Kathleen Ann Goonan

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Kathleen Ann Goonan is a science fiction writer. She is best known for novels which give snapshots taken at different times of a world where nano and biotechnologies ("bionan") produce deep changes in humans and their habitat. She explores themes of cultural and social change and catastrophe.

Kathleen Goonan's style is dense and textured, and she is influenced by literature as a whole, particularly American literature, and not just genre science fiction. Her background is in teaching, which got her interested in science. She tends to work from popular science texts, back towards the original sources when researching her books, and filters it through highly literate writing.

She is a great lover of Jazz and music in general, and peppers her tales with references to (and reincarnations of) the likes of Duke Ellington and Sun Ra. Her work rewards the careful reader with passages of great descriptive power and beauty. In this, Goonan's body of work provides one of the best examples of the literary value of modern science fiction.

Her first novel Queen City Jazz was published in 1994 to critical acclaim including from cyberpunk sf writer William Gibson who described it as "An unforgettable vision of America transfigured by a new and utterly apocalyptic technology." It was a New York Times Notable Book for 1994 and a finalist in 1998 for the British Science Fiction Association Award. It became the first book in what she would later call her Nanotech Quartet. Because of Gibson's praise, her work has sometimes grouped with cyberpunk. However, she deals little with computers in her novels, and her characters, such as Verity, the protagonist of Queen City Jazz, are positive and sometimes heroic, while cyberpunk concerns itself with anti-heroes.

While her second novel 1996's The Bones of Time featured some elements of nanotechnology science within it, it is not part of the Quartet, and was not centered around these ideas. Instead it mixes Hawaiian mythology with a spy thriller type chase through Asia centered on the cloning of one of Hawaii's native rulers. This novel was an Arthur C Clarke Award finalist.

Mississippi Blues followed in 1997 as a direct sequel to Queen City Jazz following the further adventures of her main character Verity along a Mississippi River radically changed by malfunctioning nanotech. It is somewhat of a tribute to the great American author Mark Twain who appears in the book as two separate characters who have been programmed with nanotech into believing they are him. This novel won the Hall of Fame Darrel Award in conjunction with her short story "The Bride of Elvis" for their contribution to speculative fiction set in the Mid-South of America.

Crescent City Rhapsody was published in 2000 as a prequel, explaining how the world of Queen City Jazz came about as a the U.S. government conspired to sweep in nanotechnology that was not tested for possible side effects. It was a finalist for the Nebula Award, and received high praise from her peers including such genre authors as Joe Haldeman, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, and Stephen R. Donaldson. SPOILER WARNING: Much of the novel takes place in New Orleans, and it is particularly haunting to read today as the book ends with the levees breaking and the city flooding, penned 5 years before Hurricane Katrina struck.

Light Music, published in 2002, concludes the Nanotech Quartet and is as of this date the last book Ms. Goonan has published. This novel looks at the further evolution of humanity under the influence of "bionan", and ties it in with an alien presence apparently responsible for "El Silencio" the great radio silence of Crescent City Rhapsody that paved the way for the nanotech takeover. Light Music received a starred review in Booklist and was also reviewed in the New York Times. Once more, other science fiction authors spoke highly of her work including Kim Stanley Robinson, David Brin, and, again, William Gibson.

Ms. Goonan newest novel In War Times, set in World War II is due to be published in May of 2007. Although this novel will have elements of historical fiction, it is actually going to be more a novel of the alternate history sub-genre of science fiction. It is to be published by science fiction publisher Tor Books who have published the rest of her novels as well, and it is reported to deal with the secret technologies used during the war and extrapolate on what might have happened if some of those had surpassed atomic tech and created a lasting peace instead of a Cold War.