"But It Does Move" is a novelette by Harry Turtledove, Analog, June, 2009, and reprinted in Into the New Millennium: Trailblazing Tales From Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2000 - 2010, edited by Stanley Schmidt, Dell Magazines, 2011) and The Best of Harry Turtledove in 2021. It takes place in 1633 in a palace in Rome used by the Inquisition. The story concerns an unusual interrogation in the form of several dialogs between Galileo Galilei and Cardinal Sigismondo Gioioso of Vienna.
Gioioso is an analog of Sigmund Freud, and uses a form of psychoanalysis on Galileo. For that reason, the story is probably an alternate history, although just how much the course of history is changed by the early creation of psychoanalysis and its implementation by the Inquisition is left unsaid at the end.
See Also[]
"Cayos in the Stream", another story that alters the life of a historical figure rather than the whole of history, in this case Ernest Hemingway.
