The winner of every major science fiction award, Kim Stanley Robinson is a novelist who looks ahead with optimism even while acknowledging the steep challenges facing our planet and species: a clear-eyed realist who has not forgotten how to dream. His new novel offers his most audacious dream yet. At the heart of a brilliant narrative that stretches from Renaissance Italy to the moons of Jupiter is one man, the father of modern science: Galileo Galilei.
To the inhabitants of the Jovian moons, Galileo is a revered figure whose actions will influence the subsequent history of the human race. From the summit of their distant future, a charismatic renegade named Ganymede travels to the past to bring Galileo forward in an attempt to alter history and ensure the ascendancy of science over religion. And if that means Galileo must be burned at the stake, so be it.
Yet between his brief and jarring visitations to this future, Galileo must struggle against the ignorance and superstition of his own time. And it is here that Robinson is at his most brilliant, showing Galileo in all his contradictions and complexity. Robinson's Galileo is a tour de force of imaginative and historical empathy: the shining center around which the novel revolves.
From Galileo's heresy trial to the politics of far-future Jupiter, from the canals of Venice to frozen, mysterious Europa, Robinson illuminates the parallels between a distant past and an even more remote future--in the process celebrating the human spirit and calling into question the convenient truths of our own moment in time.
"From the Hardcover edition."
Industry Reviews
"Elegant, charming, funny and profound."--The Guardian (U.K.) "Blending epic sf with alternate history, this is a masterwork of storytelling, philosophy, and science."--Library Journal
"A brilliant work of imagination, drawing together the 'two cultures' in a harmonious marriage of science and art." --The Times (London)
"The historical sections are a triumph, with Robinson's gifts for characterization and world-building firmly to the fore. . . . The finale is both stirring and melancholic, and a fitting tribute to science's most famous iconoclast." --New Scientist
"Riveting . . . Robinson brings [Galileo] to life with both his genius and his faults."--The Denver Post
"Told with verve and a sense of excitement."--January Magazine
