Speaker for the Dead

Speaker for the Dead is one of the most thought-provoking books I've read in a long time. It's very relevant to today's world in its consideration of who gets to qualify as a human, and it stands out for thoughtful inclusion of both scientific and religious ideas.

I just want to clarify up front: while this is technically a sequel to Ender's Game, it's pretty different. Ender's Game was fun and clever, but only “profound” in a few places. It fit the mold for YA fiction pretty well, even if it was a terrific book. But even the author himself says that the book was mostly an expansion of a single concept in a short story he wrote (what would military tactics look like in zero gravity?), and was intended as a prelude to a second book with a heftier story. That absolutely rings true for me.

Speaker for the Dead is not young adult sci fi. It's a thoroughly adult book that grapples with, just to name a few: genocide and its legacy, murder, challenges of cross-cultural communication, adultery, celibacy, religious devotion, evolution, and special relativity. There's a lot happening here, and does occasionally come across as overwhelming or at least a bit weird. There's a sympathetic portrayal of AI like the 2013 movie Her. There's a complex morality, where few of the characters fit into a clear good or evil role, like Princess Mononoke. There's the confusion of coming face-to-face with an entirely alien culture, like The Sparrow by Mary Russell. And there's the realistic trouble of having time-shifting affect your relationships, like The Forever War. There's the inclusion of genuinely religious people without caricaturing them as either fools or saints. And there's a pretty compelling mystery at the heart of the plot. But all of those references are high praise from me, and it all comes together really well.

I once heard a great definition of fascism as a “hierarchy of personhood.” I thought that was spot-on, in how certain people/political movements try to say that certain individuals don't deserve to be treated in the same way since they aren't “fully human.” I'm not certain how authentic this is, but Card pulls some Norse terminology for the four different levels of how we view outsiders: humans from our place, humans from another place, non-humans that are still people, or non-humans that aren't people. When humanity comes across an alien species, the arguments center on whether they ought to be treated as equals or not. It would do all of us some good to ponder how we as individuals and societies treat people of different races/religions/nationalities/immigrant statuses/etc.

On science, he's really done some good research. One of the most far-fetched items in the whole book is how relativity messes with time, but unfortunately that's the one that's actual modern physics. He employs just a few tropes of the genre (instantaneous communication across planets), but it's smartly framed as something that people don't even understand since we pulled it from alien technology. When biologists and anthropologists interact with the foreign species, all of their approaches and disagreements felt very realistic to me. There's a lot happening here, and Card has clearly read a lot about how science functions.

As a rite, the office of “Speaker for the Dead” is very compelling to me. Instead of traditional funerals, the Speaker will learn all about a person's life and lay it out in public for all to see. It's pretty harsh in some ways, but also shows how honesty is crucial to proper grief and healing.


In that vein, I'd like to say that the handling of religion in this is some of the best I've come across in any kind of fiction. Card is a Mormon, and it shows that he's a religious person. Along with Dune, it's been a great summer for me of religion in sci fi. There's a scene at the end of chapter 17 that's one of the best fictional descriptions of a religious service I've ever read. And there's a parable discussed that was wildly impactful on me. It's attested to a saint in the book's world, and I have great respect for Card that he was able to write something that felt plausibly saint-like. It's a play on the woman caught in adultery in John 8. I've copied the entire thing here:

–“A Great Rabbi stands, teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife's adultery, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death. There is a familiar version of this story, but a friend of mine - a Speaker for the Dead - has told me of two other Rabbis that faced the same situation. Those are the ones I'm going to tell you.
The Rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman. Out of respect for him the mob forbears and waits with the stones heavy in their hands. ‘Is there any man here,' he says to them, ‘who has not desired another man's wife, another woman's husband?' They murmur and say, ‘We all know the desire, but Rabbi none of us has acted on it.' The Rabbi says, ‘Then kneel down and give thanks that God has made you strong.' He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, ‘Tell the Lord Magistrate who saved his mistress, then he'll know I am his loyal servant.' So the woman lives because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder.

–Another Rabbi. Another city. He goes to her and stops the mob as in the other story and says, ‘Which of you is without sin? Let him cast the first stone.' The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. ‘Someday,' they think, ‘I may be like this woman. And I'll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her as I wish to be treated.' As they opened their hands and let their stones fall to the ground, the Rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman's head and throws it straight down with all his might it crushes her skull and dashes her brain among the cobblestones. ‘Nor am I without sins,' he says to the people, ‘but if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead – and our city with it.' So the woman died because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance.

–The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startlingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis and when they veer too far they die. Only one Rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation. So of course, we killed him.

–San Angelo, Letters to an Incipient Heretic”




SPOILERs for Ender's Game in this paragraph:
One thing I really appreciated is how Ender has aged. After unwittingly killing an entire species, the weight of that moment has transformed him in a thoughtful way. In the first book he was wicked smart and clever, but Speaker for the Dead portrays him as wise, which is a much more difficult trait to write. It seems really hard to age up a protagonist in a way that feels authentic to their earlier self but also realistic to possible growth (I think of the Harry Potter prequels/sequels, as well as the Golden Compass sequel, among others), especially coming from such a traumatic childhood. This is terrific. You can feel his sadness, and the growth and determination it brought him. The transition from Xenocide to Speaker for the Dead felt excellent to me.