Expect plenty of snarkiness from precocious children. Signature Style: It's an Orson Scott Card book.This can be inconvenient at times, if a change he made altered history and he's not familiar with the influences it had on modern culture. Other people's memories change, but his doesn't. Ripple Effect-Proof Memory: This happens to Rigg when he changes the past.Ridiculously Human Robots: The Expendables including Rigg's adoptive father.Reasonable Authority Figure: Loaf plays this role for a lot of the story.People's Republic of Tyranny: The People's Revolution has some elements of this.He lied so that Rigg would have to head to the capital. Parental Abandonment: The story starts off with Rigg's father, who had raised him alone his entire life, dying when a tree falls on him.No Biochemical Barriers: Averted and discussed in the colony ship subplot.His dad never told him he was the son of the deposed empress, or what the political ramifications of making that known would be. As such, one of the 19 colonies on Garden has people who develop time-manipulation abilities like his. Humans Are Psychic in the Future: Ram, the pilot of the colony ship, had psychic abilities that were passed down to his descendants.Force Field Cage: The Wallfold that surrounds the known world is made up of an invisible force field-like Wall that doesn't physically prevent you from entering, but does fill any living being's mind with overwhelming dread if they don't turn back, eventually driving those who try to cross insane.When combined with Umbo's power of speeding up one's brain, he realizes the paths he sees are actually the people of the past speedily walking by. Fluorescent Footprints: Rigg's power of tracking "paths".Expy: The character of Rigg bears a strong resemblance to Ender Wiggin, due to their precocious intelligence and snarkiness.Dropped a Bridge on Him: Rigg's father dies in the first chapter of the book when a tree falls on him.Does Not Like Shoes: Rigg and Umbo, according to a line by Loaf.The Big Guy: Loaf, later he develops into the Team Dad.The Lancer: Umbo, he also plays the part of The Rival for a little while.The Leader: Rigg, he also fits the role of The Smart Guy since he is a master of astronomy, physics, mathematics, biology, zoology, and several languages.In a moment of urgency he picks the most recent path of an extinct animal he sees, which turns out to be fleeing the Colony Drop that rendered it extinct. Rigg can travel back in time by identifying the "path" of a living thing that had walked the land before. The Cretaceous Is Always Doomed: Justified.They didn't tell the colonists, to sidestep moral objections. Colony Drop: A manmade extinction event to wipe out incompatible native life so that Earth life could be seeded on Garden was planned as a part of the colonization process from the beginning.Each of these identical ships end up becoming their own colony, separated by the Wall.but on the other hand, immediately after the cloning, the 'real' Ram ordered all his clones killed so that the computers and expendables would only have to listen to one captain. Cloning Blues: Ram's psychic abilities interfered with his starship's travel through hyperspace, causing it jump backwards in time 19 times and thus create 18 identical copies of itself.Bullet Time: No actual bullets, but Umbo has the power to make people's perception of time speed up or slow down.Also, it turns out that all nineteen of the gems date back to the colonization of Garden and are the key to disabling the Walls. Ancient Artifact: Turns out one of the gems Rigg's father gives him was a long-lost symbol of authority taken from an ancient royal crown, considered to be more legend than reality.So of course many Time Travel Tropes get used, though the author's note explains that he wanted to "embrace" paradox rather than avoiding it, so expect to see the Time Travel Tropes get played with. The second story deals with Ram, the pilot on a colony ship heading out from Earth to colonize a new world, equipped with an experimental hyperdrive, and his interactions with the ship's computers and the Expendables, a group of androids that interface with the computers and serve as advisers.įairly early on Rigg learns that he's not the only one with unusual powers, and that there's a way to use his ability to not only see the course of people and other life from the past, but to interact with them and change the past as well. There are two parallel stories: The main plot concerns Rigg, a boy with the ability to see "paths" left behind by all living creatures when they move, and how he gets caught up in a political struggle for the fate of the known world. Pathfinder is a 2010 fantasy/sci-fi novel by Orson Scott Card.