The American SF writer Jack Dann, best known for his previous novel, The Man Who Melted (1984), and for his impressive record as an editor of anthologies, offers in The Memory Cathedral: A Secret History of Leonardo da Vinci (1995) what might best be described as an anti-SF novel. He does not simply criticize the SF genre’s confidence in the desirability of technological progress, as authors of a cautious persuasion have for so long done; he goes further, journeying back through history to interrogate the very roots of scientific innovation. As his friend Michael Swanwick has more recently done in Jack Faust (1997), Dann asks a Renaissance Man, an originator of humanity’s secular curiosity, to explain himself. The resulting dialogue, as in Swanwick’s novel, is bloodcurdling.

The Memory Cathedral begins with the old and dying Leonardo, a guest of the French king, destroying records of his life. Clearly, he has performed evil deeds, which he wishes no one to emulate. But as a practitioner of the mnemonic arts which so obsessed his age, Leonardo has constructed in his own mind a ‘memory cathedral’, an architecture whose every minutest detail signifies some remembered experience or item of knowledge. How can someone who recollects everything consign to oblivion his darker memories? Dann’s novel is the intricate description of how Leonardo sought in youth to master the things of his self and the world, only to fail utterly; and, simultaneously, of how Leonardo in old age achieves control of his memories of that failure, and can at last forget. This narrative is rich, cold, and very strange, an account of a nightmare from which the only awakening is death.

The first three sections of The Memory Cathedral sum up the categories into which Renaissance scholars believed a man’s life might be divided. In ‘Caritas’ (Love), Leonardo, a budding genius but still an artist’s apprentice in late Fifteenth Century Florence, demonstrates his high aspiration in two ways: by hoping to marry a beautiful woman of exalted birth, and by demonstrating an experimental flying machine to his city’s Medici rulers. Both projects end in humiliating failure: love and youthful hope are betrayed. The text’s cynicism grows: in ‘Materia’, Leonardo fails in renewed amorous and aerial strategies, and the material basis of his prosperity in Florence is undermined by political intrigue and unearned moral disgrace. His great asset is his inventive intellect; disappointed at home, Leonardo in ‘Mens’ (Mind) finds employment with the Caliph of Egypt as a military engineer. It is here that Dann ventures into SF, into alternate history: Leonardo’s biography tells us that his notebooks contained numerous speculative sketches of weapons and military technology far in advance of his times; in this version of his life, he and others construct the devices in fact. In the wars of the Arabs and the Ottoman Turks, offensive gliders, repeating cannon, scythed chariots, and diving gear are employed, in a horrifying catalogue of carnage and atrocity. In the novel’s final section, ‘Fortuna’, only Fortune, an element external to human genius, can save Leonardo from this Inferno, allowing him to fly by balloon back into the history that we know. He has been humbled; many years later, he will complete this derogation of his hubris by at last burning the records of his inventions, plunging the Oriental phases of his memory cathedral into darkness, and dying.

In precise, sometimes malevolent detail, Jack Dann asks whether the Promethean fire of secular knowledge ought ever to have been our grail. If one of history’s great geniuses, a man of unparalleled observation and acuity, could find only bitterness and self-destruction in Progress, can we do any better? The Caliph’s wars are only a foretaste of our own, which may annihilate us. Dann’s polemic is vigorous and demanding; that it is also unsympathetic simply signifies how as great a sympathy as Leonardo’s can be corroded by a conscienceless Science.

BANTAM (USA). 1995. HARDCOVER.