Abstract

This essay argues that Kim Stanley Robinson’s Galileo’s Dream is an example of science fiction as science studies. By retelling the story of Galileo’s conflicts with the church embedded within the context of his personal life, Robinson portrays Galileo as First Scientist: not of an abstract and disembodied Enlightenment science, but rather of the material, contextual, and worldly science evident in the work of scholars likw Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, and Sandra Harding. Further, Robinson presents this materialist science as a utopian project of world remaking, consistent with Fredric Jameson’s reframing of utopianism as impulse rather than blueprint. Robinson’s utopian science conceptualizes the natural world as agent instead of object, and science as part of, rather than separate from, the social world. This “amodern” science, the novel suggests, can help us to see nature as simultaneously scientific and sacred and offers the best tool for confronting the environmental crisis of capitalist science.

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