Kathleen Ann Goonan is an American science fiction writer who teaches at Georgia Institute of Technology. Her novel In War Times (2007) won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Her most recent novel This Shared Dream was released in July 2011 by Tor Books.

“Most people who really enjoy music, experience it as a form of transcendence. That's why I used Charlie 'Bird' Parker and the birth of bebop along with the quantum indeterminacy 'many worlds' ideas and World War II for In War Times. For me, there are a lot of links, because the idea of modernity is linked to the sciences, and I think it was the movement in the sciences that birthed modernity in the arts. Bebop was another manifestation of that, because it was a completely new form of music. The people who played it came out of the jazz tradition, and yet it broke the mold. Bebop itself is a form of transcendence. (I know they all came to dislike that term. They called bebop 'modern music,' 'modern jazz.')”