First Lines Friday: Strange Sensations

First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Emma at Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author, or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines? To participate, simply choose a book off your shelf, copy the first few lines to hook the reader, and then reveal the book!

This week’s first lines are from a book that’s been gathering dust on my shelf, waiting to be read.

In many places in the Peopled Worlds, the pain came suddenly in the midst of the day’s labor. It was as if an ancient and comfortable presence left them, one that they had never noticed until it was gone, and no one knew what to make of it at first, though all knew at once that something had changed deep at the heart of the world. No one saw the brief flare in the star named Argos; it would be years before astronomers would connect the Day of Pain with the End of Worthing. And by then the change was done, the worlds were broken, and the golden age was over.

Curious about that unsettling feeling of loss?

The Worthing Saga by Orson Scott Card

It was a miracle of science that permitted human beings to live, if not forever, then for a long, long time. Some people, anyway. The rich, the powerful — they lived their lives at the rate of one year every ten. Somec created two societies: that of people who lived out their normal span and died, and those who slept away the decades, skipping over the intervening years and events. It allowed great plans to be put in motion. It allowed interstellar Empires to be built.

It came near to destroying humanity.

After a long, long time of decadence and stagnation, a few seed ships were sent out to save our species. They carried human embryos and supplies, and teaching robots, and one man. The Worthing Saga is the story of one of these men, Jason Worthing, and the world he found for the seed he carried.

My husband is a big fan of Orson Scott Card and has been trying to get me to read him for years. Ender’s Game is one of those books I should have read as a kid but which I unfortunately never got around to reading. (I was already climbing a mountainous TBR pile as a child!) I think I’m really going to enjoy his work!

Have you read The Worthing Saga or any other Orson Scott Card? What did you think?