Pathfinder and Ruins

I've read a lot of books by Orson Scott Card over the years (37 by my count) and I'd been slow to read some of his more recent books.  Maybe it was OSC burn out, or maybe it's just that I've been only reading his Ender books which seem to be getting progressively less good, but I haven't read a number of his more recent works.  But once you've read 37 books by an author, why not a few more? So I added Pathfinder and it's sequel Ruins to the list.  (The total is now 39, not counting short stories, poems, collections, etc.)

Anyone familiar with Card's work won't be surprised to find that the story centers around a young male (Rigg) who has some special talents.  If you've guessed that these talents might just come in handy for saving the world you'd be right!  It's a pattern that has turned up before in [insert every OSC novel here], but it's not like he's the only one to do this.  (A few stories about Hobbits or Jedi come to mind.)  In this case, Rigg can see the paths that all living being leave behind.  Sort of like a slime trail behind a snail, only with no slime, and he's the only one who can see it.  This makes him an excellent tracker, and he can also see into the past somewhat, at least to see who was where, and when they were there.  Adventures ensue, and along the way he meets some companions who have some interesting time related talents, and, of course, that whole saving the world thing comes up eventually.
Even though I'm poking some fun at it, the book is quite good, particularly the first one.  Though he's perhaps grown quirkier in his old age, Card is still a very good writer.  I'm not sure how I feel about the novel writing world we live in these days where adults spend most of their time reading books written for teenagers (and then watching all the movies), but I didn't find the books to be particularly "young adult".  (Perhaps we've reached the point where authors want their fiction labeled as YA, because more people will read it?)  Anyway, I don't want to ruin the plot too much, but there are two things that I did want to cover in a little more detail about these books.

First, the books, particularly the second one, continue Card's habit from the last 10 years of having characters in his book randomly launch into lengthy rants that don't seem to quite fit in with the story.  You're reading along, and suddenly one of the characters wants to go off for 5 pages about marriage and how it preserves society and even humanity as we know it.  Amazingly, these characters always seem to be echoing a sentiment that Card happens to personally hold.  I've read a fair amount of his political musings (which range from interesting to bizarre, in my opinion) but I'd prefer it if he'd leave them out of his books.  But, this only happens from time to time, so I just roll my eyes and skim for a page or two until he gets off his soap box.

The other interesting thing about the series is that there's time travel.  This starts happening early enough in the story that I don't feel too bad about writing about it.  Generally, stories that deal with time travel all follow the Back to the Future model.  Namely, that there is a certain way things happened, and stories should be cleverly written so that characters can always manage to stay away from their past selves and make things turn out alright.  Marty McFly hides under the table at the dance to keep from being seen by himself, and Harry, Ron and Hermione save Buckbeak but in a way that they don't know that they've saved him until after they've gone back in time and done the saving.  OSC bravely throws away all these "rules" about time travel and builds a universe that hasn't been this chaotic since Bill and Ted were running around with their phone booth.  In Pathfinder, you can travel back in time, walk up to yourself and say, "hey self, don't leave for work on time today or you'll get in a car accident."  Then, you future self goes back to a the future where he's from.  But - here's the tricky part - because you don't leave for work at the usual time, you avoid the accident and consequently, there's no need to go back in time to warn yourself of something that didn't happen.  So what happened to your future self that came back to warn you?  I don't know. Maybe he doesn't exist any more, maybe OSC has created an infinitely branching multiverse.  The only thing that matters is what happens to the you that you are right now, and we let the strange circumstances take care of themselves.  It gets confusing at times to both the reader and the characters, but it's rather fun.

One final warning, there is at least one more book in the series which is supposed to come out late this year.  I don't know if that's the last one or not.