he year that provides the title for Mary Gentle's new alternate-history novel is the 1610 we know. Underneath the grue and fustian inherent in the manner of its telling, 1610: a Sundial in a Grave, unlike almost any other alternate-history novel that comes to mind, is a story about retaining the story we have already learned about the planet we live upon. So—though it is placed at a time when the setting of the world was about to shift from "Dark" to "Enlightened," and though it mentions Giordano Bruno, and John Dee, and the Hermetic mysteries, and the Rosy Cross, and Sir Francis Bacon, author of The Great Instauration—in 1610 Gentle sets off all the same on a radically different course than (say) John Crowley, who has been mining this territory in his great Aegypt sequence since 1987.
What Crowley's cast has been seeking is the annunciation of a new story of the world, what I've been calling (in various places, quoting Bacon) an instauration. Instauration fantasies are tales in which this historical world is instaurated, which means renewed, or transformed; and there is a shift in the ground-bass of reality; and the story of the world, its fundamental grammar shifted, takes us elsewhere: to Faerie perhaps, or to some alternate history, maybe one in which there never will be a Duke at Sarajevo, no 1914 to terminate the glory of the west. Certainly this is the deep ambition in 1610 of Robert Fludd (1574-1637)—an historical figure, a physician, chemist, alchemist, astrologer, mathematician; one of those cusp mages whose language was alchemical and whose vision of a world comprehensible through arcane deduction casts a premonitory light upon the next centuries' assumption that the world was comprehensible through mundane induction. It is his deep ambition to re-gear the future in order to save it, for unless the "normal" future (i.e., the one we know) is rejigged, what Fludd's Hermetic calculations predict for us, as they are explicated in 1610, is centuries of devastation leading to a century pretty much like the one we've just survived, and climaxing in a planetary disaster. Fludd wants none of this. He wants James I of England to die in 1610 (instead of 1625), which will bring his charismatic, violently Protestant son Henry to the throne. The consequence of this instauration will be a world not destined to end, about now, in fire, like ours.
It was a very pivotal year
Fludd provides the underlying grammar of 1610, and his attempts to change the future of the world provide much of its saving fantastic content. The problem with 1610, a problem which for many pages looks as though it is going to be terminal, is that the story it tells deals only out of the side of its mouth with Fludd's significance to the world. It is at this point that it might be a good idea to stick a spoiler into the works, because a lot of readers (I fear) are likely to become so irritated with Valentin Rochefort, whose memoir this text purports to be, that they will abandon any attempt to follow to the bitter end what seems to be nothing more than the self-unaware chronicle of the missteps of a comically accident-prone, bombastic, stumble-bum Cyrano-manqué. These antics are most distracting over the first few hundred pages of the book, as Rochefort becomes increasingly stymied in his encounters with the pale, seemingly omniscient Fludd. At one point he and Fludd duel, but as the mage (who is incompetent with the sword) has previously calculated Rochefort's every move, he proves gloatingly untouchable. An image (not perhaps deliberately invoked by Gentle) came to mind at this point, from one of the great Carl Barks comics for Disney: the sight of Donald Duck exploding into gabbles of incoherent frustration as his relative, Gladstone Gander, whose luck is infallible, gloatingly dodges his every attempt to gain the upper hand. So, here is the spoiler: Maybe not entirely consciously, but consciously enough, Rochefort meant to do that: Because of a complex guilt complex, and because he is psychosexually bound to create scenes in which he will be humiliated by figures of power, Rochefort intends every beating he gets, every imbroglio he buggers up, every schoolmarmish refusal to believe that the young woman who patently loves him does patently love him.
We need to spend a few minutes on the actual story. Rochefort is a spy in the service of the Duc de Sully; Marie de Medici, married to Henry IV of France, forces him to arrange the assassination of her husband. Rochefort attempts to flee Paris, but is hampered by an insolent young man-about-town named Dariole, who beats him at swordplay. (Readers familiar with Mary Gentle will immediately recognize by various signs, not least of which being the fact that the author all too clearly identifies with her creation, that Dariole is actually female; it takes Rochefort about a hundred pages until the penny drops.) They escape France together, picking up a samurai servant to the drowned Japanese ambassador to England; and become entangled with Fludd, along with various figures prominent in English politics (all well drawn). Fludd has already (that is, precognitively) determined that Rochefort will be essential in his strategy, and compels Rochefort to supervise the assassination of James I, at the height of a masque performed in a cavern called Wookey in Somerset. In order to ensure Rochefort's compliance, he has Dariole (everyone in the novel excepting Rochefort knows that he is a she and that they are helplessly in love with one another) kidnapped, knowing that his agents will almost certainly rape her. They do so.
Meanwhile, Rochefort has met in Wookey another acolyte of Giordano Bruno named Caterina (it is perhaps Gentle's roughest massaging of genuine history to make Fludd an epigone of Bruno, when he was in fact deeply opposed to Bruno's philosophy), and it is her intervention that sets Fludd's plans awry. She upsets the assassination applecart, and his calculations are fatally jostled; with that, and with the fact that, against the odds, Dariole escapes imprisonment, and the rest of the novel tumbles, not very gracefully, into place. The failure of grace must be laid down to Gentle's undue attention to her spunky, graceful, insolent, ineffably lovable heroine; just as Rochefort is beginning to understand that Fludd may be utilized in the complex political maneuvers he's engaged upon (not very well, but always), we find his (and our) attention diverted to a 200-page long campaign on Dariole's part to kill Fludd because he allowed her to be raped (like the picaresque heroine of Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, and about as plausibly, she has retained her virginity through escapades and perils, all-night drinking parties, drunken quarrels and other stuff).
Fiddling with the future
Meanwhile, various factions vie to exploit Fludd's capacity to calculate future events. Hatching a long-laid scheme to protect Japan from total atomic devastation, the samurai heists the battered mage back to Japan, where the inevitable brouhaha that will break out when Rochefort and Dariole get to Nagasaki themselves and capture Fludd will cause Japan to enter the Sakoko period of enforced isolation from the rest of the world. King James and Marie de Medici agree to use Fludd too, in order to keep the Thirty Years War, about to break out, from destroying civilization. Fortunately, Dariole comes to her senses, humiliates Fludd but does not kill him; and the novel moves into its final resolving pages, as the private passions of the protagonists, and Fludd's profound ambition to keep the future from going completely haywire, finally coalesce. Rochefort and Dariole, and some others, under Fludd's guidance, become Secret Masters, using the Rosicrucian hoax as cover. Their success in tweaking the future can be judged by the fact that the history they deem to be the least evil is the history we remember.
Though Mary Gentle is very far from exhibiting the research rapture that attenuates Stephenson's Quicksilver, and though (blocked by Rochefort) she is unable to enter very deeply into the underpinnings of Robert Fludd's philosophy, 1610 is all the same another strong example of how 21st-century SF writers, at the prow of their craft, are inclined to understand the world. Fludd's calculations iterate the world; they command the history of the world to unpack according to the calculus of omnipotent Word. Fludd's iteration of the case of the world is as much SF as the argument of Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, or of William Gibson's Pattern Recognition.
But we must return to the spoiler. We do, in the end, forgive Rochefort his bumbling and the beatings he receives and the humiliations he carefully arranges for himself, and the rigmaroles he blathers in our faces, because (in the end) (finally) we begin to understand what makes him tick. In the end, the love story he tells grows up enough to be a love story any of us might wish to earn. And it all gets very sexy indeed. So we forgive Rochefort. But we do not quite forgive 1610, because so much of it is hoohaw, so much of it could have been skipped if Gentle had only trusted her readers to get the point a little earlier. 1610 should have been inundated with Fludd.
