Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (Mass Market Paperback)

~ (Author) "There was only one time when Columbus despaired of making his voyage..." (more)
Key Phrases: slavery project, three caravels, tobacco water, Red Sea, Father Perez, King of Xibalba (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Anyone who's read Lies My Teacher Told Me : Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong knows about the devastating consequences that Columbus's voyage and ensuing colonization had on the native people of the Americas and Africa. In a thought-provoking work that is part science fiction, part historical drama, Orson Scott Card writes about scientists in a fearful future who study that tragic past, then attempt to actually intervene and change it into something better.

Tagiri and Hassan are members of Pastwatch, an academic organization that uses machines to see into the past and record it. Their project focuses on slavery and its dreadful effects, and gradually evolves into a study of Christopher Columbus. They eventually marry and their daughter Diko joins them in their quest to discover what drove Columbus west.

Columbus, with whom readers become acquainted through both images in the Pastwatch machines and personal narrative, is portrayed as a religious man with both strengths and weaknesses, a charismatic leader who sometimes rose above but often fell beneath the mores of his times. As usual, Orson Scott Card uses his formidable writing skills to create likable, complex characters who face gripping problems; he also provides an entertaining and thoughtful history lesson in Pastwatch. --Bonnie Bouman

From Publishers Weekly

Playing with the time stream isn't new to science fiction, but Card (Ender's Game), who's won both a Hugo and a Nebula, gives the concept a new twist here-with mixed results. His angle is to make the temporal interference not accidental but intentional, as a group of scientists go back in time to alter Columbus's journey. Sponsored by the organization Pastwatch, which uses a machine called TruSite II to view the past in remarkable detail, the "Columbus Project" is headed by Tagiri, whose TruSite viewing of the horrors of slavery has prompted her to revise the famed explorer's agenda. Tagiri sends into the past her daughter, Diko, a Mayan descendent named Hunahpu and a man named Kemal, a prickly sort whose initial skepticism is transformed into a fierce commitment to change the past. Armed with devices from the future, the three return to 1492, determined to transform Columbus from a gold-seeking pirate into a proponent of world peace and global unity. Uniformly well-meaning, the trio is just too sanctified to believe, and in their hands, the complexities of temporal mechanics are boiled down to simplistic cause and effect. Some sparks are generated when the Pastwatchers finally meet Columbus, but even that encounter produces fewer surprises than you'd expect from a master like Card.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Tor; 1st THUS edition (February 15, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812508645
• ISBN-13: 978-0812508642
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (141 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #199,180 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Passion & Purity, November 16, 2003

By	Jedidiah Palosaari "Not My Real Name" (Fes, Morocco) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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 end of the answer, until you learn humility, and love towards the least.

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Historical Science Fiction, October 6, 2004

By	SirGeorgeMartini "ElDorado" (Chihuahua Legs, Wyoming) - See all my reviews

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.

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perhaps the finest alternate history novel yet written, March 4, 2001

By	Arinwalt - See all my reviews

"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.