Books - Speaker for the Dead

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	Books - Speaker for the Dead

Talker for the Dead (1986) is a science fiction novel by Orson Scott Card and a sequel to the novel Ender's Game
. This book takes place 3,000 years after the events in Ender's Game, although due to relativistic space travel Ender himself (who now goes by his real name Andrew Wiggin) is only about 30 years older.

Whereas the previous novel was hard science fiction with armies and space warfare, Speaker for the Dead is more philosophical in nature, although it still advances a xenology for the planetary setting unique in SF. Its story finds Andrew in a human colony on the colony planet Lusitania, believed to be the only remaining planet in Card's universe with an intelligent alien race after the xenocide of the Formics ("buggers") in the Ender's Game. The novel deals with the difficult relationship between the humans and the "piggies" (or "pequeninos", since the action is set in a Catholic Brazilian research installation) and with Andrew's attempts to bring peace to a brilliant but troubled family whose history intertwines with that of the pequeninos.

This novel, like Ender's Game
, won the Hugo award (1987) and Nebula award (1986) for outstanding science fiction novel, making Card the first author in history to win both these awards in two consecutive years.

Speaker for the Dead was published in a slightly revised edition in 1991. It was followed by Xenocide
and Children of the Mind
.

The title refers to the profession Andrew assumes in the novel. Speakers for the Dead are the wandering representatives of a Humanist movement (not a religion, though they are treated with the respect due a priest or cleric); they research the dead person's life and give a speech that attempts to speak for them, describing the person's life as he or she lived it. Speakers for the Dead seem to have arisen as a movement in response to Ender's 'Speaking' the life of the Hive Queen in widely-read books that slowly subvert human hatred of the 'buggers' into sorrow over a Xenocide, the complete extinction of an alien race. Any citizen has the legal right to summon a Speaker (or a priest of any faith, which Speakers are legally considered) to mark the death of a family member.

Speaker for the Dead introduces the character Jane, a sentient life form which dwells in the computer networks between hundreds of planets, who befriends Ender and speaks with him using a jewel in his ear.

It is as a Speaker that Andrew Wiggin comes to Lusitania. Once sentient life is discovered, the colony is turned into a virtual prison, with its expansion severely limited and its whole existence centering, essentially, around the work of the xenologers. The piggies, who live in the forests and worship the trees around them, are highly intelligent, and facile at linguistics, but study and cultural interchange is hampered by a strict prime directive of non-interference. One interesting cultural characteristic emerges quickly: at one point, a male piggy is found flayed and staked to the ground with a tree growing out of him. Lusitania itself is highly devoid of life, featuring thousands of unfilled ecological niches. The other outstanding feature of Lusitania is the descolada, a native virus which almost wipes out the colony, until husband-and-wife biologists Gusta and Cida succeed in developing counters. Unfortunately, they themselves do not survive, leaving orphaned daughter Novinha to strike out for herself.

At the age of thirteen, Novinha, a cold and distant girl by any measure, successfully petitions to be made the official biologist of the colony (roughly the equivalent of a master's degree); from then on, she contributes to the work of father-and-son xenologists Pipo and Libo, and for a short time there is family and camaraderie. One day, however, she makes a discovery about the descolada--that it's in every native lifeform there is--and Pipo rushes out to inform the piggies of the discovery without telling her or Libo why it's important. They can't figure it out on their own, and never learn--a few hours later, Pipo is found vivisected in the grass; his corpse does not even have the benefit of a tree. Novinha erases all the lab work, but cannot delete the information itself due to regulations; Libo demands to see it, but even their love for each other will not make her let him see it--it's a secret the piggies will kill to keep. But now they cannot marry each other, the way they always planned to: if they do, he will have access to those locked files, and he will die. In anguish, Novinha calls for a Speaker for the Dead, hoping beyond hope that perhaps the original Speaker may arrive, to make sense of Pipo's death--and maybe of her life.

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Books - Speaker for the Dead

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