Wakers
Review of novel by Orson Scott Card
This novel was written for a YA audience, so romantic interests go no further than kisses. But that in no way constrains the potential for drama.
Wakers has a great premise, though it’s not a great story. The author presents it as the first novel in the “Side Step” series, so I look forward to its further development.
It‘s told from the perspective of a pair of clones with transplanted memories of experiences they didn’t live through.
The main character, Laz, has the ability to, at will, move immediately to a different “timestream.” This isn’t time travel. He doesn’t go backward or forward in time. Rather he switches to a different now, and with a little help from a friend, Ivy, he learns to see a bit ahead in alternate streams before he takes a leap. So, if he is facing a difficult situation and needs to escape, he change jump to a story line with an outcome more to his liking. With this ability, he might be able to save mankind from annihilation.
Here’s a sampling of passages that I found intriguing, several of which appear on the first two pages. (This book can catch your interest in a hurry.)
“… Laz Hayerian had wondered since the sixth grade whether we are the same person when we wake up that we were when we went to sleep.” p. 1
“Since Laz had memories that came, not from dreams, but from timestreams he had stepped out of, did his intertwined memories of other realities make him less sane? Or more experienced? Or both? Since, as far as he knew, no one else in the world had the ability to side step from one timestream to another, there was no one he could ask, and no philosopher who had written about it.” p. 1
“So Laz did what he had always done since his earliest memories of childhood. He searched for the alternate paths through time that were always close enough for him to take hold and shift, changing the story of events in bold or barely perceptible ways. It didn’t matter which, as long as it got him into a place where things made more sense. For the first time in his life he could not find any of the alternate timestreams. … He was afraid. He had never reached out and found that all his pasts and all his futures were identical. It meant he had no choices. Whatever as going on right now, he was like other people — he was trapped.” p. 2
“… every decison point makes a new stream. As long as I exist in another timestream, I can side step into it. I don’t go back and change anything. I simply move into a timestream where it’s already been changed.” p. 74
“Who is the ‘I’ that side steps and remembers? And are the lef-behind versions of me still me?” p. 77
“Nobody should do the same job for more than ten years. You start to think that’s who you are.” p. 101
“So nothing I do can hold back time, or move me through time any faster than the normal one-second-per-second rate of time travel that everybody uses.” p. 296
“… but ay explanation that explains everything probably explains nothing.” p. 297
“Such are the sad dreams of the somewhat depressive high school senior who finds himself having to do, not a man’s job, but a god’s job. That’s right, you heard me. Gods are supposed to have infinite knowledge, or at least they should know which questions to google.” p. 331
“‘It feels like you’re just making up a story now.’
“‘of course I am,’ said Ivy. ‘That’s what science is. And history, and philosophy, and everything else. Making up stories to explain the evidence, and then testing the story against the evidence, and against new evidence, to see if it fits.” p. 341
