The Worthing Saga

Hot sleep was invented to allow travel between stars, but people used it to spread their lives over a millennia. Living life like a stone skipped across a lake. Some people, anyway. The rich, the powerful--they lived their lives at the rate of one year every ten. It allowed great plans to be put in motion. It allowed interstellar Empires to be built.

It came near to destroying humanity.

Orson Scott Card is "a master of the art of storytelling" (Booklist), and The Worthing Saga is a story that only he could have written.