(Review by Nick Gevers, Ph.D.,Cape Town, South Africa)

In the 1990s, the career of Orson Scott Card has taken turns intensely frustrating to his readers (and, it would seem, his publishers, as all his post-1994 work has failed to appear in British editions). At the beginning of this decade, all seemed well: the ‘Tales of Alvin Maker’ and the ‘Ender’ series were proceeding swiftly; Card’s novels were popular and critical successes, distinguished as they were by superb storytelling skill, a complex and acute moral sense (of Mormon derivation), and a deft use of the conventions of SF and Fantasy to argue tragic and redemptive theses. But Card’s judgement deserted him; he left Alvin and Ender in mid-stream, concentrated for years on a tediously allegorical and religiose space opera (Homecoming), and returned to his earlier series only in the mid-1990s, and then disappointingly (see the fourth Alvin book, Alvin Journeyman [1995], and the concluding Ender novel, Children of the Mind [1996]). In recent years, his one work of genuine quality is Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (1996), which exemplifies all of his old persuasive virtues.

Pastwatch, like the Alvin books, redeems America the Fallen by resort to alternate history. As a member of one of the many religious denominations that have seen the New World as a New Eden, as the site of the New Jerusalem, Card naturally views today’s materialistic and imperialistic America with a measure of dismay. Surely, he has repeatedly asserted, the continent’s history might have turned out better, truer to the dictates of religion, or at least of justice? And can’t a speculative revision of that history, a rewriting of it as something blessed, show how America might yet turn out well? He experiments boldly in this direction in Pastwatch. The novel begins some time in our future, when Earth faces final ecological collapse. Historical researchers who possess a means of viewing past ages, and who agonize at the cruelties of history, and at the mistakes that have resulted in their plight, discover that they can travel physically back in time. The past can be altered, but only at the cost of the annihilation of their own timeline. There is nothing to lose; the world is doomed anyway. And so three of them venture back to the late Fifteenth Century; they equip the peoples of the Caribbean and Central America with better technology and better values (no more human sacrifice, for example); when Columbus arrives he is seduced by what he finds, including a woman time traveller, and becomes a leader and friend of the Indians rather than their destroyer. Years later, in a striking historical inversion, American Indian fleets reach Europe; not only has the rape of the Americas been averted, but Europe can now be redeemed by these emissaries of peace and tolerance.

Pastwatch is historically naïve, placing individual initiative at the centre of historical causation, and underestimating seriously the momentum of European greed and religious intolerance. But the novel’s many redemptive scenes, in which terrible crimes are reversed, in which the villains and victims of history can try again, can be reconciled, are extremely moving. This is alternate history with a staggering human and moral charge, perhaps the first tale of Columbus which need neither gild the conqueror nor surrender to horror at his deeds.

TOR (USA). 1996. HARDCOVER.

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