Books like Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus

Orson Scott Card’s very entertaining 1996 novel Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus is a time travel book and so much more.Many great science fiction / fantasy writers have had fun and great success with time travel as an extension of their speculative vision. Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Bradbury, de Camp, H.G. Wells, Vonnegut, Twain, and Piers Anthony to name just a few. There seems to be as many approaches to the time travel conundrum as there are writers, but generally falling into one of two camps. There is the classic paradox scenario where a time traveller actually goes back in time and is a part of the action and so perhaps changes his own destiny. There is also the time traveller as voyeur, where the agent can only view and report. This is a little of both.Setting up a time travel process whereby scientists can “see” into the past, the sightseers make an astonishing discovery that perhaps they can be seen and influence those in the past. From here comes the next step of travel, and so Card is off.The subject is good ole Christopher Columbus and his world-changing voyage. Should he have gone east instead of west to influence the Crusades? What would that be like? Could travellers making influential changes create a worse result? Card asks and answers many of these questions and creates a fecundity of time travel paradoxical theorizing.Columbus is more than just a time traveller’s target, Card spends plenty of time getting to know the Genoese and this history seems well researched and deftly produced.The reader is thus entranced and entertained, spell bound by Card’s exceptional storytelling and invited to consider a myriad of time travel what ifs.