This Shared Dream
Tor, 400 pages, $25.99 (hardcover)
Kindle: $17.15 (e-book)
ISBN: 978-0-7653-1354-6
What do you do after you’ve created utopia?
In her Campbell Award winning novel In War Times (2007), Kathleen Ann Goonan introduced Sam and Bette Dance, a couple of time travelers who went back to World War II in an attempt to make our present world a better one. They succeeded, and a long period of peace replaced the Cold War.
This Shared Dream takes up the story of the present-day children that Sam and Bette left behind. Jill, Brian, and Megan Dance are all bothered by shadowy memories of the world as it was, as well as the mystery of their parents’ disappearance. Jill even seems to remember that her mother departed to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy . . . an event that never occurred in the current timeline.
As they grow, the Dance children develop strong desires, almost compulsions, to improve the world. At first their means are politics, music, and science. Then comes the fly in the ointment: in creating this new alternate world, the Dance parents caused the erasure from history of a good many powerful and malicious people. But it turns out that previous timelines don’t cease to exist; instead, there’s a multiverse of alternate histories.
And what Sam and Bette did once, others can un-do. Soon enough, the Dance kids find their utopian timeline threatened with destruction. All they have is their own abilities, their drive for improvement . . . and the power of jazz music.
Goonan’s previous work (The Nanotech Quartet) was more cyberpunk in nature; in the Dance Family books, there’s nary a nanobot to be seen. She masterfully relates this story mainly from the separate viewpoints of the three Dance children, and it works beautifully. The details of her alternate world are fascinating and fun to uncover; the personality of this utopian timeline is almost a fourth main character in the book.
A great adventure story, an engaging alternate history, characters the reader can really care about, and jazz. What more can you ask?