Book description
The dazzling novel from the acclaimed author of the groundbreaking MARS
trilogy follows Galileo on an amazing journey from the dawn of the
modern world to a future on the verge of a completely new scientific breakthrough.
Late Renaissance Italy still abounds in alchemy and Aristotle, yet it
trembles on the brink of the modern world. Galileo's new telescope
encapsulates all the contradictions of this emerging reality.
Then one night a stranger presents a different kind of telescope for
Galileo to peer through. Galileo is not sure if he is in a dream, an
enchantment, a vision, or something else as yet undefined. The blasted
wasteland he sees when he points the telescope at Jupiter, of harsh
yellows and reds and blacks, looks just like hell as described by the
Catholic church, and Galileo is a devout Catholic.
But he's also a scientist, perhaps the very first in history. What he's
looking at is the future, the world of Jovian humans three thousand
years hence. He is looking at Jupiter from the vantage point of one of
its moons whose inhabitants maintain that Galileo has to succeed in his
own world for their history to come to pass.
Their ability to reach back into the past and call Galileo "into
resonance" with the later time is an action that will have
implications for both periods, and those in between, like our own.
By day Galileo's life unfurls in early seventeenth century Italy,
leading inexorably to his trial for heresy. By night Galileo struggles
to be a kind of sage, or an arbiter in a conflict … but understanding
what that conflict might be is no easy matter, and resolving his double
life is even harder.
This sumptuous, gloriously thought-provoking and suspenseful novel
recalls Robinson's magnificent Mars books as well as bringing to us
Galileo as we have always wanted to know him, in full. Praise for the
Mars trilogy:
'Staggering … Required reading for the colonists of the next century'
Arthur C. Clarke
'The ultimate in future history' Daily Mail
'One of the most impressive pieces of science fiction of the past ten
years' The Economist
'Absorbing, impressive, fascinating… Utterly plausible' Financial Times
'One of the landmarks of American literature' TLS
'A beautiful book - to be lived in' Daily Telegraph Kim Stanley
Robinson was born in 1952 and, after travelling and working around the
world, has now
settled in his beloved California. He is widely regarded as the finest
science fiction writer working today, noted as much for the
verisimilitude of his characters as the meticulously researched hard
science basis of his work. He has won just about every major sf award
there is to win and is the author of the massively successful and
lavishly praised Mars series.
