The Worthing Saga is a collection of Card’s works originally published separately that depict the zenith, subsequent collapse and rise again of a far-future human society. In this culture, a drug called somec, which produces a state of suspended animation, has made long-distance spaceflight a possibility, but has also engendered a pseudo-immortality for the rich and privileged, who sleep away years of their lives and only awaken for brief periods. As a result, they are like stones skipping along the surfaces of their lives, rather than actually living them.

In the opening novella, The Worthing Chronicle, Jason Worthing relates the history of this culture. His family has genetically inherited psychic abilities, but a massacre caused by Jason’s father has made all the Worthings outcasts. He grows up on a planet called Capitol, which has been completely covered by buildings and infrastructure. Learning of a plot to bring down Capitol, Worthing leaves for an unsettled planet with a pre-selected group of colonists: his own enemies and detractors. But an accident during the journey causes the colonists’ memories to be destroyed while they are under the somec. Essentially, they are adult infants who Worthing must teach and raise, giving him the opportunity to create a culture entirely from scratch. Eventually, he leaves his fledgling society in the hands of his descendants and goes to sleep for several thousand years, until they have advanced enough to figure out how to awaken him.

While Worthing is sleeping, his family’s genetic abilities are augmented by inbreeding, until they become so psychically powerful that they are able to control the lives of their subjects. They eliminate pain, grief and accidental death, creating a veritable paradise, one in which human progress is essentially stalled, however. Then one day, pain returns to the world, as does Jason Worthing.

This history, related by Worthing through dreams to a young scribe, is fascinating and often harrowing, covering tens of thousands of years of history and leading up to an explanation for why pain, death and sorrow have returned. The short stories that follow fill in the gaps left by the novella, detailing some of the more critical events in the history of Capitol and Worthing. Card has fully realized several societies in The Worthing Saga, and his answers to the what-if questions he poses — What if immortality were possible? What if pain and suffering were eliminated? — are both epic and meaningful.

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