Pathfinder

About the Pathfinder series

Rigg has grown up in the wilderness with the secret ability to see the paths every living creature has ever walked, trained by his father to keep the power hidden -- until his father's death sends him out into a wider world to discover both his own origins and the true nature of the paths he can see. Pathfinder (2010) reveals partway through that Rigg's world is a human colony planet whose past and present are more tangled with time travel than anyone realizes, turning what starts as a fantasy quest into hard science fiction about causality, parallel timelines, and the ethics of altering the past.

Ruins and Visitors escalate the stakes as Rigg and his companions discover they can create branching timelines by traveling into the past, and must decide how -- and whether -- to use that power to save a human colony from a catastrophic and possibly inevitable extinction event. Card builds the trilogy as a young-adult entry point into harder SF concepts, layering a personal coming-of-age story over increasingly mind-bending time-travel mechanics.

How to read this series

Read in publication order: Pathfinder, Ruins, Visitors. This is a single continuous story with a structure that deliberately withholds context in book one, so reading out of order will spoil major reveals about the setting. No prior Card reading is required -- it's an entirely separate setting from both the Enderverse and Alvin Maker.