And in fact I’ve stayed too long. The revolution has overtaken everything; Lavoisier was just guillotined yesterday, and I’m in a cell of the Bastille waiting my turn, which I think comes tomorrow. Sitting on stone in the dark, hearing the voices outside, I recall the poem that Machiavelli wrote after he was released from the prison where they tortured him—the place that taught him the lessons about power he tried so hard to pass on to the rest of us:
What disturbed me most
Was that close to dawn while sleeping
I heard chanting: “per voi s’ora.”
For you we are praying. I hope so. La Piera has the entangler, which would otherwise have been taken from me. Whether she and Buonamici and Sestilia will be able to meet me outside with it and help me out, I can’t be sure. This may be it. I find it hard to believe, which no doubt explains my stoic lack of fear. If it happens, it happens. I’m tired of the tumbrel days. And if this turns out to be the end, in these last hours I’ll be thinking hard. Imagination creates events, and by dawn I intend to have lived ten thousand years. Then my part of the tapestry will loop back in, the threads spreading out through the rest of the pattern.
And I’ll be done with this story, which I tried so hard to stay out of. Some of it I saw, some of it Hera told me, some of it I read in Galileo’s letters to Maria Celeste, some of it I made up—that’s fine, that’s the way it always is—some of it you made up too. Reality is always partly a creation of the observing consciousness. So I’ve said what I like; and I knew him well enough to think I got it mostly right. I know he was like us, always looking out for himself; and unlike us, in that he acted, while we often lack the courage to act. I wrote this for Hera, but no matter what time you are in when you read this, I’m sure that the history you tell yourself is still a tale of mangled potentiality, of unnecessary misery. That’s just the way it is. In all times people are greatly lacking in courage.
But sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes they keep trying. This too is history. We are all history—we’re the hopes of people in the past, and the past of some future people—known to those people, judged by them, changed by them as they use us. So the story keeps changing, all of it. This too I’ve seen, and so I persist. I hope without hope. At some point the inclined plane can bottom out and the ball begin to rise. That’s what science is trying to do. So far it hasn’t worked, the story has been ugly, stupid, shameful, sure; but that can change. It can always change. Because understand: once I saw Galileo burned at the stake; then I saw him squeak his way clear. You have to imagine how that feels. It makes you have to try.
And so when sometimes you feel strange, when a pang tugs at your heart or it seems like the moment has already happened—or when you look up in the sky and are surprised by the sight of bright Jupiter between clouds, and everything suddenly seems stuffed with a vast significance—consider that some other person somewhere is entangled with you in time, and is trying to give some push to the situation, some little help to make things better. Then put your shoulder to whatever wheel you have at hand, whatever moment you’re in, and push too! Push like Galileo pushed! And together we may crab sideways toward the good.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
But truly to find a way to adapt physical, metaphysical, and theological senses to words that may have been but a simple fantasy, not to say a chimera of your spokesman, redoubles in me my marvel at minds so acute and speculative.
—GALILEO, LETTER TO LICETI, 1640
Thanks for help with this to:
Charlene Anderson, Terry Bisson, Roland Boer, Linda Burbank, Sam Burbank, Joy Chamberlain, Ron Drummond, Joe Dumit, Karen Fowler, Louis Friedman, Dana Gioia, Jane Johnson, Chris McKay, Colin Milburn, Lisa Nowell, Katharine Park, David Robinson, Don Robinson, Carter Scholz, Ralph Vicinanza, and Joëlle Wintrebert.
A special thanks to Mario Biagioli.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
“My book sprang wholly from the application of a special sense, very difficult to describe. It is perhaps like a telescope pointed at time.”
—MARCEL PROUST
THE ITALICIZED PASSAGES in this novel are mostly from Galileo’s writing or that of his contemporaries, with a few visitors from other times. I made some changes in these texts, and many elisions that I did not mark, but I was always relying on the translators who translated the source material from Italian or Latin or French into English. In particular I would like to acknowledge and thank Mary Allan-Olney, Mario Biagioli, Henry Crew and Alfonso de-Salvio, Giorgio de Santillana, Stillman Drake, John Joseph Fahie, Ludovico Geymonat, Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Pietro Redondi, James Reston, Jr., Rinaldina Russell, Dava Sobel, and Albert van Helden.
Despite the work of these translators and many more, not all of Galileo’s writing has yet been translated into English. This is a real shame, not only for novelists writing novels about him, but for anyone who doesn’t speak Italian but does speak English, and wants to learn more about the history of science, or one of its greatest characters. His complete works were first edited by Antonio Favaro at the turn of the last century, then recently revised and updated by a communal effort. Surely some English-language history of science program, or Italian department, or university press, could perform the great service of publishing a complete English translation of the Opere. The project could even be done as a wiki, in a communal online effort. I hope it happens. It would be good to read more of Galileo’s words—even after this moment, when with the writing of this sentence, for me he slips back into the pages. Good-bye maestro! Thank you!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON is a winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. He is the author of nineteen previous books, including the bestselling Mars trilogy and the critically acclaimed Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, Sixty Days and Counting, The Years of Rice and Salt, and Antarctica. In 2008 he was named a “Hero of the Environment” by Time magazine, and he recently joined in the Sequoia Parks Foundation’s Artists in the Back Country program. He lives in Davis, California.
Galileo’s Dream is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to currect events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by Kim Stanley Robinson
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Spectra, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress-in-Publication Data
Robinson, Kim Stanley.
Galileo’s dream / Kim Stanley Robinson.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-51966-5
1. Galilei, Galileo, 1564–1642—Trials, litigation, etc.—Fiction. 2. Religion and science—Italy—History—17th century—Fiction. 3. Space colonies—Fiction.
4. Outer space—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3568.O2893G35 2010
813’.54—dc22 2009042729
www.ballantinebooks.com
v3.0
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