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( ( ( 225 ( cited as an illustrative example of the science fiction tale of alternate history and is almost invariably included in bibliographies of this subgenre or theme (such as the elaborate one maintained by Robert Schmunk at http:/ /www.uchronia.net/).1 This story introduces us to a world in which Columbus’s ships are inexplicably equipped with telegraphs, shortwave radios, electric lights, and other evidences of technology that we know to have been impossible in 1492. Only a few pages in, however, we are given some clues as to what might be going on. Friar Sparks, the telegrapheraboard the Santa Maria, has been in contact with his colleague Father Sparks in the Canary Islands (Sparks seems to be a generic term for telegraphers ), mostly sharing news and gossip—Turks massing to march on Austria, Savonarola denouncing the pope, and reports of mysterious airborne “flying sausages” (Farmer 2006, 83)—but also speculating on philosophical notions such as “parallel time tracks” (85), an idea put forward by one Dysphagius of Gotham (a characteristic Farmer pun; “dysphagius” translates literally into “hard to swallow”). Father Sparks entertains Friar Sparks with questions of what the world might be like had Queen Isabella turned down Columbus’s proposed voyage, or—more to the point—had “Saint Roger Bacon” been persecuted by the Church instead of being encouraged to pursue his scientific experiments. In the story, this eventually gave rise to an order that enabled the Catholic Church to become masters of alchemy and develop these new technologies—whose details are ingeniously incorporated into a version of orthodox belief (the radio abbreviation kc, for example, stands not for kilocycles but for “kilo cherubim ,” since messages are transmitted by thousands of tiny cherubim who “line up and hurl themselves across the ether” with “the nose of one being brushed by the feathertips of the cherub’s wings ahead” (86). What we would call frequency is described as “continuous wingheight,” and signals 13 Babylon Revisited Alternate Cosmologies from Farmer to Chiang gary k. Wolfe Philip José Farmer’s 1952 short story “Sail On! Sail On!” is often 226 ) ) ) ParaBolic fUtUres are received by a “C.W. realizer,” or telegraph, at the other end (87). The scheme is worked out with such ingenuity that we can begin to appreciate how such technology could be conceptualized in theological terms.We are invited to conclude that the story is indeed an alternate history in which the fate of Roger Bacon was the principal divergence point, or “jonbar point” as later science fiction writers began to describe it, after a usage by Jack Williamson in his 1938 serial “The Legion of Time,” a classic pulpera adventure story in which an apparently trivial action by a character named John Barr radically affects the future development of civilization. But Farmer shrewdly drops a few additional clues that complicate matters further. He mentions an experiment by a scientist named Angelo Angelei, who by dropping objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa discovered that objects of different weights do indeed fall at different speeds, thus confirming Aristotle’s speculations (85). This is a clear allusion to the experiments—probably apocryphal—credited to the similarly named Galileo Galilei more than a century later, which of course contradicted Aristotle’s assertions. As the story draws toward its conclusion, other odd things begin to happen. Birds are sighted with enormous wings but no feet, suggesting they live their entire lives aloft. Mysterious telegraph signals appear, apparently from nowhere, and a debate ensues among the crew as to whether they might be coming from the moon. However, a young crew member, Salcedo, speculates that the long-established notion of a round Earth may be erroneous and that the signals might be coming from an earlier expedition, financed by the Portuguese, which had in fact sailed off the edge of the convex but essentially flat Earth. The story ends as the ocean currents rise to a roar, the ship accelerates uncontrollably, and—just as Friar Sparks decodes the strange messages and determines they are indeed from the Portuguese—sails off the edge of the world (91). The most detailed critical commentary on this story is probably from James Gunn, who for years used it in his university classes as a way of introducing students to science fiction’s particular reading protocols. As Gunn points out, what initially seems to be an alternate history “about a world that would have been created if religion had been supportive of science”—a reading supported by...

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