Galileo's Dream, By Kim Stanley Robinson
The science of altering the past
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.Great things are done by imperfect people. Isaac Newton was a curmudgeon obsessed with convicting forgers and working out the date of Creation from Biblical genealogy.
Albert Einstein was an adulterer. Johannes Kepler had fanciful ideas about the music of the spheres. And Galileo, that great martyr of reason and experimental science? He was a blusterer, a flatterer and an arrogant bully who dumped his daughters in a convent.
Kim Stanley Robinson's novel about the events leading to Galileo's trial for heresy is a warts and all picture, but one that makes us love and admire the great astronomer in spite of his weaknesses. Part of the way he does this is by reminding us of the man's physical presence. His Galileo has a bad hernia and drinks too much, he's in constant ill health as he goes about discovering the moons of Jupiter. He is wonderfully tactless and a show-off – and does not bridle his mind even when the logic of his discoveries is leading him in potentially fatal directions.
He is also, and this is the colossal risk Robinson takes, the hero of a science-fiction novel in which he escapes his own time to participate in one of the greatest of human adventures – one that threatens, yet again, to dethrone humanity from the centre of its perceived universe. Some 30th century scientists have discovered, and are communicating with, a being in the ice-covered oceans of Europa, one of Jupiter's "Galiliean moons". They bring Galileo forward, partly as a prestigious tool in their arguments, partly to salve their consciences over the way they have manipulated history to bring about a version in which he shortens the war of religion and science by heroically dying at the stake.
Galileo's struggles to deal with these time travellers effectively dramatise his role as a moral agent. His choice to compromise – to rely on history to absolve him and Copernican theory – comes to seem admirable in Robinson's fable. Sometimes we need living men finishing their work as much as heroes who go down in flames.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments