Speaker for the Dead
Nov 29th, 2007 by TooHotty
Speaker for the Dead / Orson Scott Card
Tor Books, 1994 (paperback) [orig. 1986]
My reading of Speaker of the Dead was inspired by the highest recommendation of a trusted source. I was reticent to do this review because there’s a lot involved in this book, so I’ve put it off for a full two weeks, and now it’s not even fresh in my mind. Fabulous. A+ for dealing with problems. Anyway, today Chris (Trusted Source) finished a novel, so I said to myself, “Listen! If he can write an entire book, you can write one lousy blog entry! Also, order Chinese for dinner! I feel like dumplings.”
So I’m here to contend with the many facets of this book, which I think are perhaps too numerous. I will begin by saying I really really liked Speaker for the Dead, which was a pleasant surprise. Ender’s Game, the prequel, was entertaining, but not mind-blowing, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. Speaker was far more mature a piece, and I had trouble putting it down, a problem that led to lack of sleep, lateness to work, and ignoring important phone calls from loved ones. I did not, however, love all the book. The first three quarters were fantastic; the last quarter kind of lost me.
The novel is about a lot of things, but mostly it is about a community of settlers living on a planet they share with these sentient, primitive aliens they called pequeninos. (Incidentally, my ignorance of Portuguese phonetics was a great detriment in reading this novel.) The purpose of the settlement is basically to study these creatures since they’re the first sentient alien life ever discovered besides the bug things from Ender’s Game, which are now extinct. It’s been about 3,000 years.
So, they’ve got their quiet little religious settlement, and all’s well in the world until the peaceful alien society kills the man who’s been researching their behavior. Ummmmmm…. crap.
Enter Ender, Speaker for the Dead, summoned to “speak” the death of the xenologist (kind of like an alien anthropologist). Speaking a death is rather like eulogizing, but instead of blindly praising the dead, a Speaker will give a completely candid account of the person’s life: good, bad, and ugly all right there on the table.
So, relativity being what it is, it takes Ender 20-something years to reach the planet, by which time other people have died and there’s this whole big to-do about an unhappy family and their recently deceased (jerkface) patriarch. Ender ends up speaking the death of this despicable man. This and everything leading up to it was absolutely fantastic novel-writing. Card has this great sense of character and relationships and the human psyche that enthralled me. Ender’s Speaking was one of the most emotionally satisfying scenes I’ve ever read in anything. Card captured the flaws and graces of the man, his family, and his society and shoved them in your face saying “I’m writing about some crazy science fiction world, and we were having a good time pretending before, but this is real. This is your father or your neighbor or yourself, and it’s going on now in your world.”
The characters in Speaker for the Dead are dynamic and visceral. They’re in a fantastic situation, but this never feels like a foreign planet. It’s just people. I highly recommend this book for everything leading up to Ender’s big Speaking. When I got past this part, I knew there was a lot of book left, but I assumed it was going to lead up to another Speaking, since one was requested earlier on. That’s when the novel took a strange turn.
The remainder of the story is about the pequeninos, their freaky biology, and how their society functions. There’s big drama involving a rebellion, hatching a new alien species, and forming a new society. This is all great sci-fi fare, and I know Card could have done so much with it, but with the human-centered story leading up to it, it felt rather jarring to have such a dramatic shift. The ending of the book is about learning to understand a very inhuman society. It’s message comes through clear enough, but I just didn’t care about the pequeninos like I did about the humans. I felt cold to them and never felt such revelatory writing as I did in the first major part of the book.
Ultimately, Speaker for the Dead is about learning to observe and the foil of interpreting others’ experiences through the lens of your own. During the Speaking, this civilization became aware that what they saw, what they knew, and what actually was were distinctly different things. The had radically misjudged the lives of those they called friends and family. It was a powerful message. The pequeninos’ story contributes to this theme with all the misconceptions the xenologists had of the alien society as a result of great logical leaps they took based on the human experience. I understand how the ending quarter of the book fits together with the rest, and I appreciate Card’s intentions. I also think, however, that as a novel meant to speak to our human sensibilities, the pequeninos’s story weakened the intense impact this book may have otherwise had.
Awesome review! Glad you read it. You hit the nail on the head with why this is my favorite book. Card is perhaps the best writer at tapping into the human psyche and human emotions and relationships and the speaking in this book and everything leading up to it is, as you put it perfectly, one of the most emotionally satisfying scenes ever. Where we go our seperate ways is with the pequeninos. I loved them! I thought their culture was fascinating and I couldn’t get enough of them, but I can see your point. You may not enjoy the rest of the series though if you didn’t like them. Xenocide and Children of the Mind get very philosophical and heavy on the pequeninos.
Now go order your dumplings!
I ordered them right after I wrote that sentence, so they came right after I finished the blog entry. Perfect timing, actually, and they were delicious!
Anyway, it wasn’t so much that I didn’t like the pequeninos. They were interesting, and I’m definitely a Rooter fan…. I just found the focus-shift inappropriate. Or no… maybe unnecessary? It’s hard to explain. The point is, I’d have liked that aspect of the book if it stood on its own because it was still well done and everything. This felt like two novels to me almost.
Yay! OK, so the last 2 books in that side of the series (Xenocide and Children of the Mind) are the ones that get the most criticism. If you liked the overall feel of Speaker for the Dead and have some interest in the Pequeninos then I think you’ll enjoy them. He introduces a few more characters as well, some Asian characters, and some other stuff happens but I’m not going to blab on about it or I’ll give the whole series away. But all this is to say that people tend to think these last two books are boring and too anticlimactic. I enjoyed them, though not as much as Speaker for the Dead…more than Ender’s Game though.
By the way, I see what you mean about the book being like two separate books. I remember when I first read the book, reading it as if I were switching between one book and then another. I just never paid much attention to it. It’s actually kind of neat though that you mention that because I think different people favor one story line or another. Whenever I think of this book, the first thing I think about is the piggies, while I know others think of Andrew as the Speaker when they think of this book. You’re right though, both ideas really could stand on their own as their own novels.
I really must reread the Ender books, cause I really enjoyed them, but I don’t remember a lot of the detail.
I do remember thinking that although Ender was supposed to be the hero, and his actions were justified, I thought that in many ways he was a little monster who reacted totally out of proportion to certain events. But like I said, I’d really have to reread them to be sure.