Anyone who has read or watched a great deal of science fiction will find it hard to be surprised by anything anymore. It is an odd genre in terms of surprising readers, since time travel, interstellar travel and first contact with aliens does become, if not less fantastic, then par for the course (particularly for those who grew up on Star Trek or Doctor Who). This is not to say that such staples of science fiction are not enjoyable; to the contrary, sometimes not being surprised can make a text better. The familiarity of a well-written science fiction trope is not something to be dismissed merely because others have tried it before. Having watched and read science fiction for most of my life, it is rare that I find science fiction that actually surprises me anymore. So not surprising me does not say that a book is bad, merely that it is not strange enough.
Overall, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Galileo’s Dream did not particularly surprise me. However, it is a fantastically wonderful book, full of incredibly drawn scientific history and future, political machinations worthy of both of its time periods and one of the most astonishing characters ever put to page. Galileo Galilei, as Robinson sees him, is at once maddening, brilliant, foolish and magnificent, who, despite his faults, his pride and his peevishness is likable in a way few characters achieve.
The overall plot of the novel is the charting of Galileo’s life from just before he makes his first telescope to the end of his life, interwoven with periods where politicians from the future drag him forward in time to ostensibly settle arguments (the reality being much different, and taking far more interesting paths than that first intention would have suggested). The act of time travel also changes Galileo’s past, present and future, intertwining all three in a delightfully convoluted tangle by the end.
Galileo’s Dream is a fascinating read, in that I found myself invested in both Galileo’s own time and the future, so much so that the switchovers were extremely frustrating, but in a good way. Robinson handles the switchovers elegantly, always leaving the reader wanting more from the time they were just reading about, but quickly plunging them back into the narrative.
Perhaps even more impressive than Robinson’s ability to switch between times with apparent ease is his representation of the Catholic church of the late 16th and early 17th century. It would be remarkably easy to lambast the church, and lay all of the blame for Galileo’s troubles with the church itself. However, there is a sympathy within Robinson’s description of the church, an understanding that many of the issues within it arose from bureaucracy and politics and not from faith itself. Robinson also makes it clear that Galileo is not necessarily an innocent bystander, often being too blinded by his own ambition to realise the dangers his ready insults and sarcasm were leading him to.
But even more than the characters, all of whom are interesting, fun and tragic at the same time, even more than that are the ideas. I will find myself, in years to come, returning to Galileo’s Dream again, to look at the ideas, to think about how faith and science should work together, to consider how feminism applies to a man of Galileo’s time, to ponder over the notions of time travel and encountering beings whose existence is so alien to our own that we do not recognise their existence at first. The only other book to which I have had a similar reaction is Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Robinson, like Le Guin, knows how to make the reader stop and think about their world while enticing them into an engaging narrative.
The only negative side to the sheer welter of ideas that Robinson presents is that Galileo’s Dream is not really a fast read. I found myself putting the book down a lot, which I never count as a bad sign unless I don’t pick it up again. It is, while by no means a difficult book, deep and thoughtful, and as such, requires more consideration than another book might.
There were, however, two things that did surprise me in the book, the exact details of which should be discovered for oneself. The first was a little narrative trick Robinson pulls halfway through, which I at first thought was a typo and later realised wasn’t. It interests and surprises me because I’m still not sure if I liked it or not.
The second surprise was a wonderful moment of laughing aloud and being able to say ‘I can’t believe that one was true!’ Because, despite Robinson’s often serious subject matter and theories, he writes a wonderfully entertaining novel. He writes about a life that is full of intelligence and wit and ridiculous happenings and tragedy, a life filled with successes, failures, praises and condemnations. And, better still, he writes it well. I found, coming towards the end of the book and the end of Galileo’s life, I was unwilling to finish, unwilling to come to the end of this magnificent story. And that, I think, is why I liked it so much.
So would I recommend it for reading? Yes. This is a book that sticks with the reader, a science fiction novel that, had I read it when I was younger, would no doubt be among the novels I consider my formative literary education. As it is, it is a welcome and valued addition to my collection, and one that I will never cease to recommend.
Galileo's Dream (2009)
Kim Stanley Robinson (Author)
HarperVoyager
Review by Jennifer Harwood-Smith
Published first online (28/04/11). |
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