Piggies and Buggers and human beings (Speaker for the Dead - Orson Scott Card)

Member Name: demosthenes

Product:	Speaker for the Dead - Orson Scott Card
Date:	31/08/01 (114 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: not what you expected

Disadvantages: not what you expected

Speaker for the Dead is the sequel to Orson Scott Card’s most enjoyable book, Ender’s Game. This sequel, whilst not as eminently readable as its precursor, is a better, more mature book.

Andrew (Ender) Wiggin, has taken refuge, in the company of his beloved sister Valentine, in the relativistic effects of time, fleeing the spatio-temporal reality of his role in the cataclysmic climax of Ender’s Game (trying not to give away the ending), where he was subjected to the power and manipulations of others, stripped of his family and his childhood, and transformed from a boy into a soldier into a hero, but is now reviled as a xenocide. Ender the Xenocide, he is known as, but in history: in the present he is Andrew, an itinerant teacher who teaches abstract concepts like tolerance and ethics.

Ender, self-exiled on a Scandinavian-type planet, hears about the discovery, on a Portugese settled planet, of a new ‘alien’ race. He buys a starship (savings interest over 2000 years can be quite healthy), and, accompanied by an artificial intelligence named Jane who travels in his ear-stud, he goes to this new planet to meet this new species, but finds, when he arrives there, that the sociologist who has been working with the creatures has been brutally murdered by them, his body staked out, his bowels eviscerated and pinned to the ground around him.

Meeting Novinha, the daughter of the murdered sociologist, Andrew does all he can to enter the life of her family (because he has once again left his family behind) and the community at large as he investigates the murder. He must unravel the motive behind the murder of the sociologist by the Piggies, the native race of creatures who killed him. But one death is followed by another, and this time Andrew is involved. He has been living as an itinerant teacher and Speaker for the Dead. The Speaker for the Dead is an amazing concept of Card’s which emerged out of Ender’s G
ame.

In the aftermath of the end of Ender’s Game, millions dead, an anonymous author, called the Speaker for the Dead, writes a book entitled The Hive Queen and The Hegemon, in which the life and death of the two great leaders of the war described in Ender’s Game are submitted to the honest speaking that informs that work. This text has become sacred to humankind, and it was largely from this text (which he in fact wrote) that Andrew had been teaching. Andrew is drawn to this new species because of the experience that made him write about the hive queen. A Speaking is an honest account of a person’s life, by an impartial Speaker, at the funeral of the dead: a telling, in the raw, of that person’s life and death.

What is interesting about this novel is that it is so different from Ender’s Game, which was effectively a space opera, albeit a brilliant and compassionate one. Speaker for the Dead is a whole other kind of book, and yet is deeply intertwined with the themes and events of Ender’s Game. Speaker for the Dead is a philosophical book, an elegy to tolerance and differentiation of identity and biology. It is the kind of book that you will start reading and think you might put down because it’s not what you expected, and then you suddenly find it’s three in the morning and you’ve finished it in one big gulp. Don’t be surprised, either, to find you’ve been crying.

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