Speaker for the Dead (Ender, Book 2) [Kindle Edition]

If it sounds complicated, it isn't. Card has given us another moral human tale, told in great detail and depth, yet never boring. Although the events in this book are far less catostrophic than the events our "hero" went through in Ender's game, the emotional impact is still there. We see what became of the lonly mistreated little genius, and how his life turned out. In "Game" Ender was battling for his own personal sanity and survival, playing by the rules of his controllers. In "Speaker", Ender fights for others. He has more control over the circumstances and chooses to help people he barely knows, and the last survivor of the race he was accused of wiping out.

We get a philosophically different book than "Ender's game", but it still has the power to break your heart and lift your spirits. We get a whole new set of personal moral dillemas, and see the dark and light sides of relationships. This book may be different in tone and philosophy than the prequel, but the main player is still intact. If you've read "Ender's Game", this is a must read. If you haven't, don't read this book yet. You'll like it, but that prize winning background novel is still worth the effort before going on to "Speaker". These two are the best books I've read in years.

There are so many good things about this book. Card has a talent for writing deep, real characters that I've never seen in sci-fi and seldom in any modern literature. He is a master storyteller, and this book is wonderfully paced -- you will continually be twisting your brain trying to uncover what is up with the pequeninos before the scientists do.

But most of all, this book is a eloquent manifesto of humanism. As Speaker for the Dead, it is our hero Ender's lifelong task to understand people and tell the truth about them -- a truth that will reveal their good, bad, and ugly, but most importantly, their inherent worth and um, goodness. This truth-seeking carries from the individual to the entire races, as Card (and Ender) examine how we relate to those we don't understand, even those we can't understand.

So what is it? It's a page-turner, crazy idea-filled(as all sci-fi should be) thrilling, thoughtful, powerful, funny, poignant novel. It is an excellent piece of writing that I would love to see taught in high school classrooms.

My only problems with it are that terrible cover(who designed these covers? They have nothing to do with the story -- not even the tone of the story) and the sometimes indecipherable use of portuguese. But those are both minor.

An excerpt:

"We know you now. That makes all the difference, doesn't it? Even Quim doesn't hate you now. When you really know somebody, you can't hate them." "Or maybe it's just that you can't really know them until you stop hating them." "Is that a circular paradox? Dom Cristao says that most truth can be only expressed in circular paradoxes." "I don't think it has anything to do with truth, Olhado. It's just cause and effect. We can never sort them out. Science refuses to admit any cause except first cause-- knock down one domino, the one next to it also falls. But when it comes to human beings, the only type of cause that matters is final cause, the purpose. What a person had in mind. Once you understand what people really want, you can't hate them anymore. You can fear them, but you can't hate them, because you can always find the same desires in your own heart."

If you'd like to discuss this novel, e-mail me at krischwe@whitman.edu

Although I liked the book, I could really only give it two stars due to what I consider to be some rather glaring faults:

1) The book is overly preachy and sentimental. The entire plot centers around racial misunderstanding (even the little sub-plots), and the apparent goal of the book is to teach a lesson in social conduct. Frankly, I never much cared for books that depended on a goal or a moral to make sense. The story should stand on its own without being some sort of political forum or propaganda.

2) The time-line just doesn't make a lot of sense. Why is it that there seems to be virtually no technological advancement after 3000 years of continually expanding human society? In the next book you find out that faster-than-light-speed travel is possible, so why haven't humans developed it by then? And why, oh why, would they be using essentially the same computer network for an entire three millenia? Reached its peek? The world of Ender's Game seemed at least marginally plausible, but the world of SFTD just seems to be a construction built around Ender for the purposes of a somewhat shaky plot-line.

3) The plot pivots around one crucial revelation early in the book, which is kept a secret from the reader intentionally as a motivator. More specifically, one of the characters finds out an interesting bit of information and then promptly--conveniently--dies before he gets to tell anyone. Personally, I think this is a particularly cheap plot device that should be kept exclusive to the realm of pulp murder mysteries. It doesn't make you enjoy the book more, it just makes you want to skip to the end to find out what the answer is. To make matters worse, the author drops enough clues early on, that you can guess the answer long before its handed to you, making the rest of the book filler (sentimental and preachy filler, at that).

Even with these faults, I'd still say the book is worth a read, if only as a continuation of an otherwise brilliant series. If you haven't already, though, I'd suggest you start with the first, and best of the series--Ender's Game--before reading this one.