Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus

Orson Scott Card has more range than any sci-fi writer working today. No one else could have written both the Ender series and "Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus." I love this book because of its uniqueness within the author's writings. It's not outer space, or fantasy, it's almost mainstream fiction. He tackles the age-old sci-fi time-travel dilemma of altering the past in a way I don't think I've seen elsewhere.

Pastwatch is the best book I've read in a long time and I can't stop thinking about it. What makes it interesting is the dilemma of a future society altering ancient history. If the future society makes a small change the past, they will never have existed. Typically, history books itemize dry and boring facts about people, places, and dates. Card's descriptions of Noah and Christopher Columbus are so detailed, the story becomes plausible.

Far in the future, earth's population has been ravaged by war, drought, famine and plague. But the survivors have learned their lesson. Efforts are expended to replant the rain forests, reclaim the deserts, save the species that remain. No one goes hungry or uneducated.A few scientists use machines to delve into the past, trying to understand how humanity reached such a pass. These are the focus of Card's "Pastwatch" One, Tagiri, highly sensitive to the suffering of others, sees the discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus and the enslavement and slaughter of the indigenous people, as the major significant event.Discovering the strange vision that committed Columbus to his course she and her team begin to wonder if it's possible to change history - even though they know that change will not guarantee a better world and will cancel their own.Card explores his themes through alternate narratives - Columbus' world and Tagiri's. The future is the more intriguing, especially as Tagiri's team learns the past has already been disrupted, with disastrous results. It takes a while for the Pastwatchers to jump back to Columbus' era but Card is one of Sci-Fi's best writers (winner of both the Nebula and Hugo Awards) and he keeps the pace moving.A well-developed story with real characters and plenty of the paradoxes and moral dilemmas that make sci-fi more than space opera.

I haven't been able to stop thinking about this book since I finished it late last night. I don't know the story of Columbus well enough, or even the Columbus myth well enough, to know how accurate Card's history was. I can't speak to that. But the character he created was a man so on fire for God, so committed to acting rightly, so passionate in pursuit of the vision he felt God had given him- and yet malleable and teachable. I read this, thinking, I desire that same passion for the purposes that God has set for me. And, in reading this book, I feel like I have caught some of that spirit. So often, in science fiction, the author sacrifices character development, themes, and even plot, for the sake of playing with futuristic machines and technology. Card does not. All the characters are rich, three-dimensional, taking turns you wouldn't expect. He spends great time on each character, delving into their lives, to explain what they did and why, and who they are and how they effect others. The plot likewise is worthy of O'Henry, and the very concept ingenious. This is one further error that Card avoids- so many SciFi writers are all concept, but can't put the concept to paper in a gripping story. Here the plot is intimately connected to the characters, for it is plots within plots, with themes throughout of trying to understand why people act the way they do, and what it is (within their own history, and the history going back many generations) that causes them to act. For all the evil Columbus did, or initated (truly, a great amount), here, we see a real man, flawed, like any man; heroic, like some men- and what he could have been. But Card's biggest success is perhaps his philosophical musings. Which is why it's light on the scientific methodology- you'll never hear here how it's possible to view the past or go to the past, about wormholes or quantum mechanices or anything like this as you do in Crichton's Timeline. Indeed, the history and science here are rather ridiculous, making it clear that some sort of technologically advanced native peoples (in the sense of modern technology) could never have existed in meso-America in anything else but a work of fiction. But this isn't a book of philosophy that drags to read through like Callenbach's Ecotopia. It's philosophy interwoven through the plot. Not just the "what-ifs" that always come up within the alternative history genre, but questioning of the nature of Christ, and the Gospel, and how it is meant to be practiced, and how it has been practiced. What if those first European explorers in the New World had practiced the Gospel they preached? What kind of world would we live in today? What then does it mean to act with mercy, to act with charity, to prefer another's needs to oneself, to be a servant of all? What is truly the best way to change the world? Card answers this by showing that we can only teach through learning. And that passion is an answer, but it's not the

"In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue." Five centuries later, Orson Scott Card wrote a novella titled 'Atlantis'. The connection is 'Pastwatch: the Redemption of Christopher Columbus', perhaps the finest alternate history novel yet written. In 1996's 'Pastwatch', Card weaves his compelling take on Atlantis into a still more compelling picture of Cristobal Colon and his place in our history. Along this entertaining ride we also find slavery, human sacrifice and a post-nuclear society's great moral dilemma.For in spite of the historical overtones, 'Pastwatch' is about time travel. Future historians lay the blame for their ruined planet at the foot of global evils such as slavery. While appreciating the complex causality of our world, their technology lets them zoom in on Columbus's expansion of Europe's cultural boundaries as crucial. If he could be dissuaded from his momentous voyage, the Pastwatchers consider, we should surely erase slavery from our troubled past. 'Pastwatch' tells the story of their struggle with new data and with conscience; satisfactorily, it also tells us how, why and what they conclude.Card writes so competently that his storytelling never interferes with the story. The result is an emotionally transformative experience, but also an insightful one. Civilized values are laid on the table so expertly that the reader can only take them to heart. To read 'Pastwatch' is to catalogue great virtues of humanity, whom Card redeems alongside Columbus. Let us, like the Pastwatchers, work to keep redemption within the pages of great books.