Galileo's Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson

Expanding the Proscenium reviews Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest novel, Galileo’s Dream.

It’s the story of Galileo, but what a story! Because this Galileo is confronted with people from a future. A future. That’s a very precise phrasing here, because in this story the space time continuum is in a state of constant flux as people in the far future literally burn entire gas giants to power excursions into the past, all in an attempt to Make Things Better. One man has set his sights on Galileo, and Galileo is in the fight of his life as he struggles to understand — and survive! — the byzantine political machinations of the people of the far future, even as he struggles to survive the byzantine politics of his own time. His life, quite literally, is on the line, and it is the fire that he is trying to avoid.

One of the hearts of the book is the struggle between science and religion. But Robinson is not so simplistic as that. There’s no easy Science is Good Religion is Evil message here. Rather, he is probing in deeper waters, and framing the struggle as being between the methodology of true science and the methodology of faith. Or no, that isn’t quite right either. It’s more like a reflection on fear and the human mind. The story we see of Galileo in his own time is about fear — his fear of the fire, his contemporaries’ fear of the new theories overturning centuries of belief and the sense of humanity’s privileged position.

Full review: http://expandingproscenium.wordpress.com/2010/04/28/galileos-dream/