You might think that the sequel to Ender’s Game would be set shortly after the events of that novel.
Nope.
Instead, Speaker for the Dead is set 3,000 years later, yet it still continues the story of Ender Wiggin.
How does that work? Is he an immortal being? Has medical technology banished death? Or perhaps time travel is involved. Or cryonic suspension.
Actually, it’s as mundane as the known effects of relativistic spaceflight. After the events of Ender’s Game, Andrew "Ender" Wiggin left Earth for the stars, and the only way to get there in his universe, as in ours, was by slower-than-light travel.
So while 3,000 years have passed for mankind by the time the novel begins, far fewer have passed for Ender, and he’s now a young-ish adult.
In those 3,000 years mankind has moved out into the stars and set up colonies on different worlds.
The world that is at the core of this novel is called Lusitania–the ancient name of Portugal–and it is so named because it is inhabited by Portuguese-speaking colonists from Brazil.
It is also inhabited by the second intelligent race mankind has found in the universe.
The first was the Buggers, and things went very, very badly with them. Mankind is determined not to make the same mistakes that it made with them.
The new race, known in Portuguese as the Pequeninos or "Piggies" because of their snouts, are a small, unintimidating, technologically primitive, forest-dwelling race.
But as soon as it’s found out that they have intelligence and language, mankind’s government slaps draconian restrictions on the Lusitania colony that are like the Prime Directive on steroids.
A fence must be build around the colony, whose population must now be sharply limited. The colonists must have virtually no contact with the Piggies except for two xeno-anthropologists (xenologers or xenodors) who are allowed brief, daily contact with the Piggies with the condition that they do not show human technology to them or disclose information about human society or ask questions about Piggie society that would betray human expectations of what our society would be like.
It’s maddening.
But there is a mystery on Lusitania, and the Piggies are closely connected with it.
When one of the xenologers figures out the secret, the otherwise friendly Piggies suddenly, brutally kill him.
Then they act like nothing is out of the ordinary, and the surviving xenologer can’t even ask why this was done, due to the Uber Prime Directive.
But Andrew Wiggin is called in from a nearby world to speak the death of the xenologer who was killed.
Since the events of Ender’s Game, Ender has become a speaker for the dead. This is a person who, after someone has died, performs a service (a "speaking") in which the person’s life story is reviewed and analyzed in such a way as to make sense of it. It’s not the same thing as a eulogy, because in a eulogy you say nice things about the dead. In a speaking you say honest things about them. That includes the nice, but it also includes the ugly. And yet the effort is made to understand the ugly things a person did and why he did them.
It takes twenty years for Ender to arrive on Lusitania due to slower-than-light travel, but he appears and must penetrate the mystery of the planet in order to perform his duties as speaker for the dead. He must find out why the xenologer was killed.
Speaker for the Dead is a very different novel than its predecessor. It is much more an adult novel, about ideas and adult relationships rather than kids and games and kid relationships. There are no sex scenes in the book, though there is substantial discussion of human reproduction and adultery.
It is also different in that we have a real alien environment in this novel, and much of the plot centers on figuring out the mystery of this environment and the Piggies who inhabit it.
It is a very good novel, and it also won both the Hugo and Nebula awards the year it came out (1986, the year after Ender’s Game, making Orson Scott Card the first author to win both awards two years running).
In a postscript to the audio book version, Card notes that readers are often divided about whether Ender’s Game or Speaker for the Dead is the better novel and that his idea of an ideal world is one in which people are evenly divided on this question.
Given how different the books are, it’s a bit of an apples and oranges comparison, but there is an answer to it, and I’ll tell you what it is . . .
Ender’s Game is better.
The reason is that, while both books contain very good elements, the sequel contains a prominent flaw due to the limitations of Orson Scott Card’s religious imagination.
Card is a Mormon, but the world he’s writing about has been colonized by Catholics.
That much is fine. It’s quite possible for a person of one faith to write convincingly and even movingly about the people of another. The guy who wrote A Man for All Seasons wasn’t Catholic, but he was able to tell the story of St. Thomas More beautifully.
But to do this kind of thing you have to be able to put yourself in the shoes of someone of a different faith in a way that Card can’t quite pull off.
It’s not that he doesn’t try. He thinks that he’s giving the Catholics a fair shake, showing good ones and bad ones, showing faithless and faithful ones, showing the joys and sorrows that apply to everyone regardless of their religion, even having a moment where Ender wants to weep because of the beauty of the poignancy involved in a married religious order (the Children of the Mind of Christ) where the spouses renounce sexual relations to better serve God, while still living together in a monastic environment.
But ultimately Card can’t do it.
In real life, Card spent time as a Mormon missionary in Brazil. He went there to convert Catholics, and he’s drawing upon his experiences there to shape his depiction of Lusitanian society.
The society he shows us is largely repulsive, with the vast majority of Lusitanians being insular, blindly obedient followers of the unsympathetic, rigid, uncompassionate bishop who opposes Ender at every turn and only starts to friendly up once Ender points out to him that, if they throw off the Uber Prime Directive, he will be able to evangelize the Piggies.
The problem is not that Card shows bad Catholics. The world has many bad Catholics, just as it has many good ones.
The problem is that the only good Catholics that he shows us are those who take their faith least seriously. The sympathetic Catholic characters are the ones who struggle with their faith or question or doubt it or who even have virtually no faith at all. (Ender falls into that category; he was baptized Catholic but not raised in the faith.)
Those who take their faith seriously end up being presented as harsh, insular, intellectually simple, under the domination of their bishop, and suspicious of outsiders like Ender.
The message that comes across is: simple, devout Catholics = bad; sophisticated, doubting Catholics = good.
All this is like the reception that a Catholic culture in Brazil might give to a visiting Mormon missionary, like Card.
Thus this novel is not as good as its predecessor. It’s still very good, and still worth reading, but it is also flawed. Card chose to set his story on a Catholic world; he chose to make religion a prominent theme in the novel; but he either wasn’t able or wasn’t willing to do artistic justice to a Catholic culture.
NEXT: Xenocide.
SDG here with