Wakers
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.
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Orson Scott Card
Before Ender’s Game became required reading in classrooms and a touchstone for science fiction fans worldwide, it was just a short story—one that Orson Scott Card wrote while trying to understand how humanity might survive its own genius. That idea, born of curiosity and a deep interest in moral complexity, would eventually grow into a sprawling series exploring war, empathy, leadership, and the loneliness of brilliance.
Born in Richland, Washington in 1951 and raised mostly in Utah and California, Card grew up in a family where storytelling was a living thing—spoken, passed down, constantly evolving. Though he began his career writing plays and studying literature, he found his true voice in speculative fiction. And when he wrote Ender’s Game—and later Speaker for the Dead—he did something science fiction rarely dared at the time: he treated the genre as a tool for exploring the human soul.
The Side-Step Trilogy
In a world where identity is no longer bound by a single timeline, The Side-Step Trilogy bends reality into a question: what if every version of you still existed—and you could take their place?
This quietly mind-bending series begins with Wakers, where teenage Laz discovers he can "side-step" into alternate versions of himself in parallel worlds. It’s not a flashy superpower; it’s a terrifying escape hatch—one he pulls only when life becomes unbearable. But when Laz wakes up in a cloning facility surrounded by hundreds of motionless copies of himself, the rules of his ability, and the very nature of his identity, begin to fracture.
The Side-Step Trilogy consists of two books and series is set to expand with the upcoming release of one more book. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
