Galileo's Dream (69 page)

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.

T
HE 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!

K
IM
S
TANLEY
R
OBINSON
is a winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. He is the author of nineteen previous books, including the bestselling Mars trilogy and the critically acclaimed
Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, Sixty Days and Counting, The Years of Rice and Salt
, and
Antarctica
. In 2008 he was named a “Hero of the Environment” by
Time
magazine, and he recently joined in the Sequoia Parks Foundation's Artists in the Back Country program. He lives in Davis, California.

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.

S
PECTRA
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

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