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babewiththepower.bsky.social · @babewiththepower.bsky.social@bridge.neodb.net

Rated Galileo's Dream 4/10

At last I've finished this book! I don't remember when I may have gotten it, but it's obvious it was once a library book, so I must've bought it from the local library system's clearance fundraising book cellar. Having read and loved thoroughly Robinson's Mars trilogy in high school, I figured it was way past time I read another of his books. The summary of the plot in the flaps sounded so interesting and completely in my wheel house. A founder of science, time travel, and the future in the balance? Yes, please.<br/><br/>And then it took me three months to struggle with finding the desire to struggle through it to the end. It turned out it did have the components covered in the book flaps. Unfortunately, that write-up was much more exciting sounding than the actual novel. The overwhelming majority of the time is spent in the 1600s and most of it Galileo moaning or complaining about something or the other. Or going on about his various relatives who were all hangers on wholly dependent on him.<br/><br/>If you're really into historical fiction of 1500s/1600s Italy, then you'll enjoy this book a lot more than I did. It's not poorly written, it just really wasn't what I was interested in. I would've loved a lot more time spent in the future and with those aliens on Jupiter and Europa etc. Instead I got a lot more about Galileo and descriptions of his hernia and the truss he used to keep his guts in place, constant drinking, and constant need of money not to mention his impoverished starving daughters he stuck in a convent. By the time the future people change the end of his life, I'd long stopped caring and just wanted to get to the end. The last 30 or so pages of the 527 were the most interesting of the lot. A novel from that final character's POV would've been way more interesting to me.

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Published 2026-08-18 17:59 UTC · bridged from Atmosphere