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    The Memory of Earth: Homecoming: Volume 1
    Unavailable
    The Memory of Earth: Homecoming: Volume 1
    Unavailable
    The Memory of Earth: Homecoming: Volume 1
    Ebook378 pages6 hours

    The Memory of Earth: Homecoming: Volume 1

    By Orson Scott Card

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    The first volume in the Homecoming saga from bestselling author Orson Scott Card, The Memory of Earth

    High above the planet Harmony, the Oversoul watches. Its task, programmed so many millennia ago, is to guard the human settlement on this planet--to 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 technology that could lead to weapons of war. By control of the data banks, and subtle interference in the very thoughts of the people, the artificial intelligence has fulfilled its mission.

    But now there is a problem. In orbit, the Oversoul realizes that it has lost access to some of its memory banks, and some of its power systems are failing. And on the planet, men are beginning to think about power, wealth, and conquest.

    Homecoming series
    The Memory of Earth
    The Call of Earth
    The Ships of Earth
    Earthfall
    Earthborn

    At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJan 15, 1993
    ISBN9781429966054
    Unavailable
    The Memory of Earth: Homecoming: Volume 1
    Author

    Orson Scott Card

    Orson Scott Card is the author of numerous bestselling novels and the first writer to receive both the Hugo and Nebula awards two years in a row; first for Ender’s Game and then for the sequel, Speaker for the Dead. He lives with his wife in North Carolina.

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    Reviews for The Memory of Earth

    3.5/5

    27 ratings15 reviews

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    • 1/5
      3rd try on this book...just doesn't click in my mind........I won't waste my time on this with so much more other things available for my time.
    • 2/5
      I have such respect for Orson Scott Card that it was hard to rate this low. The writing is fantastic, the effort in weaving the tale commendable, but the fact that I felt that it was pretty much plagiarized from the Book of Mormon left a really bad taste in my mouth.
    • 5/5
      fun
    • 1/5
      title and cover are obvious copy of memory of light. writing is shit.
    • 3/5
      Looking back, these books were really creepy.
    • 3/5
      OSC is a hit or miss author for me. This I remember enjoying but haven't sought it out since.
    • 3/5
      Interesting. I was just reading and enjoying the story when all of a sudden it turned into the story of Lehi and his sons. Well, it was different, but it was the same story! It kind of weirded me out a little. I plan on reading the rest of the series. It will be interesting to see if the whole story follows the Book of Mormon theme.
    • 5/5
      Somehow, I don't remember this having such religious overtones the last time I read it. Nafai is the youngest son of the Wetchik, living in Basilica on the planet Harmony. Unfortunately, Harmony is not as harmonious as it once was and plots have been put in motion that will bring about its destruction. Nafai and his family must brave great danger to serve the Oversoul who/which is charged with keeping the planet safe. This is the first book in the Homecoming Earth series, and as such is mostly setup for later books. It explains the nature of the Oversoul and introduces the characters. By the time it got really interesting, it was almost over. However, it does keep the reader plugging along; not so boring and expositional that you want to quit and read something else.
    • 3/5
      This book is hard for atheists to enjoy. Religious allegories abound, & they distract from the story and character development.
    • 5/5
      The Memory of Earth is another name for the Oversoul - a mystical supercomputer tasked with keeping humanity away from the technological discoveries that allowed it to destroy itself on Earth. But after 40 million years, the Oversoul is weakening and it needs to enlist the aid of those humans most capable of hearing its call for help. Unfortunately, the only source of help is back on Earth.I really enjoyed this book. I think the author is following in the best traditions of Sci-Fi by raising interesting questions and allowing us to explore some of the possible answers with him. One of the obvious ones is, of course, the nature of God. Do we know what God is? Really? What are His purposes? Another question is the based in the nature of the sexes - the thinking in the book is apparently that men are dominant when survival is in question while women are the bringers of civilization. We also explore questions of family and leadership. Interesting topics and presented in a way that I found to be very compelling.The things I didn't care for were the odd handling of some of the characters' youth. Card goes from showing them to be exceptionally mature to whiny to perceptive and able to handle complex social interactions with stunning insight to being completely naive to being ruthlessly brutal to being filled with the proverbial teen angst. Overall, though, I was surprised by how quickly I consumed the book and will certainly be powering my way through the rest of the series.
    • 4/5
      It's funny. Even the religions we put in our Science Fiction are works-based religions. I'm glad my God isn't as limited as the Oversoul. The implications of a God that isn't omniscient or omnipresent is devastating. I like how Card makes me think about these things though, and I really enjoyed the two main characters of this book.
    • 4/5
      The Memory of Earth. A computer called the Oversoul has been given guardianship of the planet called Harmony. But the Oversoul is in need of repair, so it selects a few people to learn about space travel and return to Earth in hopes of finding the means to fix it. First of a five book series. Rating 4 of 5. I always hate describing the premise of sci-fi books, because people roll their eyes. But it's good, really! The characters are fantastic, and the interpersonal problems posed are intriguing. The book is about so much more than just a galaxy far, far away.
    • 4/5
      After falling in love with the Ender series this year, I decided to get to know some of Card’s other series. I had never read a review of the Homecoming series, but I knew that it was based on the story of the Book of Mormon. I was interested to see what Card would do with a sacred story from his own religion, in giving it a science fiction setting and thus opening it to a wider audience.For forty million years, the world of Harmony has been a world without large-scale conflict. The Oversoul, an artificial intelligence satellite system revered as a god, has suppressed any thoughts that would lead to such conflicts. While some technologies have flourished, mechanical transportation and anything large than hand weapons have not been invented. Now a crisis has come: the Oversoul, designed by humans fleeing the destruction of Earth, has far outlasted its intended lifespan, but humanity has not yet learned how to live in peace. Despite its best efforts, the Oversoul is breaking down.How closely the story of The Memory of Earth follows the Book of Mormon is impossible for me to tell, since I’m totally unfamiliar with the latter. I do know that Card, as usual, tells a brilliant and engaging tale, one which left me thoughtful and eager for the next in the series.I had some of the same problems with this book that I had with Xenocide, namely that I found many of the characters annoying and unsympathetic. The fact that Card clearly intends them to be so didn’t stop them from diminishing my enjoyment of the book somewhat, but I wouldn’t say that the story itself suffers for their presence. Quite the contrary, since they all have a role to play in its moral framework.And that’s important, because Homecoming, even more than the Ender saga, has a point to make, and it isn’t really possibly to evaluate the books individually, except as entertainment. In that context, The Memory of Earth is a success: I couldn’t put it down.
    • 4/5
      I fall in love with OSC's writing time and time again, and The Memory of Earth was not an exception for me.It is a new world in which I had some trouble finding my bearings, but I was grateful that OSC didn't spend too much time giving me all of the bits of information that I would have needed to be completely comfortable. Instead, this familiarity came with the passing pages, as I became more in tune with the characters. There are still many questions that I have, such as, how would humans come to the decision that a computer is a necessary watch dog? How can a human even begin to hope that their programming is intricate enough to deal with humanity's many paths? How can a parent who knows the truth that an ultimate being is a computer program teach his child to believe in the Almighty as a power, and not as satellite?Perhaps these questions will be answered in the next books, which I will be sure to pick up.
    • 3/5
      OSC has always been fond of mixing religion into his books. This book could be considered to start asking the question, "what if God was a gigantic supercomputer in orbit that remotely controls us all". After all, who hasn't asked that question?Joking aside it is an interesting description of a society that once was advanced and forced themselves and their descendants into a more primitive life in an attempt to find a greater quality of life. To enforce this they have a computer that watches over and maintains the society until it is ready for greater things. However what happens if they never reach this stage and the computer starts to break down?So we have the story of a group of people who begin to find this out and start the journey to fix it. Once again OSC seems most interested in telling stories of characters who you may or may not care about. The problem i had was that OSC didn't spend much time making me care for the characters before putting them in peril - which is fine, if the peril is short lived/interesting, however it wasn't and I didn't find it so.Not a bad book, but I'm in no rush to read the next one.