Kim Robinson: Galileo's Dream

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.

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.

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!

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

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