Speaker For The Dead

Author: Orson Scott Card

This book is the second installment to the Ender’s Game series. Orson Scott Card has stated that Speaker For The Dead can be read as a stand-alone book, but I find it hard to imagine reading without having read Ender's Game first. This book details Ender’s journey to the planet Lusitania to heal the pains of a troubled family and explore the complexities of a society of sentient beings whom the human colonists refer to as “piggies”.

Orson Scott Card demonstrates a wide array of interests such as biology, religion, physics, relationships, and cosmology in his writing. This book expands on many themes first introduced in Ender’s game such as the complexity of recognizing sentience in other beings. Such complexity may be due to our biological definitions of what constitutes life. If the framework by which we define “being” is too narrow perhaps we will not be able to recognize alternative forms of life, sentience or biology. In this book Ender is now biologically 35 years of age; however, due to the relativity of travelling from planet to planet at near light speed it has been 3000 years since his campaign against the alien civilization from Ender’s game called “the buggers”. Lusitania offers a place for him to heal parts of himself, to restore the bugger civilization that he destroyed in his youth and prevent war with the Piggies.

The book is full of adventure, mystery, and wisdom. I found the imagined biological life cycle of the piggies to be extremely creative. I found this book to be a worthy sequel to Ender’s game. I thought it was just as compelling and full of gems. I am sure that my website will include other works of Orson Scott Card as I continue my journey down the science fiction rabbit hole.