ed_rex

Renaissance genius meets the distant future —
But is the author's heart in his own conceit?

Galileo Galilei by Giusto Sustermans (Wikipedia)

"If I have seen less far than others," Galileo complained in irritation to Aurora, "it is because I was standing on the shoulders of dwarfs."

— Galileo Galilei explains his limitations in Galileo's Dream.

Is Kim Stanley Robinson getting tired of science fiction?

In the five novels since the final book in his already-classic Mars trilogy was published in 1996 and the North American release of Galileo's Dream just after Christmas, Robinson sojourned in alternate history with the excellent stand-alone novel, The Years of Rice and Salt and the very near future, with the not-entirely-successful "Science in the Capital" series; not quite abandoning the field, but staying on its peripheries.

Although his newest novel is an unabashed return to centre of science fiction, that the historical sections of Galileo's Dream are both more convincing and more interesting than those set in the 31st century, suggests that return is premature.

The novel opens in the late 16th century when a professor of mathematics at the University of Padua — as you may have guessed, none other than Galileo Galilei himself — is approached by a mysterious stranger who (I give away nothing that isn't on the dust-jacket) is a visitor from the far future. The stranger tells Galileo of a remarkable Dutch invention, a device which magnifies objects seen from a distance — a telescope, of course.

Intrigued, Galileo returns home to attack the problem and, in so doing, begins the process of invention and discovery that will lead to his eternal fame and to his eventual disastrous run-in with the dreaded Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church.

Robinson is probably the best writer there is when it comes to dramatizing not just the discoveries of science but the processes by which those discoveries are made. The sections which focus on Galileo the scientist are fascinating and brilliantly alive. And he proves he is just as good at historical fiction, clearly and engagingly showing us the intricate politics of late-Renaissance Italy.

It is the conflict between science and religion, faith and empiricism, which is at the heart of the novel and that, perhaps, is why those sections set in the future don't fully succeed.

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Galileo's Dream By Kim Stanley Robinson Ballantine Books (Spectra), December 29, 2009 Hardcover, 532 pages ISBN: 0553806599/0-553-80659-9

The first chapters introduce us to the brilliant scientist, the struggling entrepreneur and the crawling courtier that was Galileo Galilei. Robinson's portrait of history's "first scientist" shows us a man of creative genius and fertile imagination, with ego and temper to match; a social climber; a bully; a loving father; and much more — in short, a complicated and compelling protagonist, if not the ideal drinking companion.

The Renaissance politics — conflicts between Catholic and Protestant, Roman Church and nominally Catholic secular rulers, between movements within the Catholic Church itself — are just as skillfully worked into the story as the title character himself. If Galileo's Dream was "only" a historical novel, Robinson might have had another classic on his hands; unfortunately, the science fiction gets in the way.

The Mysterious Stranger doesn't just appear once, but again and again. And again and again, Galileo journeys into the future, to the year 3020, where a major discovery has been made among the moons of Jupiter.

The big idea behind Galileo's Dream is the belief by some in the future that history "went wrong" when Galileo was not burned at the stake by the Roman Inquisition; that the martyrdom of the "first scientist" at the hands of the Church would have so damaged the reputation of Religion itself that all of history would have been different — and possibly better.

Would religion have suffered a crippling blow to its credibility and prestige in the western world had the Catholic Church put Galileo to death? Would that have led to a better, more peaceful and more rational history following his death than the one we have known — and the worse things Robinson implies are ahead of us?

These are the larger issues Robinson explores through the repeated visits of our protagonist into the (or rather, into a) future, where he is exposed to ideas both scientific and sociological that must obviously shock a man from 16th century Europe. That Robinson manages to convince the reader that Galileo was of a strong enough character to not only deal with such shocks to his world-view, but even to (partially) integrate them, is a tribute to his characterization of this historical figure.

My suspension of disbelief trembled at times, but never crumbled.

My interest, however, was never fully-engaged by Robinson's 31st century society, nor by his cosmic speculations or by the possible alien intelligence lurking beneath the ice of Europa. The future in Galileo Dreams is like a charcoal sketch beside the lush oils of the past.

His 31st century is strange, but not that strange; his exploration of the the multiverse and of the ramifications of time-travel in a universe in which linear time itself is an illusion is likely to be unfamiliar only in the details to regular readers of science fiction, never mind to those who keep up even casually with the latest cosmological theories.

I was left with the feeling that Robinson realized part-way through his story that he had become more interested in history and biography of protagonist than he was in his cosmological and sociological speculations about the future.

This is not to say I didn't enjoy the book. I did. I may even read it again one of these days. But if I were able to travel back in time, I would opt to wait for the paperback.

Originally posted to Edifice Rex Online.

One night as they were falling asleep Nadia said curiously, "Why me?"

"Huhn?" He had almost been asleep.

"I said, why me? I mean, Arkady Nikelyovich, you could have loved any of the women here, and they would have loved you back. You could have had Maya if you wanted."

He snorted. "I could have had Maya! Oh my! I could have had the joy of Maya Katarina! Just like Frank and John!" He snorted, and they both laughed out loud. "How could I have passon on such joy! Silly me!" He giggled until she punched him.

"All right, all right. One of the others then, the beautiful ones, Janet or Ursula or Samantha."

"Come on," he said. He propped himself up on an elbow to look at her. "You really don't know what beauty is, do you?"

"I certainly do," Nadia said mulishly.

Arkady ignored her and said, "Beauty if power and elegance, right action, form fitting function, intelligence and reasonability. And very often," he grinned and pushed at her belly, "expressed in curves."

"Curves I've got," Nadia said, pushing his hand away.

He leaned forward and tried to bite her breast, but she dodged him.

"Beauty is what you are, Nadezhda Francine. By these criteria you are queen of Mars."

"Princess of Mars," she corrected absently, thinking it over.

"Yes, that's right. Nadezhda Francine Cherneshevsky, the nine-fingered Princess of Mars."

"You're not a conventional man."

"No!" He hooted. "I never claimed to be! Except before certain selection committees of course. A conventional man! Ah, ha ha ha ha ha! - the conventional men get Maya. That is their reward." And he laughed like a wild man.

-- Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

There are great books and there are books which truly speak to a reader; books one can admire and respect, and books one loves - books that become, as J.R.R. Tolkien put it when talking about what he wanted to achieve with The Lord of the Rings, "secondary creations", worlds within the world, as it were, worlds into which a sympatico reader can disappear, as if visiting a foreign country. And when a text is rich enough, the reader can return again and again, always finding something new in the familiar.

Kim Stanley Robinson's brilliant and sometimes very strange Mars Trilogy is one secondary creation with which I fall in love each time I re-visit it.

My latest encounter with Robinson's Mars was in large part a reaction to the frustration, if not quite disappointment, I felt while reading his new novel, Sixty Days and Counting. I had been waiting impatiently for its release for about a year and am still not quite sure what I think of it. But it did inspire me to return to Mars and so that is what I am thinking of now, as I look back on the laughter, the occosional tears and the vast and deep scope of the ideas with which those books are impregnated.

I said the trilogy is a strange one, and so it is. His prose, though almost always written their-person omniscient, nevertheless has a conversational, almost sing-song quality to it; it reminds me (if one can be reminded of something one has never heard) of what I imagine it might have been like to hear Homer telling the Odyssey by the light of a campfire. Robinson shows us and tells us what his characters are doing and thinking and feeling, but he also discusses those thoughts and actions, almost like an internal monologue.

At once distancing - because the readers knows it is Robinson telling the story - it serves at the same time to draw the reader right into his characters' heads, into their minds and bodies. In the Mars books, which take place over a span of some two hundred years, each chapter is told from the point of view of a different character, each of whom sees Mars in different aesthetic, philosophical and political lights. In some ways, reading a Kim Stanley Robinson novel is like wandering through an erudite party and spending one hour with this person, then another hour with someone else entirely.

Even more unusually, particularly for a genre novel, while Robinson sometimes approaches portraying his characters as heroes, none of them are that simplistic; and Robinson's sweep is so broad, the reader is constantly reminded that the world is much bigger than the narratives of the people upon whom he chooses to shine his authorial light.

In Red Mars, the first novel of the trilogy, this is particularly evident.

Red Mars opens with the assassination of John Boone and closes (or almost) with the heroic death of his killer, Frank Chalmers. After the introduction, we flash back to Antarctica, where the first colonists are undergoing their final selection for the first permanent mission to Mars. From there, the narrative moves linearly, the first 40 or so years, culminating in a failed revolution against the Terran authorities.

Boone and Chalmers, along with the laughing anarchist Arkady Bogdanovich, the construction-loving engineer Nadia Chernyshevski and the (apparently) stereotypical nerdish physicist Saxifrage Russel, were the focal characters to whom I was mostly drawn in the first book. And Robinson killed three of them off, leaving me to wonder - my first time through - how in the world he would manage to hold my interest over the next two novels, for Boone and Bogdanovich were also the characters I liked the most. (The first time I read it, by the time Boone was killed I had more or less forgotten that I had already known his fate, and his death hit me with full dramatic impact.)

What also makes the trilogy strange, at least when compared to most science fiction, or popular literature generally, is how political Robinson's novels are. Most of the Martian colonists are there because they want to start anew, they want to build a better, saner society than the one they left behind forever.

Robinson understands that politics is not just about elections, or back-room maneuvers, but that politics is a part of life, like philosphy and even aesthetics. Whether we act consciously on our politics and philosophies or not, they influence everything we do and how we do it and Robinson does not shy away from asking the hard questions - how do we life? How should we live? How can we live, given the realities of physics and culture and the inevitable conflicts of interest between one set of goals or desires and another or another?

The Mars could be said to be "about" the colonization of another planet, but say it is only about that would be like describing my bedroom as being about my wall of books while ignoring my bed, or the table for my lap-top or what the building in which my room is situated is built of.

Red Mars ends in a failed revolution. Green Mars ends with a succesful revolution. And Blue takes the very brave pop-fiction chance of exploring the aftermath of that success. Now that we've won, what do we do next?

Part of Robinson's answer is that life is not like the simplicity of a hockey game, that one never "wins" in the terminal sense of the word. Life goes on, conflicts happen and something that seems settled can - 20 years down the road - suddenly re-emerge, probably in a new form, but still a problem to be solved, or at least, to be dealt with in one way or another.

Another part of his answer is that life is to be lived. Even while his characters spend a lot of time dealing with the Big Questions - with morality, with ecology, with politics, with economics, with science and philosophy - they also live. Robinson's characters spend a lot of time partying, celebrating, travelling and living in the moment. As a writer it is both a strength and a weakness. To almost any reader, there will be sections that will bore or annoy - "Who cares about Nirgal's run with the ferals? Let's get back to what matters!" - but one of Robinson's purposes seems to be to show life lived; not just the high points of drama, but also the sheer strangeness of existence, should one be willing to make the effort to pay attention to the quotidian, day-to-day elements that make up all of our existences.

Finally (for now - I suspect this post will prove to be only a series of notes for a longer, more focussed piece on why these books matter so much to me), I must note that there is a note of sheer joy that runs through all of Robinson's books like a symbiotic virus, colouring all of it with a wistful yet celebratory, maybe Zen-like, prayer of thanks for the fact that we are alive at all. No romantic revolutionary, Robinson nevertheless believes that we can make of our lives and world(s) something much better than we so far have.

Read these novels. Think about them, feel them. And maybe go on to think about the world we live in today and what we might do to build a better tomorrow. There is no law of nature or physics that says we must kill one another, or destroy our environment; if we can imagine and make real the Holocaust, we can also imagine and make real a world without hunger or war. Kim Stanley Robinson Mars trilogy is a better place than most to use as a starting point for seeing the real world in a new light.