Speaker For the Dead by Orson Scott Card
Funny you should mention it, Miss Bend the Round…
For the love of crap, I had to keep checking online to make sure this was actually the next book in the Ender series. Logically, it makes sense, but it takes such a violent paradigm shift from Ender’s Game to this book that it made my fucking brain hurt. It’s virtually a different genre. But it doesn’t deteriorate from the fact that this is still a good book, just in a totally different way, and for completely different reasons. It’s like trying to compare why Big Trouble in Little China and Escape from New York are good movies. Sure, Kurt Russell is in both of them, as the star, and they both have action, but they are almost different genres.
Ender has gone from messiah to antichrist. Once praised for his miraculous destruction of the buggers, his name is now muttered in the same undertones as Hitler. His wiping out of an entire species is called The Xenocide (which unsurprisingly is a title of a later book), and he is reviled by humanity. As pennance for his act, Ender has managed to save the hive queen’s cocoon, and he’s looking for a planet on which to leave her so that the buggers can be reborn. Also, Ender has written the story of the buggers, detailing all they did, good and ill, and signing it, “The Speaker For the Dead”.
Flash forward some thousands of years. Because that’s what Ender does. He travels from planet to planet with his sister, Valentine, where he acts as Speaker for the Dead for anyone who asks. Nobody knows he is Ender Wiggin, nobody knows he was the original Speaker of the Dead. Because space travel takes perhaps 22 years to get from destination to destination, while the traveler experiences but 2 weeks of aging, Ender has long since left behind the generations of people who knew him.
He is asked to travel to a colony where they have discovered a new species, which they call Piggies. The book then becomes a fascinating study on self-sacrifice as well as anthropological study. How do we understand a species without influencing them, and vice-versa? There’s a wonderful battle of religion vs. science fought out through these pages, and it’s impossible not to respect everyone’s opinion. It’s so well thought out, that you can forgive the occasional lapses into melodramatic navel-gazing.
I was enamored because of the Brazilian flavor of the colony, mostly because I now have Brazilian family and friends. But it was such an amazing divergence from the original story. I mean this was practically a different book. I’m curious to see where he goes with the rest of the series. I understand that he leaps around the time line a bit, so I’m having difficult discovering the order of events. I was told later books will cover the events immediately after the Xenocide in detail, with Ender’s brother Peter acting as the Hegemon, and with the cadets who were Ender’s classmates enduring the civil strife that came in the wake of Ender’s “victory”.
Either way, Speaker for the Dead is a terrific book, but I think it’s made more so by how off the path it goes from Ender’s Game. And even though it tackles morality, religion, and responsibility, I have yet to see it get overtly Mormon in its proseltyzing.
