Time Recursion

The story of Pastwatch is taking place in both the future, in a time when the remaining of the humanity has finally realised of all the mistakes their ancestors did, and in the past, in the time of the great discovery of Christopher Columbus. Pastwatch is nothing else then a sophisticated research organisation, that bases all of their work on a machine, that is able to browse through history, and enables their users to see and to learn from everything that happened in our past and make sure that all the horrible events are remembered and not repeated.

At this point we come across a Pastwatch researcher, that has devoted all her life to searching and finding the origin, the exact point in history in which slavery was adopted. Although at that time she can’t do anything to change the history, she finds the cause of the widespread slavery – the voyage of Christopher Columbus and the Conquest of America. And it is then, that she and her co-worker, found a strange conversation among two members of a tribe, that was just about to be attacked by the Spanish conquistadors. They were talking about them, describing how they see them watching at what was happening. Now it became clear to them, the machines Pastwatch developed were not only able to passively watch the past, but were also interacting with it.

… I guess that’s enough to give you a general idea about the storyline The book is very well written, combining the present situation with the past and describing into detail all the actions that were made. It’s obvious from my description what comes next, a voyage in the past to make changes that would make the world better. However all comes at a price. To change the flow of events means that the current time will be altered and will cease to exist. Everyone that you know, will never be born and some of the achievements could have never been achieved.

To cut it short… the book is a must read! Oh, and by the way: This only the first book, another two are planned to be published, though there’s no telling when.