Michael Wu - Speaker for the Dead: The Sequel That Became the Main Story

(Review) Speaker for the Dead: The Sequel That Became the Main Story            

Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card is the second part of the Ender’s Game quartet. Today I will review not only Speaker for the Dead as a book, but also the Ender’s Game saga as a whole. If you haven’t read the first book, Ender’s Game, be prepared for spoilers. Although I won’t get into fine detail about the first book, the overall plot is necessary to explain the events of the second book. If you don’t want spoilers, now is the time you should stop reading.

            The basic plot of Speaker for the Dead is this: In the distant future, military genius Ender Wiggin destroys an entire alien civilization of insect-like creatures called "buggers," who had previously threatened Earth. Humanity is beginning to colonize the galaxy in the wake of this interplanetary war. Ender himself is a crew member on one of these missions, and during his exploration on an alien planet, he finds the cocoon of the last remaining bugger hive queen. The queen tells ender that she didn't mean to start a war with humanity, and wants Ender to find a new home for her species. Ender agrees, and sets out to correct his past under the new name of "Speaker for the Dead." 

    Three thousand years later, humanity has colonized hundreds of worlds, and the speaker for the dead's writings have become the new norm. Everybody views the buggers in a positive light now, and they all despise the ancient Ender Wiggin, who so cruelly killed them off. But interestingly, Ender is still alive, and he’s still on the lookout for a home for the Hive Queen. He spent the last few millennia travelling on starships moving close to the speed of light, examining different worlds for the right conditions for the buggers to thrive. Because of the theory of relativity, all this light speed travel made Ender age much slower, and after all this time he’s only thirty-five years old.

Now though, news has spread of the discovery of a third intelligent alien race. On the world of “Lusitania,” a group of intelligent pig-like creatures have established themselves as a new sentient species. It turns out, this planet has just the right conditions for the hive queen to live and propagate her species. Lusitania becomes the meeting point of three intelligent species, and Ender is right in the thick of it...

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I was able to say all that about the story while only mentioning two of the characters. There are dozens of other humans, pigs, and even robots that complete the story. The book is around 350 pages long, but it felt a lot shorter for me since I got hooked to the story so quickly. Although serving as a sequel, Speaker was initially intended to be the original standalone novel. Orson Scott Card first got the idea for the plot of Speaker, and Ender’s Game was originally supposed to be a short origin story of the titular character, but ended up becoming a fully-fledged story in its own right.

Ender’s Game was published in 1985, and Speaker for the Dead was published the year after. You can definitely see the more elegant, antiquated writing style from 40 years ago when reading both books. Both Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for science fiction, which are considered the most prestigious awards for sci-fi stories. Speaker is consistently entertaining the whole way through, and there’s always something the characters are working towards. I can tell by comparing the flow of the following two novels, Xenocide and Children of the Mind, which complete the Ender Quartet. While books three and four are undoubtedly good stories, I found the two to have a slower plot progression, and they haven’t received as much acclaim as the first two. Out of all four books, I would consider Speaker to be my favorite, even beating the original Ender’s Game. Speaker has more complex human interactions and more prominent characters, whereas the first book focused mainly on just Ender himself and not much outside of his own experiences.

Still, I would strongly recommend the entire Ender Quartet, especially Speaker for the Dead to anyone even remotely interested in science fiction. It has been a journey reading through this crazy story and I hope others are as captivated by it as I am.

I give it a 2900 out of 3000 years spent traveling at light speed (~9.7/10).

Michael Wu