Doctor Mirabilis (42 page)
It would be hard to find any branch of modern science which was
not
influenced by Roger’s theoretical scheme; yet by the same token this leaven was so slow-working that I could do little justice
to it in the course of a novel. Where I could legitimately do so, I have offered hints; but I could not for instance, say
anywhere but here that:
– a passage printed from Bacon provided Columbus with one of his chiefest theoretical props in presenting his case to the
Spanish court;
– Peter the Peregrine’s MS.
De magnete
greatly influenced the epoch-making treatise of Sir Francis Bacon’s contemporary William Gilbert on the same subject, because
Gilbert -as he says in explanation in his first chapter - attributed Peter’s conclusions to Roger Bacon:
– the whole tissue of the space-time continuum of general relativity is a direct descendant of Roger’s assumption, in
De multiplicatione specierum
and elsewhere, that the universe has a metrical frame, and that mathematics thus is in some important sense real, and not
just a useful exercise.
1
In some small instances, the work of lesser men did not prove to be easy to explain in fiction, either; for example, that
the curious “sweet vitriol’ discovered by the alchemist I have dubbed Raimundo del Rey was what we now know
as ether (the anaesthetic, not the substrate). For this dilemma of historical fiction about science, I have found no workable
solution but this long apology.
Roger’s argument from Josephus in Chapter IX is a misquotation. What Josephus actually said was that the ancients were given
long lives because they could not otherwise have made accurate astronomical observations. This may seem even more preposterous
than what Roger makes Josephus say, but at least it is Josephus’s own opinion, whereas the other is only Roger’s. He often
misquoted his authorities, even his revered Seneca, whom he misquoted at great length. It is of course entirely possible (especially
when he is quoting Seneca on ethics) that he had hold of an edition now lost, which might or might not have been closer to
the original than the ones now extant; and quite often the variations must have been simply copyists’ errors and/or mistranslations,
against both of which Roger rails in work after work.
1
On the other hand, he may have introduced at least some of these distortions himself, for forensic effect, which would have
been entirely in character. Since we are dealing here with an age prior to the invention of printing, the more charitable
interpretations cannot, at the very least, be disproven.
Money in the thirteenth century was scarce and its value in modern terms is difficult to estimate, since so many payments
- especially to the Church - were made in kind, and because there were then so few things to buy. It is probably conservative
to reckon the English pound of the period - which was then a real pound of English pennies, the most stable coin of commerce
throughout the century - at about forty-five 1960 U.S. dollars. Since the income of the average parishioner was about ten
pounds a year, it can be seen that Christopher Bacon, who was able to bury two thousand pounds without
even knowing (because of his ignorance of foreign exchange) the exact worth of the hoard, must have been a wealthy man indeed
The best scholarly study of this subject known to me is Stewart C. Eastern’s
Roger Bacon and his search for a universal science
(Columbia, 1952), a warm, witty and elegant book. I am enormously indebted to it, particularly to its critical bibliography,
which is a guide to everything about Roger Bacon which pretends to be factual, even encyclopedia articles and the scrappiest
of pamphlets. Where my interpretations differ from Easton’s, he is more likely to be right than I. The
Britannica
article’s bibliography, however, also refers the reader to the Bacon legend; Easton studiously ignores this, but it is one
of the reasons why Bacon is still a seminal figure in the Western world.
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A Case Of Conscience
A Torrent Of Faces (with Norman L. Knight)
And All The Stars A Stage
Black Easter
Doctor Mirabilis
Cities in Flight
, comprising:
∼
They Shall Have Stars
∼
A Life For The Stars
∼
Earthman, Come Home
∼
A Clash Of Cymbals (The Triumph Of Time)
Fallen Star (The Frozen Year)
Jack Of Eagles
Midsummer Century
Mission To The Heart Stars
More Issues At Hand
The Day After Judgement
The Duplicated Man (with Robert A. W. Lowndes)
The Issue At Hand
The Night Shapes
The Quincunx Of Time
The Seedling Stars
The Star Dwellers
The Tale That Wags The God
The Warriors Of Day
Titan’s Daughter
Vor
Welcome To Mars!
For Virginia
James Blish (1921–1975)
James Blish studied microbiology at Rutgers and then served as a medical laboratory technician in the US army during
the Second World War. Among his best known books are
A Case of Conscience
, for which he won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1959, and the Cities in Flight sequence:
They Shall Have Stars
,
A Life for the Stars
,
Earthman Come Home
and
A Clash of Cymbals
(published in the US as
The Triumph of Time
). He also wrote almost a dozen books adapting episodes of the
Star Trek
television series, and the first original spin-off novel,
Spock Must Die!
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © James Blish 1964
All rights reserved.
The right of James Blish to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2013 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 10400 6
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or
dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
1
I have quoted part of Roger’s reasoning on this point in Chapter XII, but there is really no way short of another book to
convey the flamboyancy of this logical jump, which spans seven centuries without the faintest sign of effort. The most astonishing
thing about it, perhaps. is its casualness; what Roger begins to talk about is the continuum of action, an Aristotelian commonplace
in his own time, but within a few sentences he has invented - purely for the sake of argument - the lummiferous ether which
so embroiled the physics of the nineteenth century, and only a moment later throws the notion out in favour of the Einsteinean
metrical frame, having in the process completely skipped over Galilean relativity and the inertial frames of Newton. Nothing
in the tone of the discussion entitles the reader to imagine that Roger was here aware that he was making a revolution-or
in fact creating a series of them; the whole performance is even-handed and sober, just one more logical outcome of the way
he customarily thought. It was that way of thinking, not any specific theory» that he invented; the theory of theories as
tools.
1
Roger’s own scribes for the
Op. Tert.,
which includes a diatribe against the dog-orthography of his times, delivered the text back to him faithfully corrected into
the
mumpsimus
it denounced.