Robinson called Wolf Hall one of his favorite novels, and coincidentally he published a biographical novel the same year in which Mantel’s book on Thomas Cromwell appeared. Robinson’s interest in history was no fad: in 2002 he had already published The Years of Rice and Salt, an alternative history that starts with the plague decimating Europe in the 14th century, and in 2013 he wrote about humans in Europe during the ice age, 32.000 years ago. As in Shaman, one of the main subjects of Galileo’s Dream is the birth of science.
Galileo Galilei has been called the father of the scientific method, and so it needn’t surprise Robinson became interested in the guy – Robinson names science “the most ethical religion, the most devoted and worshipful religion” in the final pages of the book. On the next page, Robinson has the narrator describe what might be the best summary of Robinson’s own philosophy & poetics I have come across:
The good that he fought for is not so easy to express. But put it this way: he believed in reality. He believed in paying attention to it, and in learning what he could of it, and then saying what he had learned, even insisting on it. Then in trying to apply that knowledge to make things better, if he could. Put it this way: he believed in science.
But Galileo’s Dream is not only about reality – it is also about the hidden parts of reality, the parts we can’t explain yet, and about the future. In the book, Galileo is visited by far-future time travelers living on the Galilean moons of Jupiter, taking Galileo with them to help with a conflict in their own time. As such, it is also an homage to Johannes Kepler’s Somnium, one of the first works of science fiction, published in 1608.
A hybrid historical novel on the birth of science with Galileo visiting the Galilean moons, and a formal homage to the birth of science fiction too: that sounds a bit convoluted, no?
I’m not saying Galileo’s Dream is a 100% success, but somehow Robinson manages to pull it of – a testament to his ethical commitment, his dedication as a researcher, and, crucially, his love for what he writes about – in short, encompassing those three things: his love for reality.
Let’s take a closer look.
AS AN HISTORICAL NOVEL Galileo’s Dream works quite well. It manages to depict both the brutality of life in the 17th century – Galileo’s daughter starts loosing teeth at 23 because of malnourishment in a convent – and the sophistication of stuff like making telescopes. It sheds light on the politics of the Vatican and shows how international power relationships and the Counter-Reformation had an effect on how the Inquisition dealt with Galileo’s support of Copernicus.
Robinson manages to depict Galileo as a human, warts and all, a very bodily character, a body that would be in a better shape today, with our current medical potential. Part of it seems to be a bit clichéd at first: the genius as a jerk. But I guess the wine, women, and his temper were probably real, and Galileo doesn’t turn out to be a real jerk – he’s just passionate: he is who he is, he can’t help himself, and his brilliant mind will not have been easy to carry in the constraining 17th century.
‘But I want to know things. I’m made to know things! And I don’t see how knowing more can possibly harm me!’
While science and technology as a harmful cause (think Oppenheimer, think climate crisis) is not part of the thematic set-up of this book at all, other aspects of science are, and some of that is tied to the parts of the novel that are set around Jupiter.
IT’S GENIUS OF ROBINSON to put Galileo also in a setting where he is the lesser, doesn’t know a lot of things, basically is a simpleton. And it’s not only quantum mechanics he doesn’t understand: Robinson makes clear that he doesn’t really understand social phenomena, patriarchy, human psychology, not like we do today. While Galileo was, obviously, a human being similar to those we are today, and to the cave people of Shaman, that is still a lucid insight. Galileo was a genius, but he also held humoral theory to be true, and he didn’t see the problems a male dominated society caused his very own mother. That contrast provided on the Jovian moons puts Galileo into a sharper focus, and, paradoxically, helps Robinson’s biographical intentions.
But, I hate to say, the Jovian stuff is also a bit underdeveloped, and the motivation of certain actions of Ganymede, a central Jovian character, seems unrealistic – Robinson even has Galileo himself point out why. Why didn’t he write it differently then?
Trent, who commented on Galileo’s Dream on my previous post, links the Jovian stuff to Jules Verne, and there is some truth to that. Might this be deliberate of KSR, as a part of the homage to Kepler: a kind of proto-science fiction, almost as a soap opera drama, showing the nylon strings like in old monster movies?
Either way, the sci-fi stuff has a certain charm: there’s some fun, larger than life, like using gas giants as fuel, and there’s links to Dune‘s precognition theme, as Galileo sees the different possible strands of his own life. It has a bit of cosmic first contact, and time travel too – and I have to admit the stuff on the nature of time, while speculative, is fairly deep and philosophical. Like Trent, I would love to see KSR do a proper, full fledged first contact-time-travel-space-opera-adventure, but it seems that will never happen: how would that work in the light of Robinson’s political and ethical calling as a writer?
IT’S THAT ETHICAL CALLING THAT prompted Robinson to write this very novel in the first place, and not only as as an implied critique of the politics-inspired relegation of research findings in the years 2000-08 in the United States.
First and foremost, Galileo’s Dream is a look at science, and what science can do. Because science is at the heart of our current technologies, and it’s science – including social & economical sciences – that might help us out of our biosphere crisis. It’s no coincidence this book followed the Science In The Capital trilogy, Robinson’s first climate writing. It’s also no coincidence that the theme of the sciences as a possible way out culminated in his 2020 magnum opus, The Ministry of the Future – maybe the best book KSR has ever written.
Only our technologies, and our teamwork, allow us to survive.
Galileo’s Dream shows two main things about science, and both have to do with science as a weak force.
The first weakness is the fact that science still hasn’t grasped reality in full. The book is a call for epistemic humility, and, while a love song to reality and trying to understand reality with our senses and our rational powers, it is also a love song to the ultimate mystery & unknowability of reality.
‘Don’t ask why.’ Galileo snatched up the glass. ‘Why is what our philosophers ask, and that’s why they’re so full of shit. Because we don’t know why. Only God knows why. If He does.’
&
Reality is not a matter of our senses. It can’t be visualized.
&
Hence I think that tastes, odours, colours and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we place them is concerned, and that they reside only in the consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated. [Galileo Galilei’s own translated words, from 1615, in Il Saggiatore]
The second weakness is science’s inadequacy to deal with power and politics.
Winning all those banquet debates had apparently caused Galileo to think that argument was how things were settled in the world. Unfortunately this is never how it happens.
&
science began as a Poor Clare. Science was broke and so it got bought. Science was scared and so did what it was told. It designed the gun and gave the gun to power, and power then held the gun to science’s head and told it to make some more. How smart was that? Now science is in the position of having to invent a secret disabler of guns, and then start the whole process over. It’s not clear it can work. Because all scientists are Galileos, poor, scared, gun to our head. Power lies elsewhere. If we can shift that power . . . that’s the if. (…) Worse by far is the enormous inertia of human weakness, greed, fear – all the sheer bloody mass of us.
And so, like Cartophilius, Robinson keeps on hoping without hope, because that is the only thing we can do.
You could only try. You learn things that make you try.
More so, it might be the only thing we can do.
We are being drawn there by logical inference, you might say. A tractor beam of logical inference.
So indeed, science is no miracle worker, and this novel isn’t perfect either. At times it drags a bit, and its quirkiness won’t be for everyone. But again Robinson shows to be a humanist, writing insightful about characters and reality and feelings and history and being alive. Even though “consciousness is solitary”, via his books – truly a coherent oeuvre if ever there was one – Robinson manages time and time again to share something of real value.
My other Kim Stanley Robinson reviews are here: The Wild Shore (1984) – Icehenge (1984) – The Memory Of Whiteness (1985) – The Gold Coast (1988) – A Short, Sharp Shock (1990) – Pacific Edge (1990) – Antarctica (1997) – The Years of Rice and Salt (2002) – 2312 (2012) – Shaman (2013) – Aurora (2015) – Green Earth (2015, the revised Science In The Capital trilogy (2004-2007)) – New York 2140 (2017) – The Ministry for the Future (2020) – The High Sierra: A Love Story (2022).
Consult the author index for my other reviews, or my favorite lists.
Click here for an index of my non-fiction or art book reviews, and here for an index of my longer fiction reviews of a more scholarly & philosophical nature.
Weighing a pig doesn't fatten it. 
Ps – For a utterly brilliant book about power & science, try Carter Scholz’s Radiance. Scholz a personal friend of KSR by the way. It’s one of my favorite books ever. Review here: https://schicksalgemeinschaft.wordpress.com/2020/07/01/radiance-carter-scholz-2002/
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Great review, Bart. The setup of this book reminds me of Lafferty’s Past Master, in which Thomas More is brought to the future. Robinson is a very different writer though, a very different person.
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I wasn’t even aware of Lafferty as a writer, but that is a very good catch. I’m sure Robinson must have been aware of the connection too.
It makes me wonder what other stories there are about famous people from the past brought forward. It must be some kind of trope. I looked a bit on tvtropes.com, but even though Galileo’s Dream and Past Master are mentioned, they’re mentioned in relation to other tropes.
The closest thing I could find were the “Fish out of Temporal Water” trope, and the “Contemporary Caveman” trope – I thought about that 80ies movie ‘Ice Man’ too, but there doesn’t seem to be something specific for a famous man brought forward for a specific reason. So maybe Lafferty & Robinson’s books in this respect aren’t too tropy after all.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TimeTravelTropes
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I’m sure there are some Star Trek episodes that do this. And Philip Jose Farmer did it, sort of, in his Riverworld series.
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yeah Star Trek is mentioned on tvtropes too, but the stuff I recall generally was on the holodeck. never read any Farmer either, I’ll look into it, thanks.
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I wouldn’t recommend it. See my review of To Your Scattered Bodies Go
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I on the other hand would enthusiastically recommend To Your Scattered Bodies: big, bold, brash and highly readable! The whole series palls after a while, though.
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This is on my list, and I already almost started reading once or twice…definitely my next Robinson. Coincidentally I’m halfway through the first volume of Mantel’s trilogy, so it may take a while for me to get to Robinson…
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Are you enjoying Wolf Hall? I loved it. I wrote a fairly lengthy review too. Book 2 was great too, but I DNFed book 3.
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Yes, great so far, interesting times, superb writing
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yeah her writing is really something in that book, glad you enjoy it too!
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I very much enjoyed reading your review.
I’d personally rank “Galileo’s Dream” in the top-tier of KSR’s novels, just behind “Green Earth”, “Aurora”, the “Three Californias” and “Red Mars”.
IMO the novel’s scenes set in the 16th century feature some of KSR’s best character building, Galileo like a cranky old man who yells at servants (“Mazoleeeenni!”) and gets comically high on measuring triangles and circles. His battles with the church, and his juggling of patrons, scientific duties and family duties, were all well done, I thought.
What elevates the book for me is its final two chapters. After “Galileo’s” death we get a long segment where the narrator of the novel is revealed; he’s several thousand years old and he’s recounting the novel from a cell at the Bastille where he’s awaiting judgement for helping a French scientist who was persecuted and guillotined (Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier. who revolutionized chemistry). I thought it was fitting that the novel ends with allusions to, not just more scientific revolutions, but the French Revolution as well.
There’s also something beautifully tragic and poetic about how these last two chapters witness the dying of people and the passage of time. KSR gives us a thousand-year-old time traveller mourning the endless cyclical nature of life, unsure if he’s ever been useful in “decreasing human suffering”, this sub-story mirroring some other guy’s (another of Galileo’s servants) slow and seemingly futile quest to, over a lifetime, construct a little monument to Galileo. The two stories – the servant’s building of the monument and the time travellers attempt to nudge history – always seemed to me like repetitions of the entire novel in miniature (an “incremental crab walk to the good”, as I believe the novel’s last lines are).
The novel’s future sequences have always baffled me. They belong to entirely different subgenres of science fiction (time traveller stories and first contact stories), and IMO they don’t quite tonally mesh with the Galileo stuff. Everyone’s wearing weird clothes, and living in ice temples, and flying glossy spaceships; it seems both camp and deliberately melodramatic. I’m reminded of KSR’s “Memory of Whiteness”, where everyone was role playing, and I wonder how much of it is intended to be real and how much is intended as a performance for Galileo. By the end of the novel, I don’t think we even know from what timeline Ganymede the time-traveller is from, or what his motivations are, or if his assumptions are correct. Indeed, the novel hints that he may be a mad man.
For me the best things about these sequences were the way KSR occasionally had Galileo describe futuristic tech by comparison with 16th century objects, but these moments were few and far between. Galileo’s acceptance and understanding of the future is mostly unconvincing. He never feels like an ancient guy overwhelmed by a future society.
I thought the alien creatures in the novel were interesting, but only in theory. They pale next to similar fare done by Stanislaw Lem, and I don’t think they ever rise above the level of broad metaphor, though of course that’s their primary function. But a metaphor for what? It’s been a while since I’ve read the novel, but I remember KSR going out of his way to scramble all my assumptions. The aliens as God/Knowledge, Ganymede as Catholic Church allusions don’t map clearly, and it’s hard to know who in these future societies is being reactionary, anti-scientific or unnecessarily fearful. Is Ganymede right, and if he is, what does that say about the Church in Galileo’s time? After all, both are trying to suppress knowledge. The novel seems to subvert itself in subtle ways, at least that’s my memory of it.
Finally, it strikes me that this is another one of KSR’s “climate change” novels. This is, after all, about “governments” and “people in power” not only denying evidence, but trying to suppress empirical evidence about the natural world.
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It’s always great when a comment becomes a very insightful review in and of itself, thanks for taking the time to write it, I really appreciate it.
I don’t think I’d rank GD among the top tier of Robinson’s work, but it sure is a solid KSR. I agree on Green Earth btw – the original trilogy isn’t generally praised a lot I have the feeling, while I think it has some of Robinson’s best character writing. It’s a very human series, about an important subject. After Aurora, it might be the first I’ll eventually reread, after I finish the Mars trilogy (I’m planning to first read Antartica, and then start Red Mars, or maybe cram Escape From Kathmandu in between too, we’ll see).
I also agree Galileo’s characterization is very, very well done, and I liked how he also mellowed out a bit – about his mother, the mother of his children, and I was touched by nearly all the writing about his daughters. When the estranged daughter culled up to him with her head at the end, magnificent. What both daughters had to go true was truly horrible in a way, and very telling about life in the 17th century too, and for me one of the highlights of the book.
I liked the narrator too: very well done how it is slowly revealed, the occasional ‘we’ providing puzzlement. I didn’t catch the reference to Cartaphilius, the Wandering Jew – I didn’t know that character had a proper name – if I had know, I’d caught it sooner. I only found that out after I googled Cartophilius’ name.
I think you’re right when you talk about the momument & the nudging, and I think it’s something most of Robinson’s writing: what can we do? What’s the result of our efforts? It basically underlies his entire writing as a way of trying to help the human effort towards the good. It’s a theme I’ve writing about before myself, like in the Richard Powers’ Bewilderment review, and I think Robinson takes a much more modest approach – in a way similar to his “enough is as good as a feast” (but then taken ethically). I think I also wrote on it in the Ministry review, and my take basically is that even while Robinson might be preaching to the choir, if he just helps to energize the choir, it helps a wee bit. But as he himself knows: not a lot, it’s just a crab walk in the end, and this Galileo novel might be the most pessimistic of them all: not even a black utopia as Ministry, but putting “the enormous inertia of human weakness, greed, fear – all the sheer bloody mass of us” in clear focus, inserting adding a character that’s possibly from the end of human times, showing how reason and argument don’t dictate the way power goes, etc. Tragic indeed, and also KSR questioning himself whether he has helped “decreasing human suffering”.
Have you read the article by Donald Wesling on Galileo’s Dream I obliquely linked to? I should have mentioned it more explicitly. Wesling apparently helped oversee KSR’s master’s thesis on PKD, and 2010 his article in the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies is really, really insightful. I’ve only read it after I nearly finished my review, so I didn’t really change anything, except the reference to governments and people in power denying evidence as you write in the end, stuff that clearly went on during the Bush administration. Anyhow, you can read the article on JSTOR, you can make a free account and read 100 articles for free (https://www.jstor.org/stable/43921755), you might have to be creative about your occupation, but it’s a great resource, and Wesling’s is a wonderful in-depth look at the book, I would be surprised if you wouldn’t enjoy it.
He says he’s most awed by Robinson’s future speculative science writing, and I agree to a certain extent. The stuff about time, the lessons Galileo gets around Jupiter, again really powerful and imaginative writing.
I’m not sure what the aliens are about, I read them/it as the Mystery of Creation, indeed, god as you like, the stuff science can’t grasp, the stuff our senses can’t see, the bigness of reality that surpasses us. I guess that’s all variations on the same idea. Both the Church and Ganymede try to surpres knowledge, yes, but the Church does as part of a power play, to stay in power, it makes Pope Urban a Machiavelli, and Ganymede does so – at least he says so – to protect humanity from catastrophe, which makes he more like Messiah.
A rich, rich book. Writing this comment (and reading yours) has made me appreciate it even more. If you look at the scope and consistency and ethical praxis of his oeuvre, I think it’s safe to say Robinson is one of our best writers alive. There’s obviously tons of authors I haven’t read, but I can’t think of anyone else.
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I’ve been looking forward to your review of this book, and I am not disappointed at all. It’s been a very long time since I read this book; I read it when the paperback edition had just been released, I think sometime in 2011. A very different time for me, but this book left an impression on me. I had been in a Philosophy of Science course in college while I was reading this, and it was a really great companion work to the discussions we were having there. And, of course, Galileo came up in that course. I ended up writing my term paper on Galileo, in part because of this book. I don’t know how much I’ll feel this book has stood up in the intervening 12 years, but your review suggests my initial impression of it was fairly close to the mark.
I have some comments, specifically where you mention both you and Trent would like to see a full-fledged first-contact-time-travel-space-opera-adventure story from KSR (I agree, I doubt we’ll ever see it, more’s the pity). Robinson did write a short story titled “The Translator” which you can find in the collection “The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson”, which is set on an alien world, with a human translator at a remote trading post on a desolate planet that serves as a meeting ground between three or four different alien races. It barely scratches the surface of this sort of writing, but I think it gives an interesting window into what that sort of story would look like out of Robinson.
I’m also in the middle of Years of Rice and Salt, and that section about “don’t ask why, why is what philosophers ask, and that’s why they’re so full of shit” reminds me of the segment of that novel focusing around the Alchemists of Samarkand, where the K character’s arrogance and attempts to ask why wind up with his hand chopped off and him and his associates nearly being executed. The rest of the section focuses on that character’s rehabilitation, and his commitment only to tease out how the world works, and explain probable causes. It’s something you see come up a few times in Robinson’s stories, including the Mars trilogy. You find in Years of Rice and Salt the same sort of caution about the responsibilities of science; the mustard gases developed by our protagonists during the Samarkand segment comes back repeatedly in the War of the Asuras section, including the bardo/reality conclusion at the Bodhi Tree, with mustard gas infused waters and a blackened landscape. You find it in the Mars trilogy, too, where Robinson makes a very particular point, in many books, over the course of decades, that scientists need to be attentive to politics, and to participate, because if they don’t their work may be used in ways they never wanted it to.
I don’t necessarily think Galileo’s Dream is in my estimation one of the top 5 Robinson novels, but it as a concept and what he’s doing with it often has me coming back to it in thought. I think it’s a unique work, and I think Robinson captures the politics and the science of Galileo’s moment really well, and does a good job talking to us now through that story.
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Thanks for the tip about The Translator. I have the collection, I might just take it out tonight and read the story. I was thinking of reading the short stories after I read all the novels, we’ll see.
I have to admit my memories of the Years of Rice and Salt are fading quickly, even though I read & reviewed it in November last year – happens sooner I would want to. Either way it’s an interesting parallel you point at. As I replied to Ted’s comment too, the piece by Wesling is very much worth reading, and he ends with pointing out Robinson’s links to science: it is no surprise this ‘Opppenheimer’ issue, to use that term that seems to fit this summer, is firmly in his mind too, especially as science is his religion to get to a better world, and Robinson has proven time and time again he wants to be an optimist that tries.
I wouldn’t put Galileo’s Dream in my top 5 either, but I agree it is unique and food for thought, and your last sentence is spot on: even though it is an historical novel with some bits of the future, ultimately it is a conversation with his readers today.
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Great review! I enjoyed the book, I must say, even though it was a bit up-and-down in terms of keeping me engaged – but I like KSR in general, even though specific books have irked me a little. Thanks!
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Thanks, I appreciate the comment. Like you, I struggled at certain times with this book too, but overall I think it is a great novel. What books of his have irked you?
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2312: too much flitting about by the heroine, and just vaguely annoying!
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I liked it, but it was only my second KSR, after Aurora, so I was still in a kind of love struck-reading mode. But you might be right about the heroine, if I’m not mistaken she kind of resembles female characters in NY 2140 and Red Moon that didn’t really appeal to me either, but I could be way off – I read the book in 2015 so my memories are very sketchy.
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Regarding the comments above about “the responsibilities of science”, that’s also a major theme in the “Red Mars” trilogy.
In those novels, characters oppose “irresponsible” machines and techonological developments at every turn, and there’s the constant notion throughout the novels that science without the proper philosophy behind it (moral, economic or political) is a kind of curse.
Most science fiction novelists portray science and tech as inherently emancipatory, but you get the sense that KSR mostly sees progress as a kind of myth. He doesn’t believe science or tech are capable of assisting human beings in aggregate so long as undergirding “issues” are also addressed.
So there’s a kind of pro-science/skeptical-of-science tension in his novels. It’s almost as though he sees science as being chiefly responsible for figuring out why it keeps being used irresponsiblity. In this sense his novels are an inversion of HG Wells’ techno utopias; with KSR the science and tech aren’t saving you, they’re instead like naive children preoccupied with figuring out why other realms (the church, the state, capital etc) keep subsuming science.
And so his “Antartica” is basically about a bunch of scientists getting owned by corporations they barely understand. In “Gold Coast” the “bad science” of the military industry complex seems “irresponsible”, but one character make a good case that it’s actually “responsile for keeping the world safe”. In “2312” there’s a tension between scientists effortlessly making asteroid-habitats like gods, and scientists being clueless folk who bumble about like idiots and have no idea that advanced AI are evolving and controlling things in unseen corners. In “Galileo’s Dream” science is the slave to the church and state, “In “Years of Rice” to monarchs and theocrats, and in “Green Earth” to Big Oil, special interest groups and porkbarrel sleaze.
So he’s a weird SF author in the sense that he’s iconoclastic. He’s skeptical of certain forms of blind science worship. In the Mars trilogy, I believe he even has a character (Anne Clayborne, I think; a geologist “born” with a concern for “red clay”) who opposes all science outright which alters the surface of Mars. You see similar characters throughout his other novels (“Green Earth”, “Three Californias”) who have an almost Luddite streak.
Every year I read or re-read one KSR novel. This review has me itching to re-read one. I’m almost finished a John Le Carre marathon, and might give “Galileo’s Dream” a re-read. I’ve always thought it the most brisk and fun of his big novels; there’s something entertaining about a cranky old scientist moaning about his haemroids while battling the Church wearing a custom-made jockstrap.
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Interesting remarks, thanks. I tend to think KSR is right, and I have given up on the notion that social sciences will direct us towards a better society – it helps us get there a incrementally, but not enough to really get us towards any kind of (global) utopia at all. In a way lots of us live in a kind of utopia obviously, but that’s another matter. The change that the products of science & technology will cause real catastrophe or extinction before it will get us utopia seems to be significant – at least larger than the other way around. So yes indeed, “issues” need to be resolved, and those have to do with power distribution, ‘power’ being the antagonist in Galileo’s Dream, Green Earth, Years of Rice, etc.
It makes me want to go back and reread Shaman in that light: does that novel portray a human society with less ‘power issues’? And does it say anything about how power is related to the birth of a proto-science?
As for iconoclasm: true. It’s interesting to compare Ministry to Stephenson’s Termination Shock. Ministry is much more about social solutions, Stephenson goes full tech. I guess there’s truth to both of the approaches, and we need a varied approach, but that’s such a giant cliché that I’m a bit embarrassed typing it.
I’ve just scrolled true the authors I’ve read, and I don’t see that many science skeptics. Maybe Ballard a bit, maybe John Brunner, maybe PKD, Gibson. But none have framed it in the way KSR does. There’s obviously fear for nukes in the writing of the 50ies and the cold war, but that’s also another matter.
Have you read Radiance by Scholz? I can’t recommend it enough.
Never read Le Carre. I do have A Delicate Truth on my TBR, bought it on a whim in a second hand shop. What would you recommend?
What KSR novels haven’t you read? I was under the impression you’d read them all…
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Great review, Bart! I am really intrigued by this book, though I might get to The Ministry for the Future first. I think the points you make about responsibility of science/scientists are very salient, especially today – but there is also the question of validity of putting an unusually big burden on their shoulders just because they are smarter than most, somewhat along the lines of Spider-Man’s motto.
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Interesting remark. I don’t however feel that Robinson is playing the blame game. I tend to even think of him as an amoral author, in a way. For him it seems less about individual moral responsability, it’s more about pointing at structures that guide biological humans to do (un)natural things. But that’s just my feeling, maybe some of the other commenters can chime in on this matter.
In Galileo’s case for instance, while he is clearly portrayed with serious moral faults, at the same time KSR remains sympathetic throughout, and shows Galileo can’t really help himself.
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Btw, read Ministry asap 😉 I think it’s formally really an interesting novel, and it is again a testament that KSR in that stage of his carreer and life managed to write something that was artistically really new, topically and morally relevant, and yet feels as a logic continuation of all his previous writing. Some claim it doesn’t have enough story or character depth, but I disagree entirely, it just needs careful reading. I was moved to tears.
The only thing I wonder is how soon some of the subject matter/science/projections will turn out to be outdated. My guess it will remain readable and relevant for at least 5 or 10 years.
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