Orson Scott Card: Speaker For The Dead

Something about me: I have no trouble putting down a book that loses my interest. Speaker For The Dead may be one of the few exceptions to that. I deeply lost interest in the story and characters for most of the book, but occasionally books are worth finishing even if the journey is a slog.

I started reading Speaker For The Dead with my preteen daughter as part of our usual bedtime routine. We had finished Ender's Game together and enjoyed it, so this seemed like the best next step. Pretty quickly she got bored, and this was the last book we ever attempted reading together.

I don't know why I came back to finish it on my own. After sitting on my dresser for months, I decided I was engaged enough in the core mystery of the world to seek resolution.

Speaker For The Dead picks up 3,000 years after the events of Ender's Game. Through the use of relativistic interstellar travel, Ender is still alive and trying to make right his unintentional genocide from the first book. He lives as an anonymous Speaker for the Dead: a sort of humanist religious figure. He's called to speak the death of a xenobiologist on a nearby planet, and he is ultimately thrust into tensions between two cultures trying their best to understand each other.

Ender emerges as a mythical, redemptive figure who seeks to heal through truth-telling. His role is to love equally and speak truths that set people free. Readers with a religious background can easily see his parallels as a perfect Jesus figure.

Card's writing style as a meticulous plotter was deeply felt throughout most of the book. Characters often feel flat, existing mainly to advance the plot. He constantly shifts perspective scene-by-scene, using internal monologue to tell rather than show characters' feelings.

The ultimate payoff was worth the tedious journey, and the themes felt especially cathartic in this particular political moment. This was a journey of finding humanity in the utterly alien. It was also about rediscovering humanity in your fellow man when forces push you to "other" them.

"If the Bishop had told us you were Ender we would have stoned you to death in the praça the day you arrived." "Why don't you now?" "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."

Despite being written decades ago, these kinds of exchanges ring more profound than ever. Our entire political moment is defined by trying to alienize and dehumanize the other. All forces try to push us to forget that we really do know each other and reduce the opposing political team to two-dimensional caricatures.

We need these messages now more than ever. While I can't recommend the journey to most people, I am glad that I made it to the destination.