Orson Scott Card, The Worthing Chronicle (1983)

Early in his career, Orson Scott Card published two books, both with the subtitle The Worthing Chronicle: Hot Sleep and Capitol. Hot Sleep was more of a traditional novel, about the character of Jason Worthing; Capitol was a story cycle filling in the backstory of the world Worthing came from. Card later came to dislike both books; Capitol was completely withdrawn from publication, while he revised Hot Sleep into a new book, called just The Worthing Chronicle. (Still later, he republished The Worthing Chronicle with the stories from Capitol that he actually liked in a collection called The Worthing Saga; that's the iteration that actually remains in print, I believe.)

The Worthing Chronicle by Orson Scott Card

Published: 1983
Acquired: mid-1990s
Reread: December 2025

As a kid, I inherited an enjoyment of Orson Scott Card from my mother, and The Worthing Chronicle was one of the sf novels of his we owned. A few years ago, I read Capitol seeking stories for my class on life extension in sf, which made me want to reread the novel that followed on from it and used its world.

The Worthing Chronicle is set in the far far future, in a world where no one dies or suffers great pain... until one day, when that changes. At the same time, strangers arrive at the inn where the main character, Lared, lives with his parents. These strangers are from space, have great powers, and are clearly linked to the great change that has taken place. The book integrates a story about Lared with a number of flashbacks telling the story of Jason Worthing, which begins with his boyhood on Capitol from Capitol, but goes far beyond it as Worthing becomes the progenitor of a new breed of human.

There is definitely a subgenre of sf about evolutionary leaps forward, new humans with amazing powers who use those powers for good or for ill. (See, for example, Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human.) It's not a subgenre I care for, whether I am supposed to admire the "throw-forward" or despise them; I feel like the kinds of questions these stories often ask just don't interest me. The Worthing Chronicle, even though it is a very late example of that genre, is no exception. Should a secret cabal rule all of humankind for its own good? Would humans be humans if they never experienced pain or death? I don't know, and I don't really care, and to the extent that I do care, I feel like it probably would be better to never experience death even if that diminished our "humanness" in some kind of way, and I feel like Card uninterestingly stacks the deck in favor of the opposite outcome.

Overall this is decently well told, and I did like Lared, but I didn't find the story being told very interesting. There's a lot of nastiness in this book. As someone who enjoys a bit of textual analysis, I am mildly curious about what kind of revisions Card did to transform Hot Sleep into this book... but not so curious that I would actually go and read it. Card did eventually republish Hot Sleep as a serial in his online magazine. Skimming it, it seems like the big change was the addition of the Lared narrative, and thus the editing down of Jason's story.