I loved this book. It’s both a pure shining SF novel and a good, respectful fictionalized biography of an amazing man; it really brings the beginnings of science to light, and I learnt a lot I hadn’t known about the politics surrounding the Copernican system at the time. (I also learnt something I hadn’t known about elliptical orbits, too.)

If I could arrange my bookshelves by affinity (and if I hadn’t taken it back to the library), this one would go between Anathem, Godel Escher Bach, 2061: Odyssey Three, Galileo’s Daughter, and Latitude. In fact, I had to re-read Latitude almost immediately on finishing Galileo’s Dream.

If the proposition had been put to me, prior to reading this novel, that it was even remotely possible for a text to be at one and the same time a time travel caper, a 1930s detective story, a deconstruction of the Country House Novel, and an extended meditation on modelling chaotic systems and the cosmological significance of jumble sales, I would (I freely admit) have been dubious.

There are so very many things I would like to say about this book, but it will take another half-dozen readings at least for me to understand it properly. That is, however, a chore I will undertake with equanimity.

Normally, I would encourage all of you to read this book immediately; however, that would be wrong of me. You must, if you have not already, read Three Men in a Boat (though The Wind in the Willows will do at a pinch), The Complete Jeeves and Wooster, By His Bootstraps, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, William the Conqueror, and at the very least The Nine Tailors and Gaudy Night. Then you must read this book.

I was a little disappointed when I worked out one of the central mysteries long before the protagonists did; but then again, it was (in retrospect) inevitable, and I suspect Willis would have been disappointed if a genre-aware reader hadn’t been expecting that.

The book is gentle, witty, poignant, and more than occasionally side-splittingly hilarious. It runs on cheerfully, like the ever-flowing stream which forms such an eminently Victorian metaphor for time, but – like the stream – there are all sorts of interesting eddies and crosslinks inside the flow. Nothing is insignificant, the story tells us. Nothing gets ignored or passed over; not bulldogs, Oxford Dons, kittens, spinster ladies, or the most egregiously hideous Victorian decorative ware. All Nature is but Art.

I adore the Stainless Steel Rat books. I grew up with them – my father’s old Sphere paperbacks, and then 2000AD serialized The Stainless Steel Rat For President in 1984/5. (I was 8. I was in heaven.)

Slippery Jim DiGriz has always been the epitome of the fast-talking, high-living, straight-shooting trickster hero (and First Person Smartass), and what’s more he never kills people. He’s rather the Technical Pacifist, though, and it’s stated fairly unambiguously that this is down to his not wanting to kill people rather than, you know, not wanting them to die. And I don’t have a problem with that… it’s more honest than the A-Team version, where they very carefully show everyone escaping from the burning building or the car crash. And Jim rarely sheds a tear (except in a melodramatic smartass kind of way) for the mooks who do insist on dying. This happens a lot around his wife Angelina.

Speaking of Angelina, though… she’s a former psycho killer mastermind, who was born Extremely Ugly and had herself reshaped into ravishingness. She and Slippery Jim fell in love, and he had top Patrol doctors surgically implant a conscience in her. This is possibly a littlIe too close to Taming Wild Women for my taste, but, well, 1972 SF.

Speaking of 1972… well, 1975 really. This is one of that odd sub-genre of SF where the protagonist travels to the author’s time (or timeline) and generally place, and we’re supposed to derive some enjoyment from their attempts to understand our world or their gleeful rampage through it. And, of course, from recognizing things they don’t.

It seems to be closely related to that odd sub-genre of SF set in a fantastical world which halfway through turns out, with a nod and a wink, to be a postapocalyptic version of our own.

I suppose you could call them reverse portal-quest stories; there’s probably a case for understanding them as a kind of mooreeffoc story, with the same abrupt disruptive perceptual shift in the Way Things Are.

On the other hand, the past is a different country, and 1970s America even more so; I feel that that perceptual shift trivializes and distances the interestingness of it. Which is probably useful in context, since that lets us focus on the characters and the capers instead of the scenery.