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Sign up todayPastwatch
This audiobook uses AI narration.
Weโre taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreIn a not-too-distant future that is not quite ours, there has been a major scientific breakthrough, a way to open windows into the past, permitting historical researchers to view, but not participate in, the events of the past.
A small group of scientists and historians, carefully trained, spend their days viewing the human past through a machine, the TruSiteII. It takes a particular talent to search the past for moments of significance, to focus the machines and track individuals through the depths of time, but a woman named Tagiri is more than just talentedโshe has a knack for finding interesting lives.
But the world Tagiri lives in is a tragic place, the human race reduced to a population of less than one billion after a century of war and plague, of drought and flood and famine. There have been too many extinctions; too much land has been poisoned. The remaining people strive to renew the Earth while they search the past for the causes of their plight.
Then one day, while watching the slaughter of the Caribe tribes by the Spanish led to Hispaniola by Christopher Columbus, Tagiri makes a discovery that will change everything; she discovers that the woman she is watching is seeing her, too, as a vision sent by her gods.
Can the past be changed? Can the Earth be restored? Can it be right for a small group of people to take action that, if it succeeds, will wipe out the entire time line in which they live, even if the death of an entire planet will be averted?
And even if the answer is yes, where do they begin?
In one of the most powerful and thought-provoking novels of his remarkable career, Orson Scott Card interweaves a compelling portrait of Christopher Columbus with the story of a future scientist who believes she can alter human history from a tragedy of bloodshed and brutality to a world filled with hope and healing.
Orson Scott Card, the author of the New York Times bestseller Enderโs Game, has won several Hugo and Nebula awards for his works of speculative fiction. His Ender novels are widely read by adults and younger readers and are increasingly used in schools. Besides these and other science fiction novels, Card writes contemporary fantasy, American-frontier fantasy, biblical novels, poetry, plays, and scripts.
Orson Scott Card, the author of the New York Times bestseller Enderโs Game, has won several Hugo and Nebula awards for his works of speculative fiction. His Ender novels are widely read by adults and younger readers and are increasingly used in schools. Besides these and other science fiction novels, Card writes contemporary fantasy, American-frontier fantasy, biblical novels, poetry, plays, and scripts.
Scott Brick first began narrating audiobooks in 2000, and after recording almost 400 titles in five years, AudioFile magazine named Brick a Golden Voice and โone of the fastest-rising stars in the audiobook galaxy.โ He has read a number of titles in Frank Herbertโs bestselling Dune series, and he won the 2003 Science Fiction Audie Award for Dune: The Butlerian Jihad. Brick has narrated for many popular authors, including Michael Pollan, Joseph Finder, Tom Clancy, and Ayn Rand. He has also won over 40 AudioFile Earphones Awards and the AudioFile award for Best Voice in Mystery and Suspense 2011. In 2007, Brick was named Publishers Weeklyโs Narrator of the Year.
ย Brick has performed on film, television and radio. He appeared on stage throughout the United States in productions of Cyrano, Hamlet, Macbeth and other plays. In addition to his acting work, Brick choreographs fight sequences, and was a combatant in films including Romeo and Juliet, The Fantasticks and Robin Hood: Men in Tights. He has also been hired by Morgan Freeman to write the screenplay adaptation of Arthur C. Clarkeโs Rendezvous with Rama.
Christopher Cazenove (1943โ2010), one of Englandโs finest actors, starred on stage and television in the United States and Great Britain. His motion-picture credits include A Knightโs Tale, Eye of the Needle, Children of the Full Moon, and Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill. He played Ben Carrington on televisionโs Dynasty.
Gabrielle de Cuir is a Grammy-nominated and Audie Award-winning producer whose narration credits include the voice of Valentine in Orson Scott Cardโs Ender novels, Ursula K. Le Guinโs The Tombs of Atuan, and Natalie Angierโs Woman, for which she was awarded AudioFile magazineโs Golden Earphones Award.ย She lives in Los Angeles where she also directs theatre and presently has several projects in various stages of development for film.
Arte Johnson is an award-winning narrator and an American comic actor who won an Emmy Award for his role in the television series Rowan & Martinโs Laugh-In. His audiobook narations have won two AudioFile Earphones Awards, and he placed as a finalist for the Audie Award for best narration in 2003 and 2007.
Moira Quirk, a British actress and Earphones Awardโwinning narrator, co-narrated Ben Bovaโs Mercury and has narrated other popular audiobooks for which she received Audie Award nominations. She is a successful comedian and can be heard on Nickelodeonโs cartoon My Life as a Teenage Robot as well as in The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd, The Wild Thornberrys Feature, and Serendipity, among others. She has also lent her voice to several video games, including Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction and Haunting Ground.
Stefan Rudnickiย is a Grammy-winning audiobook producer and an award-winning narrator who has won several Audie Awards, as well as more than twenty-five Earphones Awards, and been named one ofย AudioFileโs Golden Voices.
Reviews
“Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus is the best book Orson Scott Card has written since 1985, when his Ender’s Game won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards.”
“Stefan Rudnicki is the guiding force behind this intriguing novel, which involves alterative history and time travel. His deep voice and measured pace lend the sense of dignity and realism needed to sustain the book’s high-concept plot: an attempt to change the devastating effects that Columbus had on natives of the Americas…Scott Brick, Gabrielle de Cuir, and Moira Quirk utilize their talents well in voicing the Spanish explorers and the native leaders they influence prior to Cristoforo Colombo’s landing. Together, the narrators bring all these characters alive.”
“A bold and compassionate alternative history filled with believable historical and fictional characters.”
“Another superior addition to a superior body of work.”
“Readable and engaging, full of likable heroes and unmistakable villains…Pastwatch raises many significant and vital questions about humanity’s social development, that mixture of flaws and promise.”
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