At a house party this fall, I noticed a wall-to-wall bookshelf filled with science fiction paperbacks. I recognized some of the authors like Kim Stanley Robinson and Poul Anderson, but most of them were new to me. Frederik Pohl and Orson Scott Card took up a lot of the shelf space, yet I never had heard of them. Later I realized Card is the author of Ender’s Game, which I was familiar with even though I didn’t know who wrote it.
When I talked with the host, a professor at Berkely, he said I should try Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, which is also by Card. So I did.
It’s one of the better alternative history novels I’ve come across. It’s easy to read but has some plausibility issues – not just surrounding the technology, but also surrounding the characters’ motivations, organizational functioning and the way that history can or can’t be shaped.
Below are two of the sections I enjoyed and highlighted.
Oh, this is such a wise perspective, to compare human lives to the lives of stars. The only problem is that it cuts both ways. If in the long run it doesn’t matter that we wipe out billions of lives in order to save our ancestors, then in the long run saving our ancestors doesn’t matter, either, so why bother changing the past at all?
And this:
Happiness is not life without pain, but rather a life in which the pain is traded for a worthy price.
Nehaveigur 