Speaker for the Dead
by Orson Scott Card
Rating: 5.0 / 5 · Read · Finished 2014-05-27
Ender’s Game is one of my favorite books, so I was hesitant to read this sequel. What if it ruined things for me? The author’s introduction revealed that he had the idea for this story separately and actually added to the story of Ender’s Game in order to set things up for this story.
The events take place 3,000 years after the first novel. Minor characters and events easily fall away so the novel can focus on a few important components: Ender, Valentine, the buggers, the piggies (a new race), and a family. Ender is now 35 years old, so there is no chance of the book ruining your image of him from Ender’s game. He is an adult, but retains his important qualities: compassion and competence. They are even more pronounced now in his role as Speaker for the Dead.
The main theme of the book is that understanding someone and loving them are the same; one leads to the other. Understanding another species or another human takes empathy. The clarity and precision of the Speaker’s perception of people’s emotions and motivations is impressive and an ideal worth striving for.
At times, things seemed to drag on in complicated meta-emotion similar to the Fountainhead, where so-and-so feels such-and-such and the other person knows this and the first person knows he knows this, which fills him with an agonizing joy, etc, etc. But overall, I felt the novel was well-planned and executed, with the key components always in focus and little filler. The author’s introduction really enhanced my enjoyment.
I didn’t think my childhood favorite could have a good sequel, but Speaker for the Dead is its own novel which happens to take place in the same universe.