The Memory of Earth (Homecoming Saga #1)
High above the planet Harmony, the Oversoul watches. Its task, programmed so many millennia ago, is to guard the human settlement on this planetto protect this fragile remnant of Earth from all threats. To protect them, most of all, from themselves.
The Oversoul has done its job well. There is no war on Harmony. There are no weapons of mass destruction. There is no technol
...moreCompact Disc, 9 pages
Published
April 1st 2008
by Blackstone Audiobooks
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Decent sci-fi lacking some impact...: Orson Scott Card knows how to tell a story. This book is nothing more than the prologue for a five issue epic about our distant relatives on a distant planet in the distant future.
Card develops the characters nicely and the story never gets boring - it's an easy and enjoyable read. But it lacks the incredible imagination Card displayed in "Speaker for the dead", maybe because this time, there are no fascinating aliens present. Instead, we get a so
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This is the first of an older series of Card's I'd somehow never picked up. Based on ease of acquisition - either from the library or the used bookstores - I assumed that it wasn't very popular among his fans, and may not be very good.
I was pleasantly surprised. It's a perfectly decent, solid start to what looks like it'll be an interesting series.
Many of the classic Card elements are present: dangerously intelligent children, wildly dysfunctional family and sibling relationships...more
I was pleasantly surprised. It's a perfectly decent, solid start to what looks like it'll be an interesting series.
Many of the classic Card elements are present: dangerously intelligent children, wildly dysfunctional family and sibling relationships...more
Nafai lives with his father and his brothers outside of the great city of Basilica. He's not a child any more, but he doesn't know what he wants to do with his life. Then things get turned upside down when his father has a vision from the Oversoul. Nafai begins to wonder about his world, and soon discovers that the Oversoul, the world and everything he thought he knew is not what it seems. Now his family is caught up in the political intrigue of Basilica. How can Nafai keep his family safe and k...more
I really enjoyed reading this book. I liked the descriptions of the cultural and political systems used in the setting as they are very different from any other kind I have known of. I have also gotten to like many of the characters, and even some of there strange names, though a few of them still bother me (such as "Luet").
The only reason that I gave this book four stars rather than five is that I would have liked for it to surprise me a bit more. Being very familiar with ...more
The only reason that I gave this book four stars rather than five is that I would have liked for it to surprise me a bit more. Being very familiar with ...more
This is a difficult review for me to write, as it raises the question of what my book reviews need to be. On the one hand, I found this book to be very well-written, yet the themes, implications and general message I profoundly disagreed with and found a little disturbing. To deal with this, I've decided to score this one based on it's craft, not counting "against" it because I happen to disagree with it's message, although it will be impossible for me to make a full review without com...more
So I'd never read anything by Orson Scott Card before. Of course I had heard of him and seen his books all over, but he was just one of those authors I never quite got around to reading. While that misstep has now been corrected, I had to put down The Memory of Earth.
I fully intended to read the book front to back, but something had been nagging me almost since the beginning. Given that I was a newcomer to Card's work, I was keeping an open mind and had no idea what to expect except ...more
I fully intended to read the book front to back, but something had been nagging me almost since the beginning. Given that I was a newcomer to Card's work, I was keeping an open mind and had no idea what to expect except ...more
Kind of amusing, out of the four books I got from the library, this was the one I was dreading reading them most, and it actually turned out to be the second best of the bunch. My eyes completely glazed over as I read the inner cover, and the book cover is doing it no favors, either. But it really was an interesting read, despite the horrible names given to characters and some descriptions of their sexual culture that almost made me put it down (nothing explicit, but kind of strange).
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Ender's Game was one of the first sci-fi novels I read -- and enjoyed -- as an adult. My teenage memories of the genre were of the worst pulp fiction; I read everything I could get my hands on, and one of my uncles was a sci-fi fan. Needless to say, he wasn't reading fine lit.
A friend chose Ender for book club (she'd put up with a lot of Oprah picks up till then), and most of the members who read it loved it. I was the only one to devour the whole series, though, and the Shadow ones ...more
A friend chose Ender for book club (she'd put up with a lot of Oprah picks up till then), and most of the members who read it loved it. I was the only one to devour the whole series, though, and the Shadow ones ...more
Rita Webb
rated it
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review of another edition
Recommended to Rita by:
Tj
Shelves:
scifi,
read-in-2009
Somehow Orson Scott Card makes writing look easy. Every word flows in unity with every other word. The seamless blend of character development, world creation, science, story, and descriptions was awe inspiring.
Nafai hates it that his father had a vision from the Oversoul. It ruins his sense of how the world should work, and it makes his family the laughing stock of Basilica. He doesn't like the intrusion of the "witches" who interpret his father's visions. Who are they to...more
Nafai hates it that his father had a vision from the Oversoul. It ruins his sense of how the world should work, and it makes his family the laughing stock of Basilica. He doesn't like the intrusion of the "witches" who interpret his father's visions. Who are they to...more
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Orson Scott Card is a very creative science fiction and fantasy writer! This book (series) is a great look into the philosophy of life on other planets and the possibility of higher intelligences. The last books in the series introduce new characters that are not a likeable as the earlier books and the storyline suffers because of it.
Fans of ENDER'S GAME--BEWARE! This is not on par with that novel in any way. Personally, I can't believe how many of the novels within this series I've read when I realize I should have ended with this one. To me, this novel felt like it was one of Card's many forgotten manuscripts, written while he was a writer honing his craft, left at the bottom of a desks drawer in a beat up manila folder to gather dust. Then, when the Ender novels garnered much appraisal & awards, Card's publisher must ...more
I'm a science fiction fan ... however, I've never read anything by Orson Scott Card until this book. I enjoyed the premise of the book ... a world, Harmony, 40 million years from now where the basic technology appears to be from a bygone era ... no airplanes, no telephones, no skyscrapers ... but, there is still technology for wheelchairs that can float and computer-driven libraries and commodity trading.
Anyhow, the key to any sci-fi novel is the human interaction and this book has ...more
Anyhow, the key to any sci-fi novel is the human interaction and this book has ...more
I liked this whole sci-fi series. I've heard that it has a lot of Mormon themes in it (the author is Mormon or lapsed Mormon or something like that) but to be honest, I didn't notice it at the time I was reading it and it didn't interfere with my enjoyment. Dramatic stories, fun characters, big mysterious computers...
This was the first Orson Scott Card novel I read and I liked it a lot. If I remember correctly I went through the five books in this saga (Homecoming Saga) in about two weeks. Several years later I found out that the series is loosely based on the Book of Mormon (Orson Scott Card is mormon). Go figure.
Being an Orson Scott Card fan, my daughter Tracy loaned me this book along with the other 4 in the series. She told me it took its basic plot from the Book of Mormon. This is certainly true. "The names were changed to protect the innocent", and were a little difficult to get in my head, but the characters were certainly recognizable
It was interesting to read the account of a people 10,000,000 years from the destruction of Earth on the planet Harmony, a kind of advanced a...more
It was interesting to read the account of a people 10,000,000 years from the destruction of Earth on the planet Harmony, a kind of advanced a...more
I liked the premise of this book- that in the future there exists a computer (created by humans who have survived the destruction of Earth) that guides the cultural evolution of humanity by making them clear-headed when they're doing something good and absentminded when they're doing or thinking about something "bad"- though the "bad" things include wheels and other things you wouldn't necessarily expect.
I wasn't as pleased about the characters, which is something ...more
I wasn't as pleased about the characters, which is something ...more
This series had good potential, and I liked this novel, but once the series started getting "preachy" I dropped it like a hot potato. Card is a perfectly decent writer, though his style is pretty straightforward and lacking much flourish, but he let's his personal beliefs creep into most of his works. If it were just a couple of his novels that were thinly veiled Mormon mythologies it would be fine, but a large percentage of his later work is very colored by his religious beliefs. This...more
This book was definitely the first in a series, so I will have to read more/the rest of them in order to really know whether I like it or not. So far, it seems as though the story is just a repeat of the back story. The humans destroy Earth, some leave, establish Harmony and create a supercomputer to keep them from once again destroying their home, but, the computer is failing, the people are beginning to head in the same direction as what occurred on Earth, so the computer has elected new peopl...more
The Memory of Earth was pretty awesome. I found the world of harmony and the culture of the it inhabitants to be fascinating. The Oversoul is a very interesting concept that keeps the novel from being unbearably religious. This book has some very religious overtones but the Oversoul keeps it from being overdone and give the old prophets tale a nice scifi twist. Another saving grace was how the characters interacted with one another. Card is able to bring all of his characters to life wi...more
I didn't read the whole book, so this is just my review on the bit I read before getting disgusted. I love love love his Ender series, but it ends there. I didn't have time to get interested in the society (though I wasn't finding them that interesting anyway) before getting too disgusted with the societal moral norms. Yes, I'm conservative and religious. I don't demand perfectly clean angelic books, but I don't like to read about things I consider to be crass, vulgar, whatever. Since it wa...more
the think I don't like about Sci-Fi is the strange names. I want to be able to identify the characters by name and a name I can't pronounce does me little good. So when I recognize characters that the author has based on some other character that is well known to me I just use the name I am familiar with. That doesn't make for the ability to discuss the story with anyone else. It helps me though. Published in 1992 there are no real surprises in this book. The way the story is told and the twists...more
Hello 1 Nephi!!!!!! I know Orson Scott Card is LDS and if you didn't you would after reading this book. So far a father has had a "dream" sent from a higher power about the destruction of his home world unless everyone returns to the old ways. The father is forced to flee with his 4 sons into the wilderness to stay safe. The two eldest brothers don't believe and the youngest is also having "dreams". It actually translates very well into a sci fi story and it will be inte...more
I picked up this book from the library not knowing anything about it. About a third of the way through, I was thinking, gosh, this story is familiar - and realized it is a retelling with a sci-fi twist of part of 1 Nephi in the Book of Mormon. I liked it and I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the series to see how Card handles the rest of the history, and to what extent he takes it.
I am re-reading 1 Nephi now, with a new perspective. It is more interesting to me than befor...more
I am re-reading 1 Nephi now, with a new perspective. It is more interesting to me than befor...more
This review covers the 5-volume Homecoming saga, which I started in January, 2009.
This series is a fictionalization of the Book of Mormon (BoM), 1 Nephi through Mosiah. The sci-fi elements are serve the appropriate function of personalizing Card's interpretation of the story so that he can indulge in theological speculation without provoking conflicts with Mormon doctrine per se. I suspect that the reader who expects a sci-fi experience and who is unfamiliar with the BoM will be ve...more
This series is a fictionalization of the Book of Mormon (BoM), 1 Nephi through Mosiah. The sci-fi elements are serve the appropriate function of personalizing Card's interpretation of the story so that he can indulge in theological speculation without provoking conflicts with Mormon doctrine per se. I suspect that the reader who expects a sci-fi experience and who is unfamiliar with the BoM will be ve...more
I was hoping to enjoy a different Card series besides the Ender and Bean sagas, but Homecoming won't be it.
I like the central idea of the Oversoul, but I never cared for any of the incredibly flat characters enough to want to see what happens next. The 300 page book took me 2 weeks to finish with the last 100 pages being read in an hour once the plot started moving past pubescent anger. The decent resolution bumps up the review one star.
Looking at reviews for the next f...more
I like the central idea of the Oversoul, but I never cared for any of the incredibly flat characters enough to want to see what happens next. The 300 page book took me 2 weeks to finish with the last 100 pages being read in an hour once the plot started moving past pubescent anger. The decent resolution bumps up the review one star.
Looking at reviews for the next f...more
I have conflicting opinions of this book. First of all, I never read science fiction, but Timm brought it home from the library and I had nothing left to read at the moment. I had no advance knowledge of this book, but quickly realized that it was a sci-fi retelling of the Book Of Mormon. I found this very interesting, but sometimes unsettling. It was interesting to see the correlations to a story that I know so well, but sometimes the dialog was almost verbatim from the Book of Mormon. Weird. B...more
Definitely not the best I have ever read. The world is so strange and inconsistent. Example: While they really have no vehicles to speak of for transportation, they have computers. While these are explained within the story, it just felt forced to me. I did enjoy reading parts of it, but the family dynamics within the main group of characters just gets in the way (not to mention that there seemed to be a lot of inconsistency with how the brothers interacted with each other). I definitely won't r...more
This is an interesting story...wait! I think it sounds like another book I have read.... Wealthy family with a couple of good brothers, and a couple of not so good brothers. Father has vision-family needs to leave and live in wilderness. Wait! Need to go back and steal family records from evil guy. Brothers go together, good brother has to cut off evil guy's head to get records...etc. Sound familiar? Come on Bro. Card. I have to say that I liked the thinly veiled stories, though, but ga...more
I like Orson Scott Card's books and I feel like I entered into this series biased because of that. I did enjoy this book, but didn't think it was quite as captivating as the Ender series or his more recent works. One of Card's strengths is his character development and the characters in this book did not disappoint.
I read several reviews that said this series is a retelling of the Book of Mormon, so I read the Book of Mormon online and found that to be true, but this did not affect m...more
I read several reviews that said this series is a retelling of the Book of Mormon, so I read the Book of Mormon online and found that to be true, but this did not affect m...more
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| Book of Mormon | 2 | 24 | Oct 24, 2009 10:51pm |
Orson Scott Card is the author of the novels Ender's Game, Ender's Shadow, and Speaker for the Dead, which are widely read by adults and younger readers, and are increasingly used in schools.
Besides these and other science fiction novels, Card writes contemporary fantasy (Magic Street, Enchantment, Lost Boys), biblical novels (Stone Tables, Rachel and Leah), the American frontier fantasy ser...more
More about Orson Scott Card...
Besides these and other science fiction novels, Card writes contemporary fantasy (Magic Street, Enchantment, Lost Boys), biblical novels (Stone Tables, Rachel and Leah), the American frontier fantasy ser...more
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