Homecoming Saga

About the Homecoming Saga series

Forty million years in the future, the last remnants of humanity live on the planet Harmony, kept deliberately primitive and pre-industrial by Oversoul, an ancient orbiting computer originally programmed to prevent the kind of technological self-destruction that drove humans off Earth in the first place. When Oversoul's degrading circuits threaten to fail and release Harmony's people into unrestrained technological development, it recruits the family of Nafai to journey back to a mythic, half-remembered Earth and retrieve the means to fix itself. Card has been explicit that the Homecoming Saga is a loose science-fictional retelling of the Book of Mormon's opening narrative, transplanting its family drama, sibling rivalries, and themes of exile and return onto a far-future interstellar canvas.

Across five novels -- The Memory of Earth, The Call of Earth, The Ships of Earth, Earthfall, and Earthborn -- the saga follows Nafai's family from Harmony's court intrigues through a generation-spanning voyage back to a transformed Earth and the difficult founding of a new society there, blending Card's interests in family psychology, politics, and religious allegory.

How to read this series

Read in publication order, which is also strict internal chronology: The Memory of Earth, The Call of Earth, The Ships of Earth, Earthfall, Earthborn. This is a single continuous story told across five volumes rather than five self-contained books, following one family across generations, so it should be read straight through in sequence.