The Redemption of Christopher Columbus
by Orson Scott Card
ages: adult
First sentence: “Some people called it the ‘time of undoing’; some, wishing to be more positive, spoke of it as ‘the replanting’ or ‘the restoring’ or even ‘the resurrection’ of the Earth.”
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I’ve been trying to wrap my brain around this one ever since I finished. It’s so hard to sum up: as one-part dystopian, one part historical fiction, and one part time travel, it has a bit of everything.

The end of the world came, basically destroying most of the Earth. Only a few thousand people survived, and they’ve been trying to restore the Earth. As part of this, they developed a technology, and a group called Pastwatch evolved from this technology, to watch the past, to learn from it.

As part of this, one researcher, Tagiri, discovers that Christopher Columbus played an important role in the shaping of the current world. Which got her to thinking: what drove Columbus to go west in order to find India? What if he never made it back to Spain, thereby sending more conquerors to the Americas to plunder, rape and enslave the native populations? There’s a lot in the book from Columbus’s point of view: Card explores Columbus’s thoughts, motivations and the amount of conviction it took to convince Ferdinand and Isabella to fund a seemingly crazy trip.

After the Pastwatch researchers start thinking about Columbus’s decisions, and after they discover a couple bits of crucial information, they begin musing about how to — and whether or not to — influence the past. Eventually, for many reasons — sometimes this novel was a bit circuitous and confusion, but eventually, if you wade through all of Card’s exposition (and he tends to philosophize, especially in his later works), it does make sense — they do decide to send a team into the past to reshape the course of history.

The novel had an intriguing balance: more than two-thirds was set up, and the pay off was less than one-third of the novel. It makes it a much more philosophical novel than I was expecting, but it turns out to be a good thing. I think it was Card’s intention to raise questions about pre-destiny and divine right, as well as acceptance of religion and race. He presents things to think about, but he’s very heavy-handed in doing it. More than once I felt like I was being hit over the head with a hammer, and I even agreed with the sentiments he was expressing.

In the end, I was surprised at how much I ended up liking it. For all it’s flaws, it’s an interesting story.