Speaker for the Dead

Today is the day for me rating books a 3.5.

I reread this over the weekend, in search of comfort reading. And that is basically what it was: a familiar story, nothing that made me think too hard, a plot that propelled me to the finish line in fairly short order and without a whole lot of mental effort on my part. And for doing the job of entertaining me over the weekend, it gets a 3.5.

But--despite the author's rather wordy and self-flattering forward--this is not High Art.

1. The author's very public homophobia influences his storylines: there are no gay characters. All the men are Manly and all the women are Feminine, unless they are damaged, and then they SHOULD be feminine and will be restored to their proper softness/motherliness by show more the end of the book.

2. Every single child character in his novels is some kind of prodigy. This simply is not credible. Ender himself is a prodigy, as we all learned in Ender's Game; and in this book, all of the other characters are prodigies, too, somehow able to amass enough knowledge and skill in the fields of xenobiology & xenoanthropology, respectively, to pass the admittance exams while still teenagers. I'm thinking that in 3000 years the amount of specialized knowledge in those fields would be so extensive as to make that essentially impossible, no matter how smart the kid is.

3. Ender is just not a credible character in this book. His insights are pedestrian in the extreme. In order for him to shine as a genius, Card must paint all of the other characters as exceptionally blind and stupid. Somehow no one in the entire city even thinks for a second that Novinha is unfaithful to her husband, even though ALL SIX of her children are from a man not her husband, who is actually physically sterile, and known to be so. Come on. No one guessed? No one hinted? No one gossiped? This husband of hers who was cuckolded for decades, actually adored his wife and only beat her because he loved her--oh ok. Well that makes it all right then.

No one sees that the littlest boy is grieving the man he thinks is his father--because why? It's pretty glaringly obvious. Why is Ender the only one who sees it? Why is he the only one who offers discipline or structure?

Why do all of the xeno- experts think that the aliens must reproduce the same way people do? Wouldn't that be one of the earliest and most basic things covered in the exams they all passed when they were 13? For that matter, why--except for Card's homophobia and sexism--is male/female a pattern carried through all of his alien races? In order for Ender to be a genius who solves this world's problems in 30 minutes (not an exaggeration) everyone else on the planet must be painted as an absolute idiot, even though they are simultaneously all prodigies. This makes no sense.

The way it looks to me is this:

Card needs to make Ender a genius, but one's character cannot exceed one's own intellect. Ender is limited to the insights that Card himself is capable of. Therefore, in order for Ender to be a super-genius, the entire city must be stupid.

It's dangerous for an author to make a character a genius. If the author isn't capable of the genius they need their character to display, it just won't be convincing. show less

I am not sure what happened. Last time I read this book I loved it and thought it would always be a favorite. But this time around, I couldn’t get past the weird pacing, poor characterizations, the unearned deification of Ender, and the absolute nonsense of most of the plot twists on Lusitania. Special recognition goes to the monstrous underutilization of Jane, an inconceivably powerful and essentially omnipotent being, reduced to being Ender’s secretary slash girlfriend.

Orson Scott Card is one of a distressingly large class of science fiction authors whose work is best appreciated by those who can ignore the writer’s opinions and behavior regarding religion, politics, and sex. The question for a reader is not what Card believes about these issues but what his novels say about them.

Ender’s Game dramatizes the pitfalls of innocence. Young Ender commits near xenocide because he doesn’t know that the decisions he makes in simulated battle games cost lives. In Speaker for the Dead, Ender sets out to find a new home for the Buggers. But full atonement is never possible, and the sins of ignorance are inescapable. Ender unwittingly causes the Bugger Queen pain because she does not experience time show more dilation and is conscious throughout the decades-long voyage. He also damages his close relationship with Jane, the ansible-AI, when he cuts his link to her, unaware that hours for him seem like years to her.

A similar drama of well-intentioned torture takes place on the planet Lusitania, where aliens and humans do not understand each other’s biological imperatives. The colonists also injure each other through well-intentioned attempts to protect each other from unpleasant truths.

NB: Speaker for the Dead seems to pay homage to James Blish’s A Case of Conscience (1958), another novel where a priest struggles to understand innocent but dangerous aliens who talk to trees. show less

I first read Speaker for the Dead in middle school, not long after picking up Ender's Game. Both books set me on a course in reading for the rest of my life, but compared to the action-packed first novel I found Speaker comparatively boring, mundane, and a bit of a slog. Returning to it now as an adult, I am blown away. While it has its faults (Ender, for one, exists almost as a strange type of Mary Sue character), the concepts behind the book and the way they're unfolded throughout the narrative are unmatched. The book's emotional sensitivity takes its characters seriously, human and alien alike, driving home the central theme of finding the relatable and the shared core in the things we don't recognize or find repulsive. Speaker for show more the Dead is an absolute tour de force, and my only regret is that I didn't return to it sooner. show less

A brief disclaimer: While I recommend this book wholeheartedly, the author has shown himself to be a severe bigot and homophobe. If you wish to read this book, buy it used or don't buy it at all; I cannot endorse supporting the author in any respect.

This is a book of - duality, of forgiveness, of understanding of those outside yourself and love for people despite and because of their flaws. The opening quotation from Demosthenes, about the varelse and raman, about how when a species is judged as raman and not varelse, it is not an advancement in that species' maturity but in that of the judges -- this quotation is relevant throughout the book, particularly in at the end of the book, at the death that Andrew speaks. (I won't say much show more more than that, as it would spoil the story!)

I first read this book in late middle school, when I was a child, more Ender than Speaker or Andrew. I enjoyed it then; but now I am grown, now I have sinned, now I find my own guilt in Novinha, in Andrew. This tale speaks to me as much as Ender's Game ever did, and I will carry it with me as much as anything.

"For he loved her, as you can only love someone who is an echo of yourself at your time of deepest sorrow."

Five stars, and a permanent place on my shelf. No other review was ever a possibility. show less

Some argue that this book was superior in all ways to Ender's Game. I agree that the story was wonderful, detailed, mysterious, and well-researched, and overall I'd say it was a very powerful novel. Stylistically, this one's superior.

I still enjoyed reading Ender's Game more, though.

Don't get me wrong. Speaker for the Dead is a wonderful novel, and I'm glad to have read it. The book before it just appealed to my interests more. That being said, though, it's interesting to see just how Ender grew up, how he became a different person and yet still showed signs of the killer-child he used to be.

I'm still a sucker for cultural relativism, though, and this book had that in spades. What might be appalling to us is perfectly normal, even show more respected within other cultures, and learning to see past ourselves is very often the key to solving the mystery and understanding others. The way Card handled the killings of the humans by the piggies was wonderful to read, and trying to solve it kept me amused through the book. ("Is this why they did it? Or maybe because of this?")

I applaud the man for the research that he put into the writing of this novel, in linguistics and anthropology and biology. The little details made everything so believable, so realistic, that when his smooth writing style drew me in, I forgot everything around me. show less

When I attempted Speaker for the Dead for the first time back in 6th grade, shortly after finishing Ender's Game, I'll admit that most of it went over my head. I understood the basics of the Lusitanian colony life, the interactions among the Piggies and the external threats all were facing, but I simply didn't have the life experience to appreciate the bigger themes. I knew what a Speaker for the Dead did; I did not understand what a Speaker for the Dead was for. It would take two more attempts before I "got it." And now—some decades and countless philosophical discussions later—I can claim that Speaker has affected me in profound ways that would have been impossible when I was younger.

To change things up I listened to the audiobook show more on this last re-read, and at the end Card gives this interview where he provides a little background on how the story came about. He relates an anecdote about when he was a Mormon missionary in Brazil attending a funeral for a man who was an abusive husband, and how his victimized wife openly and unabashedly mourns upon his coffin. You'll have to hear it. It wasn't that this story was particularly sad, but I was nearly moved to tears by the end. There was a part about "To understand someone, even one who has done wrong to you, is to love them." It's arguably THE central theme of both Ender's Game and Speaker. Have you ever been exposed to an idea that your heart understood right away but would take your mind days, months or even years to grasp?

The irony is that in the past few years Orson Scott Card has earned public derision for being intolerant of homosexuality and for espousing a slew of bigoted ideas—ideas I certainly do not share. Meanwhile, I've been a committed atheist/agnostic for over almost two decades. And yet here we are, meeting in the middle on the shakiest of common ground, able to share this one enlightened idea. show less