From the New York Times bestselling author of Enders Game comes a brand-new series following a teen who wakes up on an abandoned Earth to discover that he’s a clone. Laz is a side-stepper: a teen with the incredible power to jump his consciousness to alternate versions of himself in parallel worlds. All his life, there was no mistake that a little side-stepping couldn’t fix. Until Laz wakes up one day in a cloning facility on a seemingly abandoned Earth. Laz finds himself surrounded by hundreds of other clones, all dead, and quickly realizes that he too must be a clone of his original self. Laz has no idea what happened to the world he remembers as vibrant and bustling only yesterday, and he struggles to survive in the barren wasteland he’s now trapped in. But the question that haunts him isn’t why was he created, but instead, who woke him up…and why? There’s only a single bright spot in Laz’s new life: one other clone appears to still be alive, although she remains asleep. Deep down, Laz believes that this girl holds the key to the mysteries plaguing him, but if he wakes her up, she’ll be trapped in this hellscape with him. This is one problem that Laz can’t just side-step his way out of. Gr 8 Up–The first in a planned trilogy, this novel tells the story of teenager Laz. He wakes up in a cloning factory on a seemingly empty Earth. Laz is a side-stepper, a person with the ability to travel to alternate timestreams. He can remember the normal life he had prior to waking up in the factory. But when he wakes up there, all the clones are dead except one who is asleep in a suspended chamber. He contemplates waking her up, but that comes with the consequence that she will have to be on this dangerous, empty Earth with him. He chooses to wake her as he believes she may be the key to getting out of this timestream. The two theorize that they must be clones of themselves and set forth on a quest for answers using their abilities to move among the different timestreams. They have an array of adventures and meet curious people along the way. The novel moves at a slow, but steady pace. It is richly textured and heavy with dialogue, but at times can be more cerebral and interior than as expository and action-packed as many sci-fi readers may expect. Card has created an intricate and deliberate plot device with the timestreams that will be novel to many readers. His characters are relatable and likeable; their witty, snappy dialogue will engage readers. VERDICT For libraries with a strong sci-fi collection that is widely circulated. -- School Library Journal ― 9/23/2022 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. Chapter 1 1 BECAUSE HE WAS a teenager, and teenagers take pleasure in exploring wacky ideas, Laz Hayerian had wondered since the sixth grade whether we are the same person when we wake up that we were when we went to sleep. Specifically, he wondered if he was the same person, because sometimes his dreams persisted in memory as if they had been real events. Did dream memories change him the way real memories did? This always led to the deeper question: Since Laz had memories that came, not from dreams, but from timestreams he had stepped out of, did his intertwined memories of other realities make him less sane? Or more experienced? Or both? Since, as far as he knew, no one else in the world had the ability to side step from one timestream to another, there was no one he could ask, and no philosopher who had written about it. As he woke up this morning—morning?—he felt very strange, and it wasn’t the residual effect of some dream. He didn’t even remember dreaming. It was his own past that felt like a disjointed dream, as if sometime in the night his whole life played out in his mind, but completely out of order, an incoherent scattering of scenes, facts, feelings, people, places. When he opened his eyes, he was in nearly complete darkness. Even on mornings at Dad’s place, there was always plenty of light that seeped around the curtains. All he could see was a tiny amount of green light coming from a few inches to his left. He was lying on a plastic mattress that felt no more cushioned than the pad in the bottom of a portable crib. Yet he didn’t feel any aches or sore spots, and when he flexed muscles up and down his body, nothing caused him pain. So Laz did what he had always done since his earliest memories of childhood. He searched for the alternate paths through time that were always close enough for him to take hold and shift, changing the story of events in bold or barely perceptible ways. It didn’t matter which, as long as it got him into a place where things made more sense. For the first time in his life he could not find any of the alternate timestre