First in the 'After Such Knowledge' sequence, this is a densely written historical novel about Roger Bacon, the 13th century philosopher/scientist and Franciscan monk. Although most of it is imaginative extrapolation, because the facts are few and far between, Blish does manage to evoke the whole attitude of the time especially among the scholars and clerics.

Due to his combative character and unwillingness to compromise, Bacon comes into conflict with an increasingly dictatorial church authority and pays the price with the loss of his freedom and ability to work. Despite the use of quite a few passages in Latin and the representation of the speech patterns of the middle ages, it is an absorbing read and has a touching conclusion. Giving it four stars as the lack of translations for the Latin is occasionally a stumbling block.

Read as part of the After Such Knowledge omnibus and posted as an individual review as all the other GR reviews are under the individual books. ( )

This is a historical novel about Roger Bacon, who figured out the rainbow and reinvented gunpowder, more or less invented the modern idea of "science" while writing on commission from the Pope, was probably driven half insane by 13 years of imprisonment and died in obscurity. James Blish was a science-fiction writer of great verbal skill and diverse interests, who in my opinion found it hard to keep a book or a character together (about half of each book of his Cities in Flight series is one of my favorite SF novels), but here, working from scraps of biography and a vivid dream-recreation of medieval life, he was mostly on a roll. I wish this book (and Blish) were not so overlooked now.

The character of Bacon, who's driven by an obsessive curiosity and a hallucinatory voice of ambition, is very vivid; the others somewhat less so as the story gets a little bogged down in 13th-century politics (uncharacteristically for an SF writer, Blish made a stern effort to avoid any anachronistic exposition, meaning that he assumes we know as much as Roger does about how his world works: a choice that can contribute to the immediacy of the setting, as it does in [b:Riddley Walker|776573|Riddley Walker|Russell Hoban|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1223635898s/776573.jpg|762606], but in this case Blish didn't find equivalent devices to keep us interested in the machinations of state -- or maybe the problem is that Bacon isn't naive enough to serve as our guide). The language is an interesting mix of archaisms and elegant modern prose, which mostly works, though it helps if you've had a better education than I did; the dialogue is usually rendered in modern English when the characters are speaking Latin, which is most of the time, and in an artificial but fairly graceful pseudo-Elizabethan when they're speaking their vernaculars.

Blish also paints a vivid picture (again a little less clear for someone like me who lacks a grounding in the classics in question) of the dogmatic yet flexibly flaky medieval attitude toward science and history. The fluidity of an oral tradition, and the role of misreading as a tool of discovery, are themes reflected in [a:Russell Hoban|12076|Russell Hoban|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1194471840p2/12076.jpg]'s past and future worlds as well. (The parallels with Riddley Walker, including the rediscovery of gunpowder in a dream about a "still unbroken" man standing between two shores "at the heart of an explosion," are especially interesting because in most ways the two books couldn't be more different.) I think Blish may be indebted to C.S. Lewis's great non-fiction book [b:The Discarded Image|80005|The Discarded Image An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Canto)|C.S. Lewis|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170976306s/80005.jpg|1731922] for much of this; Blish's wild apocalyptic fantasy [b:The Devil's Day|952429|The Devil's Day (After Such Knowledge, #2)|James Blish|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1266667909s/952429.jpg|937340], which recasts the cosmology of Dante and medieval notions of black magic in a thriller context, is dedicated to Lewis. ( )

A rather dull retelling of the life of Roger Bacon, there's not as much about clergy politics as I would've liked. ( )

Although first issued and mostly reprinted under science fiction imprints, Blish's Doctor Mirabilis is a quite conscientiously historical piece of fiction set in the thirteenth century. Although it's written in modern English, there are enough Middle Englishisms in it that it might seem like a chore to those who have no prior familiarity with the language of the period, and there are a few short passages of untranslated Latin. It was a fast, enjoyable read for me, but I can't second-guess how it might read to someone who hadn't formally studied medieval history. The book stands as part of an alleged "trilogy" (with one of the three parts most often published as two volumes) joined only by theme, rather than plot, character, or even style. This one is probably the strongest, though least-read, book of the set.

The chapters are episodic, and the plot has the nature of a biography, covering the whole of Roger Bacon's adult life. Other characters are filled out credibly, particularly Adam Marsh, but it's mostly just Roger's story. Many 21st-century magicians might be satisfied to read only the chapter about Roger's alchemical investigations in Paris, if they want to maximize entertainment for time spent.

Blish's picture of his central character is decidedly that of a scientist--not an inventor/technologist, but a researcher trying to understand the world, and to empirically verify or disprove the ideas about it that have been supplied to him in the hard-to-obtain "commmon" knowledge of his medieval university world. Even without the mass of clinical notions developed since the writing of this book in the 1960s, Blish also effectively presents Roger as a very high-functioning inhabitant of the "autism spectrum." He's passionate about knowledge, good with words and numbers, and terrible with people. The upshot of this condition is something nobler than an idot-savant: a tragic hero.

My previous reading on Roger Bacon had never suggested any connection to the Spiritual Franciscans and Joachimism, but Blish is certainly within his rights to imagine one, inasmuch as the conflict within the Ordo Fratrum Minorum could not have been invisible to Roger. The attraction of apocalyptic thinking for pioneering English men of science is well attested in such other cases as John Dee and Isaac Newton, and Blish doesn't go so far as to make Roger into a Fraticello, but simply one who staunchly credits the possible validity of Joachimist prophecy.

Another feature of Blish's Roger Bacon is his lifelong dialog with his personal genius, or "demonic self." This aspect, along with the attention to historical context and the emphasis on the spiritual value of knowledge about the world, makes the book an admirable piece of creative hagiography, especially for adherents of the Gnostic Catholic Church whose canon of saints includes the Doctor Mirabilis.

A novel about the life and work of Roger Bacon, strange and brilliant thinker of the 13th century, a fore-runner of modern science. Interesting read. ( )