Book Review of Speaker for the Dead
A Book Review By “D. Speekor”
This book, the sequel to the more popular book Ender’s Game, occurs approximately three thousand years after Ender wiped out the “Buggers”, in what is now called The Xenocide. Now, after a human effort to colonize all the worlds once populated by Buggers, a planet has been discovered where another form of non-human yet still sentient life exists. This world is dominated by the rules governing how a less intelligent race should be handled.
The colony is guarded by a fence, and only the xenologers are allowed outside. These animals are called pequeninos, piggies, and they have their own laws and such, as would befit a slightly warlike people. Their entire world is a genetic anomaly, with few species due to a certain disease that rewrites the genetic information of the subject. For any more information, you have to read the book.
It seems to me that Speaker For The Dead is the book that sparked the HALO: COMBAT ADVANCED video games and the books that followed after. The comparisons are numerous. Extra terrestrial life has a few misunderstandings with us, and then due to religious and social differences, someone gets killed, and it snowballs from there. This is about the aftermath of the war, as in what do we do with these new toys we just won by right of combat. In this case, they try to prevent it from ever happening again.
I think that this is sort of a representation of what our world is like today. There is our side, and there are the other sides, and once we destroy one completely, we try to make amends to our selves and make a salve of lies for our bruised conscience. Once that happens we take over some of their ideas completely, and then we force what’s left to fit our needs. If there is some one who is a threat to us, and our way of life, we will try do destroy them even if they’re no longer a threat, because they could become one again.
Speaker For the Dead also has elements of Hindu beliefs, particularly regarding reincarnation. If an animal native to the planet dies, it serves a new purpose in death, like the trees that grow from the bodies of the dead piggies, who are ritually sacrificed, to become trees that fertilize the female piggies. If you lead a good life as a Hindu, you die and you go to heaven, or are reincarnated. As a piggie, you die to become a tree if you’re male, and the only females that survive to become old are the ones who can’t have kids.
As far as books go, there isn’t really much that is even slightly similar to this one so I’ll use an analogy. Speaker for the Dead is to Jack London’s Call of the Wild, as the Chinese in America graphic novel is to Maus. The first two involve the acceptance of others, while the latter refer to seeing the world from a view not that of our own. No matter how odd or how unusual someone appears, it turns out that you and them have often something in common. Even if you can’t really see it.
A choice phrase for describing this book is “The truth will have out.” The job of the speakers is to talk about all of the deceased person’s qualities, whether they are good or bad. They simply reveal the truth, and then their job is done, but they do it in such a way that they seem neither inclined to the good or bad side. They tell it as it was, as the dead person probably saw it.
This practice has really nothing in common with the modern funerals of today. We tend to show our “respect” for the deceased by showing only what they did that was good, fair, and just. I have no idea why. Maybe its because we’re scared of seeing the dark side, and liking it. The book H.I.V.E. has a line in it which states it’s a good thing that the majority of the populace thinks that justice wins, for if people knew the pleasures of being on the “dark side” the world would be in total anarchy, instead of what is going on now (semi-anarchy).
“With great power comes great responsibility”. So says Spiderman. But in these times, do we really stop to consider the consequences of our actions? Or do those in power consider the options, and then go on with the original plan anyways? In both worlds, and also in a great deal of books, people commit all kinds of war crimes in the names of justice, freedom of the oppressed, and righteousness in general. This book is dissimilar, as one who tries to avoid these crimes, instead opting for penitence, for wrongs committed in the past.
The book Speaker for the Dead has a great many currents under the surface, and on the surface. The winds are a tempest. I think that the reason it’s better then Card’s predecessor because it has less of the confusing, chaotic, and confounding events that occur in Ender’s Game. As one of my teachers would say “it less plot and more of the WHY?” than the first book. I mean, how many things have altered the course of history by some one sitting down and asking “Why is that so?”
For these and all other reasons, Speaker for the Dead is an A-list, must read book.
