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aicilalane 's review for:
Pastwatch
by Orson Scott Card
Reading some of the other reviews of this book make me doubt myself a little, but I really enjoyed Pastwatch. I read it in high school and just reread it ~10 years later. My favorite thing about OSC is that he writes very genuine characters, and I liked the coincidence of that with the concept of going back in time to rewrite history, particularly about someone as universally hated/problematic as Christopher Columbus + something as obviously terrible as European colonialism.
I definitely get the complaints about the info dumping/going too much into flimsy science; for me, while I didn't love that aspect, it didn't distract from the story.
The complaints about racism, I don't know if I agree with. In fact, I found it remarkably compassionate and progressive in terms of how it portrayed race (described in more detail with conceptual/thematic spoilers below).
(**vague spoilers below**)
The gist is that European colonialism used the labor of people of color to spark an industry/culture that eventually ruined the environment, so in order to save the environment, they need to go back and change things so that the racist white man (Columbus/all of Europe) realizes he's racist, can learn things from the native people, and should befriend them and not treat them like savages. I'm pretty sure every main character except Columbus is not white- 2 black women, 2 Arabic/Muslim men, and 1 Mayan man are the key players in the Columbus Pastwatch project.
There were 2 things that could come across to me as problematic. First: the way some of the time travelers spoke down to the native people. Even still, it was always in kindness, and the speaking "down" was because they had literal centuries of knowledge these 15th century people did not (and again, these were all people of color). The second thing that bothered me was the assumption that it is inevitable that Christianity would have to be the mechanism for developing shared values between the Europeans/indigenous peoples. (But to be honest, I can't think of anything else that would have made those white sailors looking to claim land and gold in the name of the Lord stop in their tracks and think of brown people as People.) I am a cis white woman so I may have missed something, but I would say it's definitely not ~overtly~ racist.
I definitely get the complaints about the info dumping/going too much into flimsy science; for me, while I didn't love that aspect, it didn't distract from the story.
The complaints about racism, I don't know if I agree with. In fact, I found it remarkably compassionate and progressive in terms of how it portrayed race (described in more detail with conceptual/thematic spoilers below).
(**vague spoilers below**)
The gist is that European colonialism used the labor of people of color to spark an industry/culture that eventually ruined the environment, so in order to save the environment, they need to go back and change things so that the racist white man (Columbus/all of Europe) realizes he's racist, can learn things from the native people, and should befriend them and not treat them like savages. I'm pretty sure every main character except Columbus is not white- 2 black women, 2 Arabic/Muslim men, and 1 Mayan man are the key players in the Columbus Pastwatch project.
There were 2 things that could come across to me as problematic. First: the way some of the time travelers spoke down to the native people. Even still, it was always in kindness, and the speaking "down" was because they had literal centuries of knowledge these 15th century people did not (and again, these were all people of color). The second thing that bothered me was the assumption that it is inevitable that Christianity would have to be the mechanism for developing shared values between the Europeans/indigenous peoples. (But to be honest, I can't think of anything else that would have made those white sailors looking to claim land and gold in the name of the Lord stop in their tracks and think of brown people as People.) I am a cis white woman so I may have missed something, but I would say it's definitely not ~overtly~ racist.