Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus

Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus is a 1996 science fiction novel by American novelist and critic Orson Scott Card. The book chronicles the life of the famed explorer and one of the first European discoverers of the Americas, Christopher Columbus. It examines his life partly through the perspectives of a group of scientists from the distant future who time travel to the fifteenth century hoping to alter the way in which Europe first made contact with the Americas. Episodes in their mission are juxtaposed against vignettes into Columbus’s lived experience and his endeavor to acquire funding to travel across the Atlantic. The novel is known for its blend of historical fact and science fiction.

The novel begins at an unidentified point in humanity’s future when engineers have invented machines that create windows through which they can observe the past. Their head organization, Pastwatch, employs Tagiri, a researcher who is interested in Christopher Columbus and his relationship to Caribbean colonization. One day, Tagiri discovers that the machines allow more than observation: they allow information to move into the past. She, her husband Hassan, and their daughter, Diko, are permitted to explore what capabilities might be opened up by this discovery.

The story shifts into the fifteenth century. Columbus is desperate to obtain the political and financial support necessary to sail across the Atlantic. Viewing his plight from the future, Tagiri and her fellow researchers observe that Columbus’s first dream was to form a new Crusade to wrest the Holy Land and Constantinople from the Muslim people. He refocused his sights onto the Atlantic after he almost died in a storm. Diko tries to learn why the near-death experience changed Columbus’s mind. She implements an updated time viewer to observe Columbus just after he survived his shipwreck. Columbus experienced a vision that told him to move west and convert the inhabitants of an undiscovered continent to Christianity. The researchers discover that the “vision” was no divine insight, but was rather a hologram projected into Columbus’s world from a different future timeline to change the course of history.



The hologram raises the question of why some researchers wanted Columbus to move west instead of east. Another researcher for Pastwatch, Hunahpu, suggests that if Columbus had not had his vision, he would have led a failed advance into the Muslim world. The advance would have weakened Europe enough that the Tlaxcalan Empire in Central America could stage a successful invasion. Thereafter, Europeans would have been subjected to Central America’s inhumane sacrificial practices. Hunahpu says that the Tlaxcalans eventually developed their own version of the Industrial Revolution and could conquer the planet. To prevent this from happening, the parallel timeline’s version of Pastwatch sent the vision to Columbus. They saved themselves at a huge cost to the Native Americans, who were slaughtered in Europe’s imperial conquest.

Tagiri and her researchers decide to change the timeline to minimize the amount of human suffering that imperialism caused. They are driven by worsening ecological decay in their own world, which threatens their future existence. Tagiri believes that humans’ rampant destruction of the environment is a continuation of the European imperialist mindset and that if this initial impulse is negated, she will save her own future. Her team sends Hunahpu, Diko, and a Turkish scientist Kemal to enter Columbus’s era. They arrive before his voyage and immunize Indian society from the diseases that the Europeans will one day carry across the ocean. They also indoctrinate them with a more peaceful, fabricated religion that prohibits human sacrifice. Hunahpu helps develop an empire in Central America that can hold its own against Europe. When Columbus finally arrives with his forces, Kemal destroys their ships. Columbus survives and goes on to live with the indigenous Americans. Ultimately, he becomes their liaison with Europe, overseeing a peace treaty between the two empires.

Diko and Columbus end up falling in love. After several years together, Diko tells him that she is from the future and how she intervened in his life. After he learns what would have happened had she not intervened, Columbus sobs with gratitude for Diko’s actions. By the end of the fifteenth century, the Caribbean and Central America begin sending ships to Europe. Since neither empire has enough power to destroy the other, they coexist with little tension. Pastwatch speculates that our future might also be bound up in our past, and that violence need not be an integral part of humankind’s evolution.