After reading Ender’s Game, I wasted no time in reading the follow-up, Speaker for the Dead. The premise is intriguing. The story picks up about 20 or so “relative-time” years after Ender’s Game (which, in “real-time” years is closer to 3,000 or so years due to the mystery of space travel). Ender, now going by his real name, Andrew, is in his mid-30s and living on the planet Trondheim with his sister, Valentine. Andrew has spent his life — SPOILERS!!!!!!!!!!!!! SPOILERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SPOILERS!!!!!!!!!! –
working as a Speaker since the genocide of the Buggers in Ender’s Game. Ender and Valentine have spent their lives traveling from planet to planet in the galaxy looking for a home for the last remaining Bugger hive queen (she is still in a cocoon waiting to hatch). Ender, who wrote The Hive Queen and the Hegemon, detailing the history of the Buggers as a way of telling the truth about the Buggers, has created a wildly popular pseudo-religion that involves people “speaking” for those who have passed. Speakers tell the unbiased, unedited truth about a person when requested to do so.
This takes Ender to Lusitania, a colony of Catholics who live on the only planet where intelligent alien life still exists. The “Piggies” as they come to be known, are primitive compared to humans, but are extremely intelligent. Humans are supposed to engage in limited interaction with the Piggies, but that does not stop two “murders” of humans by the Piggies (the murders take place about twenty years apart). The murdered humans are xenologers (who study the Piggies) and family members of them call for a Speaker.
Enter Ender, who heads to Lusitania on the hunch that the Buggers will be able to thrive there and in response to requests for a Speaker. Ender’s visit to Lusitania allows Card to tell a complex story involving linguistics, anthropology, sociology, cultural histories, sin, religion, the fear of the unknown, the outsiders, and the different, and the desire for redemption. Well, more accurately, the human need to be redeemed. Ender eventually uncovers the mysteries of the dead he comes to speak and the actions of the Piggies.
The novel is ambitious, and Orson Scott Card should be respected for trying, but it is not as good as it is ambitious. What made Ender’s Game work so well, in my mind, was its simplicity. It followed, for the most part, the story of Ender as he made it through the Battle School. There was a B story, but it never distracted from the A story. That cannot be said to be the case with Speaker.
There were far too many characters in Novinha’s family and the problems of each one slowly merged together until I stopped caring and, as a result, repeatedly forgot the names of all the children. Miro’s fate at the end is a perfect example. And while I liked the concept of the almost sentient computer program Jane, her story is little more than a retelling of the Buggers and the Piggies. What makes that worse is that the Piggies are basically a retelling of the Buggers, although that retelling was necessary, so a retelling on top of a retelling is asking a bit much from the reader.
That said, Card presents several interesting ideas that he is not afraid to fully explore (in great detail). Reading it is a toss up, but I feel that it is necessary if you read Ender’s Game.
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