Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card

Hello, Stranger.

Let's talk about Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead.

The Short of It

Plot: Ender Wiggin travels to the only planet where humans are interacting with another species, in the hopes of finding somewhere to leave the Bugger Queen. 

Page Count: 419

Award: 1986 Nebula, 1987 Hugo

Worth a read: Yes
Primary Driver: (Plot, World, or Character)
Bechdel Test: Pass
Technobabble: Moderate.
Review: A very different side of Ender, but a believable development. A truly massive cast of characters to keep track of, for the most part successfully. The Piggies are excellent - aliens with confusing customs, misunderstandings, physiology, and so on. And all grounded with some compelling and heartbreaking human drama. A worthy follow up to Ender's Game. 

The Medium of It

Spoiler Free!

Well, spoilers for Ender's Game but not this one. Go read that first!

Well, here we are, hanging out with Ender once more. This is a different Ender, a more mature one, one who is haunted by his past. The world has changed since Ender's Game - humanity has spread to other planets, become a galaxy-spanning species.

One of the main background devices here is time dilation: Ender and Valentine have been traveling so much that the rest of the world is 3000 years ahead of them. In that time, and thanks to his own written work about the humanity of the Buggers, Ender has gone from a hero to being The Xenocide. He's viewed as somewhere between Lucifer and Satan - the person who singlehandedly erased an entire species. 

No one associates Ender with his past, given the millennia that have passed. But this is the context in which he finds himself - everything he accomplished considered as evil. And this is how he views himself as well - in constant penance, trying to find somewhere for the Hive Queen, trying to make it right.

This book does not have a plot, exactly. Many characters have wants and needs, questions to answer, relationships to mend. But the process of doing so is circuitous - meandering from one thing to another, often waiting for epiphanies to connect the dots. This is not to say that things do not happen; it can just feel that at points things happen for the sake of the status quo being shook up. Ender spends a lot of time strolling around and chatting with people. He is, of course, the emotional core of this whole story, so it makes sense; this does not always make it gripping. 

World building is well executed on both micro- and macrolevels. Local politics and drama have sizable impacts on the events of the story, and make sense in the context of how the planet colony was established. On the broader level it's interesting to see bits about how different planets are linked, and particularly so to get bits about Earth and Peter the Hegemon.

This is a very different story, a very different vibe, and a very different Ender than Ender's Game. It is nonetheless engaging, a believable maturing and growing of a character to whom we feel attached. I'd recommend reading it.

If you'd like to give it a read, consider using the link below! I'll get a few extra cents at no additional cost to you!

Link for the Dead

The Long of It

Spoilers Ahead!

I do not think that Card really planned to write this book. Ender's Game has a satisfying conclusion; this does not really feel like it needed to happen. That said, I love the Piggies. It's incredibly rare to encounter aliens that do a great job of being totally unnatural. They have a three-part life cycle: from tiny bug critter, to "person" and finally to sentient tree. It's bizarre, it's alien, and it makes perfect sense in the context of the story. The gory murders suffered by the humans who deal with the Piggies are a misunderstanding: the Piggies want to give the humans their highest honor: the Third Life, as a Father Tree, able to pass on genes and continue to live for centuries to come.

Then we can talk about Jane: a computer program but more, a person on her own. A unique form of digital life. Her sections is some of the most fun, as she has effectively no limits. At one point Ender turns off the earpiece he has which connects him to her, and one of my favorite scenes unfolds:

    She didn't notice unless something went massively wrong.

    Or unless she was paying attention.

    She paid attention to Ender Wiggin. More than he realized, she paid attention to him.

    Like other sentient beings, she had a complex system of consciousness. Two thousand years before, when she was only a thousand years old, she had created a program to analyze herself. It reported a very simple structure of some 370,000 distinct levels of attention. Anything not in the top 50,000 levels were left alone except for the most routine sampling, the most cursory examination. She knew of every telephone call, every satellite transmission in the Hundred Worlds, but she didn't do anything about them.

    Anything not in her top thousand levels caused her to respond more or less reflexively. Starship flight plans, ansible transmissions, power delivery systems-she monitored them, double-checked them, did not let them pass until she was sure that they were right. But it took no great effort on her part to do this. She did it the way a human being uses familiar machinery. She was always aware of it, in case something went wrong, but most of the time she could think of something else, talk of other things.

    Jane's top thousand levels of attention were what corresponded, more or less, to what humans think of as consciousness. Most of this was her own internal reality; her responses to outside stimuli, analogous to emotions, desires, reason, memory, dreaming. Much of this activity seemed random even to her, accidents of the philotic impulse, but it was the part of her that she thought of as herself, it all took place in the constant, unmonitored ansible transmissions that she conducted deep in space.

    And yet, compared to the human mind, even Jane's lowest level of attention was exceptionally alert. Because ansible communication was instantaneous, her mental activities happened far faster than the speed of light. Events that she virtually ignored were monitored several times a second; she could notice ten million events in a second and still have nine-tenths of that second left to think about and do things that mattered to her. Compared to the speed at which the human brain was able to experience life, Jane had lived half a trillion human life-years since she came to be.

    And with all that vast activity, her unimaginable speed, the breadth and depth of her experience, fully half of the top ten levels of her attention were always, always devoted to what came in through the jewel in Ender Wiggin's ear.

The writing is perfect. Stepping the reader through different tiers shows just how important Ender is and simultaneously demonstrates Jane's power. And this calm, logical, step-by-step process nonetheless makes Jane's pain clear. Ender's scene, in parallel, is also important - but this moment with Jane does more than any other to shift her from quippy computer program (JARVIS) to a being on her own.

Lots of good SF ideas bouncing around. But the best scene in the book is, by a significant margin, the first time that Ender interacts with the Ribeira family. This is Ender as the Speaker for the Dead in proper form, far better than his speech later. Ender seeing people and understanding them, winning a battle of wills, seeing damage and trying to mend it. He's speaking with a bunch of children, trying to find the root of their hurt, trying to learn. It's impressive that each kid is given a personality and voice, that even these brief interactions show years of background, trauma built into a struggling family. Olhado is the perfect hybrid of family trauma and science fiction: he has a mechanical eye which he uses to record the world around him. He can also shut them off to isolate himself.

    Olhado leapt to his feet and stood in the middle of the room, turned around to look at them all with his unhuman eyes. "Why do you still want to hide it?" he asked softly.
    "What's it to you?" asked Quim. "He never did anything to you. You just turned off your eyes and sat there with the headphones on, listening to batuque or Bach or something-"
    "Turn off my eyes?" said Olhado. "I never turned off my eyes."

Olhado has recorded everything; instead of insulating himself from it, he sees it, and relives it all, constantly. In one sitting Ender has this out of him, something none of his siblings knew. This is one of the few moments where we truly see Ender able to do everything that people say he can: understanding people on an intuitive level.

This is probably my favorite iteration of Ender.

A very different book from Ender's Game but equally deserving of the praise and awards it received.

That's all for now.

Don't turn off your eyes, Stranger.
And don't forget to read a book!