Pastwatch
From back cover Tor paperback February 1997: In one of the most powerful and thought-provoking novels of his remarkable career, Orson Scott Card interweaves a compelling portrait of Christopher Columbus with the story of a future scientist who believes she can alter human history from a tragedy of bloodshed and brutality to a world filled with hope and healing.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
14mentions
12people
2008–2024years
36% recommend57% neutral7% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- For a while, years ago, I was on an "alternative history" fiction kick. Most of it is dreck, but one diamond in that rough was Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus[1]. Without giving too much away, it's about a group of future historians that use time-travel to study past cultures, and discover that they can not only view past events, but influence them as well. It's got a couple of interesting semi-plausible what-ifs of different ways the Columbian Exchange might have worked out, under different parameters.
- This is basically what Pastwatch: Redemption by Orson Scott Card is about. Bit of sci-fi but that's the general gist - quite a nice read.
- Reminds me of one of my favorite books (well, not really. The premise was incredible and the writing was impeccable but it was part one of a trilogy that never materialized): Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus
It was basically a brilliant alternative historical fiction novel based around the premise of being able to rewatch the past.
- In Orson Scott Card's "Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus" (awesome book, btw! I don't think he's planning on writing the remaining 2 in the trilogy, though :() they have machines that do exactly this, letting them monitor ancient history up to a decade ago: anyone, anywhere on the planet. The catch is that the builders of the machine actually have access to real-time monitoring, but pretend this isn't the case to avoid public outrage.
- I respect that he can write a book without selling dogma. I love Enchantment and Pastwatch, even if the Ender series has faded with time.
- I would say that this sounds like a great idea for a novel, and then I remembered that Orson Scott Card already wrote Pastwatch :)
What's GGS? Only found Guns, Germs, and Steel in that context, is that the one?
