In a not-too-distant future that is not quite ours, there’s been a major scientific breakthrough, ways to open windows in to the past, permitting historical researchers to view, but not take part in, the events of days gone by.

A small band of scientists and historians, carefully trained, spend their days viewing the human past through a machine, the TruSiteII. It requires a particular skill to search the past for occasions of significance, to target the devices and track people through the about Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus depths of your time, but a female named Tagiri is normally more than simply talented-she includes a knack for acquiring interesting lives.

But the globe Tagiri lives in is a tragic place, the people decreased to a inhabitants of significantly less than one billion after a century of war and plague, of drought and flood and famine. There have been way too many extinctions; too much land has been poisoned. The remaining people make an effort to renew the Earth while they search days gone by for the sources of their plight.

Then one day, while watching the slaughter from the Caribe tribes from the Spanish resulted in Hispaniola simply by Christopher Columbus, Tagiri makes a breakthrough that will switch everything; she discovers that the girl she is watching is viewing her, too, like a vision sent by her gods.

Can the past be changed? Can the planet earth be restored? Could it be right for a little group of people to do this that, if it succeeds, will wipe out the entire time line where they live, even if the death of an entire planet will be averted?

As well as if the answer is yes, where do they start?

In another of the most effective and thought-provoking novels of his remarkable career, Orson Scott Card interweaves a compelling portrait of Christopher Columbus with the tale of another scientist who believes she can transform human history from a tragedy of bloodshed and brutality to a global filled with hope and therapeutic.