Pathfinder, by Orson Scott Card

The thing about time travel stories is that they inevitably have plot holes that don't make any sense.  How does Harry Potter survive the dementor attack the first time, to live long enough to come back from the future and save himself?  If Doc takes Marty and his girlfriend 30 years into the future to save Marty's children, how is it that a 48 year old Marty is there in the future with children to save?  Shouldn't he and his girlfriend have skipped and jumped over the intervening thirty years in the car ride, like the dog skipped one minute when the car was demonstrated for the first time at the beginning of the first movie?  But the biggest problem of all in any time travel story is the lack of believable suspense: if you have the ability to change time, won't you just go back and fix anything that goes wrong to keep the plot from ever being forwarded?

All those problems are probably present in Pathfinder as well, but I enjoyed the story so much I didn't think about them. Indeed, in his afterward to this, the first book in a new young adult series, Orson Scott Card says he deliberately embraced the paradoxes of time travel, just for the fun of it.  Thus, for example, the main characters find that when they get a visit from one of themselves, from the future, with a warning to help them avoid some catastrophe, they don't actually have to make the trip for that visit themselves, in the future.  Rather, some other version of themselves did that and presumably winked out of existence or something.  This gets a little dodgy but you learn to just go with it and suspend your disbelief and enjoy the story.

And it is a really enjoyable ride, a return to form for OSC and one of his best books in a long, long time.  The best parts of this book aren't the time travel bits in any event.  Rather, the book tells two stories (a space travel/colonization story told in brief flashbacks at the beginning of each chapter, heavily driven by ideas and reminiscent of the best old-time pulp magazine short story sci-fi of Bradbury and Asimov juxtapositioned against a vaguely medieval story in the main text) and the fun is in  slowly determining how the two stories will eventually reconcile.  As the puzzle comes together, and you realize how characters in one story are related to those in the other, the plot takes on an extra dimension of satisfaction.

May 15, 2011
Highly recommended.

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Ruins
Book 2

So I just finished reading Ruins, the second book in this series, and I continued to highly enjoy the cool sci-fi ideas that drive the plot-focused story.  In this chapter, those ideas focus on what it means to be human, as Rigg's little fellowship of timeshifters and soldiers visits some of the different "Wallfolds" that were created to subdivide humanity when the planet Garden was colonized over 11,000 years ago, and learn how humanity developed and fared, or failed to do so, in the different worlds.  Are you, for example, still a human if you have joined in a symbiotic relationship with an alien parastic life form that enhances your abilities but also influences your actions?  If mice were bred to have near human intelligence, and, when acting as a group, greater than human ablity, would they have human souls?   These are all the kind of cool sci-fi questions that I used to love when I read books like this in my youth, and, like the first volume, this reminded me of some of the cool mind-altering idea-driven Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov short stories and novels I loved as a young adult.

If the book has a weakness, it lies in the clunky manner in which two of the characters, Umbo and Param, are written.  Card apparently wants us to see these characters "grow" as they seek to overcome their annoying adolescent weaknesses.  But some of their intemperate acts are so sudden and random that they aren't believable and jar the reader out of the narrative.  Card's trademark style of having his characters engage in lengthy inner dialogues also gets a little tiresome.  I wonder if this is how Orson Scott Card thinks.  Does he argue with himself all day and challenge and refine his own assumptions for hours on end, such that he thinks this is a normal way to show his characters' inner lives?  I dunno, but it occasionally devolves into tedious self-parody here.

This is a plot and idea driven story though, not a character driven one, so those issues don't prevent the book from working.  I enjoyed getting to know Rigg, Olivenko, and Loaf, the three non-annoying characters. The stuff with the expendables also continues to be fun and intriguing, as the reader can never quite figure out how self-driven these robots are.  I enjoyed the ideas and trying to figure out the same mystery the characters are dealing with, as they learn of a future destruction of the planet Garden by the people of Earth and try to find out why that happens and how it can be prevented.   If Card gives us satisfactory answers to those questions in the next and final volume, then this series will be one of the higlights of his career.  If he lets the series disspate (as he has with some of his other series), and doesn't wrap it up with a satisfactory conclusion, then it won't be.