So ON THE ONE HAND, it’s the book that really vividly illustrated, to me, the moment when Europe’s maritime traditions all pivot away from trade in the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic, which is a pretty abrupt change in the late 1400s for very specific reasons, and the enormous technical difficulty involved in making the Atlantic crossing. It was written as its author’s career just teetering on the brink between “deeply religious but principled man who writes thought-provoking science fiction” and “raving xenophobic nutjob” and kind of feels like he started writing it in one camp and ended up writing it in the other (there’s a character storyline that just didn’t make sense to me until I was like, “Oh right, the author is an Islamophobe”). And the book that primed my interest for that kind of nerdery is a deeply problematic novel, Orson Scott Card’s Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus.
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