In my novel, “Don’t Mess With Earth,” Galileo Galilei is a Terran astronomer who decides to go to to Earth to convince the powers-that-be that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around. In real life, he was a normal human who tried the exact same thing and was punished for his opposing views to official doctrine from the “Church.” My story goes almost the same way….
In this, Galileo meets Michelangelo who is painting the Sistine Chapel, but had also somehow gotten his hands on drawings for a glider. This interests Galileo, so he helps Michelangelo build the glider. They build it, and decide to present the glider flying to the Pope and the powers-that-be. The flight is successful, but the Pope comes to Galileo and tells him that if “men were supposed to fly, he would’ve given us wings.” Galileo tells the Pope what he thinks of him the Swiss guards then beat down the scientist, and then they burn the glider and tell Michelangelo that he is in danger of being a heretic, but, if he creates something new for the Church, he may be forgiven, so the artist caring only about his name in history, agrees and creates the Statue of David.
Galileo gets dragged down to a dungeon and beaten by the Swiss guards. Word reaches Terra that their scientist is in trouble, so a covert team is sent in to extract him. They extract him, blow up the building housing the dungeon/prison, causing a massive fire that sweeps up most of Rome, and the Pope vows to find him, even if they have to search all over the New World for the scientist. On Terra, Galileo is banned from ever leaving the planet again.
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