SF. Excellent time travel and alternate history story of efforts to change the way Columbus affected world history.

“Pastwatch” is an interesting concept, but it has one of Card’s most boring beginnings. It’s only my appreciation for Card’s general talent that kept me reading to see where he’s going with such a dull story line. After a hundred pages or so I began to see that Card was giving me a reasonably accurate, and entertaining, short history of Christopher Columbus’ life and times. I can’t say that it was worth the time and effort on my part, but I did enjoy the history lesson. And then the story took fire as the protagonists managed to change history…only to discover that they produced the same horrendous results as the “people” who changed their original history before them. That epiphany initiated the real story, wherein the ultimate project became one of undoing the worst of mankind by setting up a mechanical trajectory that would cause humans to act sanely for a thousand years or so. The challenge of pulling this task off gave the story enough tension and action to make the rest of the book worth reading.

Giving all that, it still seems more pie-in-the-sky than his other explorations into how to create a reasonably empathic and united world culture.

Series: Ender’s Game & Ender’s Shadow—1985-2012
Series: Pastwatch (Christopher Columbus)—1996
Series: Empire & Hidden Empire—2006-2009

It wasn’t until I read Hidden Empire that I realized Card was exploring different possible scenarios that might produce an Earth with a united peoples living reasonably cooperatively with each other. Pastwatch is the least convincing alternative…especially since it’s founded on Christianity, while ignoring the other major religions and China. ( )

Rating it one star without reading based on subject and author, fight me.

Yeah I owned this (but never got around to reading it) literally decades ago when I was a fucking religious conservative dweeb teenager. I got better. ( )

stopping Columbus seemed like a good idea, until they discovered what could happen to Europe

Time, history, alternative history. Uses Colombus as a lynch pin. Very interesting. ( )