Galileo's Children: Tales of Science vs. Superstition Read online

  Table of Contents

  Preface: “It Still Moves!”

  The Stars Below by Ursula K. Le Guin

  The Will of God by Keith Roberts

  The Way of Cross and Dragon by George R. R. Martin

  The Pope of the Chimps by Robert Silverberg

  The World Is a Sphere by Edgar Pangborn

  Written in Blood by Chris Lawson

  Falling Star by Brendan DuBois

  Three Hearings on the Existence of Snakes in the Human Bloodstream by James Alan Gardner

  The Star by Arthur C. Clarke

  The Last Homosexual by Paul Park

  The Man Who Walked Home by James Tiptree Jr.

  When the Old Gods Die by Mike Resnick

  Oracle by Greg Egan

  GALILEO’S CHILDREN

  Tales of Science vs. Superstition

  Edited by Gardner Dozois

  Galileo’s Children

  Gardner Dozois

  Thirteen tales dealing with the struggle of scientists toward truth in spite of opposition from religious and political forces arrayed against them.

  Authors include:

  George R.R. Martin

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Robert Silverberg

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Keith Roberts

  Edgar Pangborn

  Chris Lawson

  Brendan DuBois

  James Alan Gardner

  Paul Park

  James Tiptree, Jr.

  Mike Resnick

  Greg Egan

  PYR

  an imprint of Prometheus Books

  The Crown Rose

  Fiona Avery

  THE HEALER

  Michael Blumlein, MD

  GALILEO’S CHILDREN: TALES OF SCIENCE VS. SUPERSTITION

  edited by Gardner Dozois

  THE PRODIGAL TROLL

  Charles Coleman Finlay

  PARADOX: BOOK ONE OF THE NULAPEIRON SEQUENCE

  John Meaney

  HERE, THERE & EVERYWHERE

  Chris Roberson

  STAR OF GYPSIES

  Robert Silverberg

  THE RESURRECTED MAN

  Sean Williams

  Published 2005 by PYR™, an imprint of Prometheus Books

  Galileo’s Children: Tales of Science vs. Superstition.

  Copyright © 2005 by Gardner Dozois

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Inquiries should be addressed to

  PYR

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Galileo’s children : tales of science vs. superstitition / edited by Gardner Dozois.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-59102-315-7 (alk. paper)

  1. Science fiction, American. 2. Superstition—Fiction. 3. Persecution—Fiction. 4. Scientists—Fiction. I. Dozois, Gardner R.

  PS648.S3G35 2005

  813’.0876208—dc22

  2005010181

  Printed in Canada on acid-free paper

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-344-7

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material:

  “The Stars Below,” by Ursula K. Le Guin. Copyright © 1974, 1975 by Ursula K. Le Guin. First published in Orbit 14 (Harper & Row), edited by Damon Knight. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, the Virginia Kidd Literary Agency.

  “The Will of God,” by Keith Roberts. Copyright © 1991 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 1991. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate and the agent for the estate, the Owlswick Literary Agency.

  “The Way of Cross and Dragon,” by George R. R. Martin. Copyright © 1979 by Omni International Ltd. First published in Omni, June 1979. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Pope of the Chimps,” by Robert Silverberg. Copyright © 1982 by Robert Silverberg. First appeared in Perpetual Light (Warner Books), edited by Alan Ryan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The World Is a Sphere,” by Edgar Pangborn. Copyright © 1973 by Terry Carr. First published in Universe 3 (Random House), edited by Terry Carr. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate and the agent for the estate, Richard Curtis Associates.

  “Written in Blood,” by Chris Lawson. Copyright © 1999 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Falling Star,” by Brendan DuBois. Copyright © 2004 by Brendan DuBois. First published in Space Stations (DAW), edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Three Hearings on the Existence of Snakes in the Human Bloodstream,” by James Alan Gardner. Copyright © 1997 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, February 1997. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Star,” by Arthur C. Clarke. Copyright © 1955 by Royal Publications, Inc. First published in Infinity Science Fiction, November 1955. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agents.

  “The Last Homosexual,” by Paul Park. Copyright © 1996 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 1996. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Man Who Walked Home,” by James Tiptree Jr. Copyright © 1972 by Ultimate Publishing Co. First published in Amazing Science Fiction Stories, May 1972. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate and the agent for the estate, the Virginia Kidd Literary Agency.

  “When the Old Gods Die,” by Mike Resnick. Copyright © 1995 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, April 1995. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Oracle,” by Greg Egan. Copyright © 2000 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Preface

  “It Still Moves!”

  I do not feel obligated to believe that the same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect intended us to forgo their use.

  —Galileo Galilei

  “Eppur si muove!” (“It still moves!” or “But it does move!” or “And yet it does move!”—depending on the translator) is what Italian scientist and pioneering astronomer Galileo Galilei is supposed to have muttered defiantly to the Court of the Inquisition in 1633 after having been forced to abjure his belief in heliocentricity, the idea that the Earth rotated around the sun rather than itself being the center of the solar system, as held by the geocentric Tychonian model officially upheld by the Church.

  This famous story is almost certainly apocryphal. Galileo would have to have been suicidally rash to make such a remark to the Inquisition after having narrowly missed being sentenced to torture and death (as it was, he would remain under house arrest until his death in 1642), and records suggest instead that he was a careful, even cautious man. In fact, some modern commentators have criticized Galileo for caving in to the Inquisition and agreeing to “abjure, curse, and detest” his work—but then, they weren’t in the power of the Inquisition, who did
send thousands of people to face mutilation and horrible deaths, especially in Spain, and who were then in the full flush of their power.

  The danger of torture and death that Galileo faced was very real. Giordano Bruno had been burned to death at the stake in 1600 for holding similar heretical beliefs, including a belief in the large, possibly infinite, size of the universe, and theologians such as the Dominican father Caccini were preaching that “geometry is of the devil” and that “mathematicians should be banished as the authors of all heresies.” Another theologian declared, of the Copernican model of the solar system that Galileo would be tried for heresy for teaching: “It upsets the whole basis of theology. If the Earth is a planet, and only one among several planets, it cannot be that any such great things have been done specially for it as the Christian doctrine teaches. If there are other planets, since God makes nothing in vain, they must be inhabited; but how can their inhabitants be descended from Adam? How can they trace back their origin to Noah’s Ark? How can they have been redeemed by the Saviour?”

  And yet, the Earth was a planet, and a planet that rotated around the sun, whether those inconvenient facts conflicted with Scripture or not. “Eppur si muove,” indeed. And although Galileo probably never said that, he no doubt would have sympathized with the sentiment, since it’s clear that his recantation was insincere and that he continued to believe that indeed it did move, whatever the Inquisition said, throughout the rest of his life, toward the end of which he wrote the epigram that opens this preface.

  It’s easy enough to make Galileo’s story an exercise in Catholic bashing—especially since the Church did not admit that “errors had been made” in the case of Galileo until 1992—but the reality is more multifaceted and contradictory than that. During the Middle Ages, the same Church that later prosecuted Galileo and Giordano Bruno had gathered and collected the secular knowledge of the ancient Romans and Greeks that might otherwise have disappeared, and many theologians then and later, especially the Jesuits, were also noted investigators into scientific mysteries. The Benedictine abbot Benedetto Castelli, a former student of Galileo’s and a professor of mathematics, had come to Galileo’s defense, an extremely risky thing to do, and part of Galileo’s house arrest was spent in the home of the sympathetic archbishop Ascanio of Silva, also a learned man; even the pope, Pope Urban VII, was an old friend of Galileo’s—which perhaps explains why it was possible for Galileo to plea-bargain his way out of the rack and the stake. Clearly, many churchmen were sympathetic to Galileo, and perhaps privately believed that he was right—but that didn’t matter as long as the power was in the hands of those who were determined to make science conform to Scripture and who refused to look at any facts that didn’t agree with the opinions they already held, just as many refused to even look through Galileo’s telescopes, for fear of seeing “sinful things.”

  To enforce willful ignorance through terror—that strikes me as superstition, not religion. And it’s a kind of superstition that has persisted down through the years, even to the present day, in many different cultures—there’s more than one kind of Scripture to which fearful men have tried to make science conform, with persecution and prosecution and proscription, with imprisonment and exile and bloody murder.

  The Inquisition has cast the longest and coldest shadow over the imaginations of Western writers, as this anthology will make clear, but it’s far from the only time that proscriptions have been set up as to what people were allowed to think, and enforced with law and iron.

  About the same time that Galileo was clashing with the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Church under Queen Elizabeth I was hunting down Catholics and having them hanged, drawn, and quartered, a fate as gruesome as the bloody tricks the Inquisition was getting up to (and the great Protestant reformer Philipp Melanchthon was being just as fierce in his attacks on the Copernican theory as was the Roman Church, so Galileo might not have fared any better if it had been the Protestants who were running the show). In China, under the Ming dynasty, Grand Eunuch Chêng Ho commanded the mightiest navy the world had ever seen, far in advance in numbers and sophistication of technology than anything Europe would see for a hundred years or more—until the Confusionist factor at court, fearful that new ideas and contact with foreigners with very different customs would shake up the rigidly stratified class structure of Chinese society, convinced the emperor to institute the Great Withdrawal of 1433, disbanding and scuttling the mighty fleets and forbidding his subjects to travel abroad on pain of death. Later, according to Daniel J. Boorstin in The Discoverers, the ban was “eventually extended to include coastal shipping, and later even the construction of sea-going junks”—which, to quote Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, caused the country to step back “from the verge of an industrial revolution in the 14th Century” that might have made China the master of the world, and instead to fall into centuries of cultural and technological stagnation that ultimately left them at the dubious mercy of the European nations who forced them to break their self-imposed isolation. In Tokugawa Japan in the 1600s, a few decades later, another kind of Great Withdrawal was taking place, and another country would also step back from the brink of an industrial revolution, with dismal results. Firearms had been introduced into Japan in 1543, in the form of two arquebuses, matchlock muskets, that had been sold to a warlord by Portuguese traders hitching a ride on a Chinese junk, and soon, to again quote from Guns, Germs, and Steel, the Japanese had “commenced indigenous gun production, greatly improved gun technology, and by AD 1600 owned more and better guns than any other country in the world.” The desire to preserve a rigidly stratified class system, superstition, fear of foreigners, and the distaste of Confusionists for change soon led to the de facto suppression of gun manufacture and the banning of foreign trade—and indeed any foreign contact. This succeeded in keeping Japan frozen at the same cultural and technological level for more than another two hundred years—until the gunboats of Admiral Matthew Perry forced them to open themselves to the world again, in an inferior and disadvantaged position. The very Arabic nations whose extremist factions now rail against “Western science” were largely responsible for passing the basic mathematical and scientific knowledge out of which that science was later developed along to the West in the first place. And so on.

  Even today, the pope interdicts cloning, the president of the United States pushes to make stem cell research illegal, mention of the theory of evolution is banned from textbooks and explanations of “creation science” are inserted instead, and politicians of both political parties vote against money for space exploration or any other kind of research where the instant up-front financial benefit to the bottom line is not immediately evident.

  The battle of science against superstition is still going on, as is the battle to not have to think only what somebody else thinks is okay for you to think. In fact, in a society where more people believe in angels than believe in evolution, that battle may be more critical than ever.

  One of the major battlefields is science fiction, one of the few forms of literature where rationality, skepticism, the knowledge of the inevitability of change, and the idea that wide-ranging freedom of thought and unfettered imagination and curiosity are good things are the default positions, taken for granted by most of its authors.

  Oh, it’s not quite that clear-cut, of course—transcendentalism has always been a major force in the genre, with even hardheaded rationalists like Arthur C. Clarke flirting with the mystic in novels such as Childhood’s End, just as many of today’s theological physicists sound more like mystics or theologians than sober scientists, with their talk of the invisible worlds that surround us and the hidden forces that shape the workings and the structure of the universe.

  Still, for the moment at least, until some new Inquisition, motivated by ignorance, intolerance, and fear, forces its writers to go underground and mutter “It still moves!” to each other in hiding, science fiction provides one of the few places in modern letters wher
e the battle between science and superstition is openly discussed and debated, and that makes those who write it, as well as those brave characters they write about, embroiled in the age-old struggle to prevent the control of the human mind and the suppression of the human spirit, “Galileo’s Children” in a very real way indeed.

  The anthology that follows takes us to many different arenas in that struggle—from the past to the present to the future, from worlds that never were and never will be to worlds deep in space that someday may come to pass—and introduces us to many different warriors, male and female, rich and poor, young and old, who, in their different ways—some quietly, some defiantly, some reluctantly—fight the kind of battles that we ourselves might someday have to fight if we want our children and our grandchildren to be allowed to read these words.

  Enjoy—and ponder.

  The Stars Below

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Ursula K. Le Guin is probably one of the best known and most universally respected science fiction writers in the world today. Her famous novel The Left Hand of Darkness may have been the most influential science fiction novel of its decade, and it shows every sign of becoming one of the enduring classics of the genre—even ignoring the rest of Le Guin’s work, the impact of this one novel alone on future science fiction and future science fiction writers would be incalculably strong. (Her 1968 fantasy novel, A Wizard of Earthsea, would be almost as influential on future generations of High Fantasy and Young Adult writers.) The Left Hand of Darkness won both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards, as did Le Guin’s monumental novel The Dispossessed a few years later. Her novel Tehanu won her another Nebula in 1990, and she has also won three other Hugo Awards and a Nebula Award for her short fiction, as well as the National Book Award for Children’s Literature for her novel The Farthest Shore, part of her Earthsea sequence. Her other novels include Planet of Exile, The Lathe of Heaven, City of Illusions, Rocannon’s World, The Beginning Place, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, Tehanu, Searoad, the controversial multimedia novel Always Coming Home, and The Telling. She has published nine collections: The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Orsinian Tales, The Compass Rose, Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, Four Ways to Forgiveness, Tales of Earthsea, The Birthday of the World, and, most recently, Changing Planes. Upcoming is a new novel, Gifts, and a collection of her critical essays, The Wave in the Mind: Tales and Essays on the Reader, and the Imagination. She lives with her husband in Portland, Oregon. Here she relates the grim but oddly beautiful story of an astronomer who, denied the study of the stars by the agents of ignorance and fear, undertakes a strange and perilous journey into the uncharted hinterland of his own soul.