Summary: Partially-digested feces. With just a hint of pandering freshness.
There are times in your life when you are reading a book by one of your favorite authors that makes you cock your head to the side, pull back your ears, and, with a puzzled look on your face, make a sound somewhat like “ar-ooo?” After finishing the book, you throw it across the room, and start to re-evaluate why you like the author in the first place. You feel stupider than when you started, because now you need to go re-study history and physics just to get the bad science out of your head. This book was that bad.
It’s been a while since I read the book, and I refuse to read it again. But, thanks to chorpler’s insistance, I will endeavor to recall my feelings about the book. Thanks, chorpler, you’ll be getting my psych bill. 
It might help to have a brief synopsis of the book. In the distant future, the world has problems. There’s war, everpresent famine and hunger, global pollution, the works. The future people devise machines that can look back into the past and watch events as they unfold; this program is called “Pastwatch” and is staffed by our protagonists. One such character sees that Christopher Columbus was visited by another group of people from the future, who convince him to go find America rather than go stomping around with the Crusades. This process, it is speculated, will destroy the old future while a new future is built. Columbus does go find America, thereby introducing genocide upon the native Americans and starting a chain of events that lead to today’s lack of food, but at least preserving the Middle East from Columbus’ religious passions. Our protagonists decide to fix this historic meddling, and invent a machine that sends them into Columbus’ past, where they plant American prophecies of Columbus’ arrival and make him a caring and gentle Messiah that drives a new age of stone-age industrial might, thereby making Mesoamerica a world superpower that rivals all of Europe. Everyone still living happily lives to a ripe old age.
The problem that readjusting Christopher Columbus’ path will again destroy the future, is specifically addressed then discarded.
That’s right, the topic of the murder of hundreds of billions of lives is discarded, because the treatment of the 15th century native Americans is more important.
One could make the argument that this book is a cautionary tale, prepared with heaping spoonfuls of tact and clever irony, highlighting the dangers of time travel. I reject this theory, because Card is neither clever enough nor subtle enough a writer to do this. When he wants to make a point, he pins it up to the wall, sprinkles gold glitter on it, draws arrows pointing to it with magic marker, shines a spotlight on it, then, after he’s gotten your attention, whacks a few long nails into it. He just wants to make sure the reader GETS THE POINT.
No, in this book, the protagonists are rewarded for their hubris. They get to live long, comfortable lives in a land of plenty with a progressive and people-friendly government.
This cowardly act is worse than murder. Murder implies that someone, once living, was robbed of their life. This is an act of uncreation - the removal from a victim of all possibility of life. Somewhat similar to some arguments of pro-lifers, to be sure, but this book review isn’t meant as a review of this political trend. The author is pro-choice, anyhow, so I doubt I could (or want to - :shrug: ) convince Card that this form of death is more significant than murder.
But it’s worse than murder in other ways. This is genocide - the willful destruction of whole groups of people. The three people who go back in time, see, they acknoweldge that their acts result in the destruction of all their family, all their loved ones, and all those they ever knew.
This was justified because it would prevent the current global political, environmental and social problems. That, my friends, is genocide on the basis of percieved cultural superiority.
It gets better. We are led to understand that the history that was deleted was our own. Our history, the history of the readers of the book. The characters in the book kill you, they kill your family, they kill your loved ones, they kill everyone you ever knew or even knew about, and so on.
Never mind that, at the conclusion of the book, a ginormous Mesoamerican supernavy is parked, so densly that the ships crowd the horizon from north to south, on the shores of a badly fractured Europe. We are expected to understand that there is no following bloodbath, no wars, no later conquests. The Mesoamerican superpower is ruled by just and honorable people who would never let such a thing happen.
All this happens, of course, on the unshakable assertion that Christopher Columbus was the single most influentual person in history. That is to say, his actions have affected more people throughout history than any other person, ever. This is a well-established FACT (with gold glitter glued to it, highlighted with a spotlight) based on the research of high-tech scientists who can actually watch history unfold.
Except, of course, it’s rubbish. For example, Gengis Khan and his armies personally affected more people, and his influence completely reshaped Asia and Europe and, by extention, America through Columbus and other European explorers and conquorers. Khan gets little or no mention in the book - not enough to warrant me remembering it, anyway. Similarly, Alexander the Great rates no better than chopped liver.
Much of Card’s effort also went into describing how horrible the American genocides were. The characters discuss smallpox blankets and westward expansion and 20th century exploitation of native factory workers. For some reason, this specific genocide was worse than the Jewish Diaspora, or the slaughter of the Cimmerians, or the Roman campaigns to wipe out the Gauls. And again, Gengis Khan is conveniently not mentioned - he put a lot of hard work into obliterating folks in Persia and other places. I was continually asking why the American genocides were so terrible in comparison, but this is never answered in the book.
Stop, then, to remember that Card is a Mormon. He, like I, believe that the native American people are a chosen people by God. If you want to debate this, fine, but get your own thread, please. Accept that Card has a special place in his heart for the people who lived here before the Europeans. Anyway, this premise is addressed, indirectly, in the book. The summary: if there is a God, He ain’t listening. It was made abundantly clear that the Pastwatch historians never came across any signs of divine intervention, and the prevailing consensus was that He wasn’t going to come rescue anyone. In fact, the first part of the book is a dry and secular deconstruction of the story of the bliblical flood, witnessed in real time by the Pastwatch historians, as though to say “look here, stories of God are simple rubbish.” Therefore, the author’s notion that the Americans were holy people living in a holy land has no meaning in this novel.
One also asks oneself the question as to why the future was so bad to live in. Everyone we meet in the future is well-fed and well-read, there’s plenty of breathable air, and the technology is amazing. We only get snippets of bad things happening in the future, through the characters perceptions, with just a little through exposition, but not enough to convince the reader that it’s worth killing hundreds of billions of people to fix.
It’s also not mentioned that there’s no way to be sure that changing the past will actually fix any problems. I say it can’t. You either (a) destroy the industrial revolution and thereby benefit the environment to the detriment of the people living in it, or (b) re-live the industrial revolution with its attendant pollution issues and improved genocidal techniques.
A competing science fiction author named Elaine Radford once claimed that Card’s novels Ender’s Game and Speaker For the Dead, which won many accolades including the Hugo and Nebula awards, amounted to an apology of Adolph Hitler and his acts of genocide. This argument is largely accepted as flimsy and selfish, and not many people take it too seriously.
It’s too bad that Radford never applied that argument to this book, because that’s exactly what this book is. It’s a defense of the premeditated and systematic destruction of entire civilizations in order to fulfill someone’s sociopolitical goals. There, I said it. On the basis of this book I safely feel it can be argued that Orson Scott Card, one of my favorite novelists, is a Holocaust apologist in sheep’s clothing. (That epiphany really hurt.) This book kills off more people than Hitler, more people than Stalin, more people than anyone else ever, because their existance was based on flawed social policy.
Yep, the future’s looking bright.
