Author: oBrien

The third military mission is almost to Saturn’s moons. The earlier craft were machines only, but this is different. This is headed by Cassandra, Spanish marines. It’s time to deal in earnest with what’s there.

World politics by 2041 has changed quickly – the global players have moved seats, the familiar is destroyed.

“What’s out there, Sollie,” she asked him again. Cassie and Higgins carried the codes, had the final targets, “waxed and sealed” in their heads.

That Earth they may never see again, fed only half the Luna Saturni facts, lay now behind them, turbulent, anxious and dangerous. But that was tame against what was happening aboard.

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Hey, go away. I’m  writing. On a mission. And it may never happen.

“Fearless in new truth”  proved harder than either imagined.

In Bologna, Celia’s painting fame grew. She neglected simpler challenges in her own growth, ordinary feats like riding, or going to sea. Her artistic purity battled with the seductions of the wealth.

They did both negotiate a new world of lover and mistress, but in that Italy, they needed secrecy, and that alone violated their vow.

Gian’s compromises were greater. The Inquisition had executed Bruno and house-arrested Galileo. To the political and religious interests of the seventeenth century, more “heresy” from Cassini’s telescope was not tolerable. The Earth stood still in the Universe, and all else went around. Cassini’s research repeatedly said otherwise.

To speak out would be death.

The Guardian, interview with Alex Miller, Australian author of The Passage of Love—a wonderful and poignant novel set in so many of those Australian places where I too have lived.

But, back to Cassini’s Vision. The history? In renaissance Italy? In the Enlightenment? Yes, we have an “ocean of stories”.

I am hoping I have found a little of that novelist’s nous to make an enjoyable narrative, some magic, from that plethora of material.

Because the history does not make the story. The history is to give background. History facts deserve to be bent. History’s to tease. It’s to give smell and taste, maybe humour.

But it’s the story that makes the story.