Many people are convinced that Washingtonians — or at least those who work for the federal government — don’t actually live on the same planet as the rest of the country. Kathleen Ann Goonan’s “This Shared Dream” suggests that this view is almost right. This excellent science fiction novel is part “Inception,” part “Back to the Future,” part “Jumanji” — and it takes place almost entirely in Washington and Northern Virginia.
When the novel opens in 1991, Sam Dance, an engineer, and his wife, Bette, a Montessori teacher, have been missing for a long time. First, Bette simply vanished in 1963; then, more than a decade later, Sam did the same. No one knows why they disappeared or whether they are alive. The couple did leave behind a rambling old house, with a perennial trust set up for its maintenance and care. They also left behind three now grown children, Jill, Brian and Megan, who have been more or less scarred by the mysteries surrounding their parents’ lives and their own childhoods.
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Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World and the author of the memoir “An Open Book” and of four collections of essays: “Readings,” “Bound to Please,” “Book by Book” and “Classics for Pleasure.”
Rumor has it, for instance, that Bette may have been an elite OSS spy in Europe during the 1930s and ’40s. Sam definitely served in World War II with his friend Wink, and the two seem to have been involved with research into a force more powerful than atomic fission. A device harnessing this mysterious energy has even been envisioned by the enigmatic Eliani Hadntz, a brilliant physicist (and physician) who believes that the world could be made more humane through the right kind of early childhood imprinting and the reinforcement of empathy in people’s brain chemistries.
In the first chapter of “This Shared Dream,” the 41-year-old Jill Dance is just finishing her last class as a PhD candidate in political science at Georgetown University. Though generally a superb student, she occasionally makes strange errors, once hurriedly writing in a paper that John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. Which, of course, isn’t true. “Kennedy had not been assassinated,” she recalls, when confronted about it. “Not here. He was an international statesman, a celebrity, the father of the space program, as well as the father of several children born to women not married to him.”
By the novel’s second chapter, Jill has been incarcerated in St. Elizabeths for probable schizophrenia. In reality, she secretly bears a horrible burden: Twenty years earlier she destroyed an entire world, and possibly her parents as well.
“This Shared Dream” is a sequel to Goonan’s “In War Times” (2007), winner of the John W. Campbell Award, and fans of that earlier book will know immediately what’s going on. But the skillful Goonan offers enough hints to bring new readers quickly up to speed. It’s not giving away anything to reveal that a Hadntz Device was developed and that it can morph into multiple shapes, transmit molecular agents that affect the brain’s empathy centers and somehow be used to navigate time streams. Only a very few people are aware of its existence and capabilities, among them Sam and Bette Dance. They also know that, at times, history reaches a kind of temporal crossroads, a highly charged nexus, and Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas was one.
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