Russia on a secret mission, and they meet in Washington, D.C.

Sam and Bette get married and raise three children in D.C., Hawaii and Germany in the 1950s. Sam continues work on his Device, which now can take various forms and can be divided and spread around the world, which Bette, still working for the U.S. government, secretly encourages but does not want the government to learn about. In 1970, back in D.C., Sam and Bette learn that their kids have found the Device, which has transformed into a game to teach them about Hadntz and possible futures. When Wink appears to inform them that Hadntz has sent Sam and Bette's daughter Jill back through time on a mission to prevent President Kennedy's assassination, they must use the Device to follow Jill and try to save her as well as the president.

A complex and moving alt-history story

Kathleen Ann Goonan appeared on the science-fiction scene in 1994 with Queen City Jazz, an impressive first novel in what would become her Nanotech Quartet, completed in 2002 with Light Music. Her earlier novels involved a high-tech future transformed by a mixture of biotechnology and nanotechnology, and used jazz music as part of their central themes and storylines. With In War Times, Goonan moves into alternate history with a complex and intensely real tour-de-force novel of World War II and its aftermath, spanning more than three decades.

The intense realism of the novel derives primarily from Goonan's exhaustive research into the history of the 1940s through the 1960s, which was aided by her own father's experiences in the war, which he recorded in a diary. The itinerary of Sam Dance in the 1940s sections of the novel follows closely that of Goonan's father, and in fact the many sections throughout that appear to be Sam Dance's diary are actually taken verbatim from her father's. Goonan uses this intense realism to give verisimilitude to the science-fictional aspects of the book, which is needed due to the nebulous and unpredictable nature of the Hadntz Device and its capabilities, which sometimes make it seem more like a magic talisman than a complex quantum-mechanical science-fictional device.

Although In War Times is a powerful and well-executed story, with superior characters and settings as well, it is not an easy novel to read. Readers not intimately familiar with the history of World War II and the 1960s, not to mention the history of jazz music in the 1930s and 1940s, may struggle to fully understand the narrative and characters.

Readers who are new to science fiction might also find it difficult to make any sense of the Hadntz Device and the vaguely characterized concepts of what it does. Even among those knowledgeable in all of these areas, I suspect there might be different interpretations regarding exactly what occurs at the ending of the novel.

But for knowledgeable readers for whom complexity is a virtue instead of a fault, In War Times should prove to be a rewarding reading experience. Goonan has delivered a novel worthy of strong consideration when awards for best SF novel are given next year.