Four(-and-a-half) star review of The Worthing Saga by Orson Scott Card
This begins with a longish story within a story about a boy writing down the history of Jason Worthing and his descendants. Snippets of the boy’s own story are interspersed with the history told to him by telepathy. Many interesting characters populate each. This is followed by a compilation of shorter stories that involve some of the people in the history. Running through it all is the use of somec, a drug that allows a person to sleep for a time dependent on their wealth and position, thus ‘prolonging’ their lives. But they aren’t really living during the time their asleep. Their memories are extracted and kept for them and then reintroduced when they wake. The use of somec allowed interstellar travel, which seems to be the only good use. Card’s writing was excellent as usual.
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