Ambition and Time Travel

I didn't have anything to do. I just lost my job a few weeks ago and had finished the last Stieg Larson book in his trilogy and had absolutely nothing to do. So I started to get depressed. I went to the library and asked the guy with the long gray ponytail (known to me as the computer Nazi who goes around making sure everyone signed in)what authors he recommended. I said my favorite authors at the moment were Larson and Michael Crichton and they were both dead and would never have any more books. Ponytail man said he only read science fiction so took me to that area to choose me a book. He asked me what kind of science fiction I liked, my only answer to that is time travel and multi-verse theory.

He thumbed through every book with what looked like love in his eyes, caressing the books, his only friends. It looked like he had indeed read all of them. Some he said were boring, some not well written, then he pulled out one with a smile on his face. "Time travel and a good author!" He said with triumph. The book written by Orson Scott Card and called Pastwatch. He had read it and said it was a good one, he handed it to me and asked if I liked Star Trek books at all. I told him that my Dad watched too much Star Trek when I was a kid, so no. He went through the new books in front and handed me two more about time travel but warned me that he hadn't read them yet so they could be bad.

I really got into the Pastwatch book where people of the future can actually study the daily lives of people in the past, watching their every move, listening to their every word. One woman decided that slavery never should of happened and decided to go back in time to change it, stopping Christopher Columbus from discovering America. This was suppose to change the future to not have a polluted dead earth that could only support a few million people. Her daughter went instead to not stop him, but educate him and Europe never took over America but became trade partners with it and the educated civilization that was there.

It made me think of critical points in my life that have thrown it into new and opposite directions. It also made me think of how motivated Christopher Columbus was to achieve his goal of a west passage to the Indies. I think the book sparked my own ambition in what I want to achieve in my life, something that is almost as impossible as convincing a queen and king to send me into the unknown with their money and ships. If he can do it though, then so can I. He wasn't even a gentleman, he had to overcome his lower class and the long period of time itself to grow to the position that he made for himself in history.