Where Everything Is Wrong

I recently read Pastwatch by Orson Scott Card. I believe practically every premise was wrong. I have for sometime felt sad at the demise of science fiction, but really this was most hopeless.

The plot, such as it was, is that a group of people have a way to watch everything in the past. They have pathetically obvious contemporary ideas about life, so when they realize they can change the past, they decide to try because they are unavoidably arrogant. Oh, and there is a terrible environmental calamity threatening to wipe out the world, and someone already messed with time anyway, so we might as well go ahead and do it anyway, especially since we can wait until people are in a lot of pain and put it to a vote, so we can absolve ourselves of any blame anyway!

Sorry. As characters, these people make me angry! And this is sad, because it's a mark of good writing that I wanted to reach into the book and strangle these idiots. Unfortunately, Card had to use the current environmental myths in such a baldly obvious way that I could no longer suspend disbelief.

The worst, perhaps, is the hodgepodge of half-baked ideas that went into their idea of empire building. See, for some goofy reason, they thought they had to change the cultures in the Americas so that they would be on a more equal footing with the Europeans when the two cultures met. Card decided this could be done without private property. This has never been done. In fact, the requisitioning of private property for the purposes of the state helps bring about its demise. (Read up on the Roman empire, the latifundias, and of course the poor people who were stolen from as an example.)

They lie to people and yet expect poor people who are at subsistence level to understand complex ideas. There is a mix of egalitarianism and arrogance that is hard to believe. Apparently it's easy to lie about Christ to get people to stop killing people- because the people are stupid and wouldn't understand Our Savior. Meanwhile, the same people will just stop raping women if we have a little conversation and the women stand up for themselves.

Frankly, this book was so dissapointing that I have, several times during the writing of this post almost given up. I've been wanting to erase this post just so I could stop thinking about this atrocious piece of crap. But, I will just post it so that everyone can be forewarned. Before I go, let me mention that poor Christopher Columbus was a huge part of this book. Should Columbus have ever been in purgatory, he is most assuredly out now, and is probably handing out get-out-of-purgatory-free cards to his descendants on account of this book. God should raise him from the dead so that he could sue for libel.

Well, I suppose this could be instructive in terms of what NOT to do...