You may be wondering why I chose this unique picture that bears no resemblance to the standard cover of Orson Scott Card’s amazing science-fiction novel, Speaker for the Dead. Let me explain. The books in the Ender Series—although commercial and critical successes—were given generic reused covers from a different sci-fi series that had enjoyed less luck. Yep. There’s a reason why the covers seem to have no connection to the books. It is quite simple: they don’t. Some schmuck designing the book cover just changed the title and author from other covers, in this case using the image from a book entitled The Age of the Pussyfoot. Can’t make that up. Also, while Card has said that no one shall ever be allowed to make this book into a film, Marvel did publish a comics version, but I couldn’t use those images, either, because all the characters are white. In the book, it is quite clear that Ender is the only white person on the entire planet. So. Thank you to whoever designed this version.
My friend basically dared me to read Ender’s Game a couple years ago, and I was surprised to find that it was a very good book with a closely integrated prose style that spoke to how we tell our own and others’ stories. He immediately lent me the sequel, Speaker for the Dead, but it took a while to get through my TBR queue. (Also, interestingly, Card set out originally to write this book but had too much backstory, so he put together Ender’s Game first, and it became a phenomenon. Speaker for the Dead, however, was always the actual main attraction.)
Again, I was blown away by the mature and elegant way that Card used the style of his writing to bring out the themes of the book. A good rule of thumb (I find) when facing a hard interpretive task is to start with the thing that stands out the most, that seems like the oddest choice. For the first book, it was the way that the POV shifted constantly from first to third person mid-paragraph that brought out the story’s themes once I had identified the patterns of the switch. This time, it was the fact that the first few chapters in the book use the word “sophistry” three or four times. It’s not a super-common word in books like this, and its continued appearance seemed designed to make the reader take note. Indeed, just as sophistry is nonsense worded as if it were wisdom, the book explores how the way you say something, or the way something appears, can cover up its true meaning.
Above all, though, this is a book that is incredibly well-written and that weaves a shocking number of story strands, characters, and species together in a tight, unified, and enthralling whole. Speaker for the Dead also mixes languages, with English (or “Stark”), Brazilian Portuguese, and Norwegian playing major parts.
Orson Scott Card does several very difficult things at once and with the appearance of ease. He creates several truly alien cultures that unintentionally clash in their attempts to interpret each other from their own worldviews. He centers much of the book around brilliant scientists while believably discussing their fields with intelligence. His main character (if you wish to call him that), Ender, is also a genius, but not a scientific one. He has a genius-level EQ as well as a mercilessly indoctrinated sense of strategy. Writing any of these characters in a way that feels true would be terribly hard, but Card manages to do them all justice while also taking on different versions of religious thought in a lived-in way.
One thing that struck me as especially clever was that, although the book takes places thousands of years in the future, characters regularly reference events and people from our own history. Earth’s technology has only advanced through the reverse engineering of alien tech, and human society has barely changed from our present. The Roman Catholic Church, modern languages (listed above), recognizable norms and mores, and quotations from Shakespeare proliferate aside invented technology and extraterrestrial life. The task of building this world was already a monumental one, so by choosing to embrace the idea of “nothing new under the sun” and the human propensities to relive the past and stubbornly cling to one’s culture, Card freed himself from inventing futuristic slang, new countries and languages, or exotic traditions. That allowed him to focus on the important factors that touched on his story and themes.
Another storytelling tool that blew me away with its simplicity and novelty was the leveraging of how faster-than-light travel drastically changes the human experience of time. Thus, when Ender has to travel 22 light years, he experiences it as a couple weeks, while everything and everyone else moves ahead 22 years. The character dynamics that this creates are fascinating. Ender has traveled so extensively that he is millennia old. The girl who asks him to take the aforementioned journey is middle-aged by the time he arrives, while he is still young. It makes perfect sense, and yet I never would have thought of it.
As I mentioned, religion plays a very large role in this novel. All of the new concepts in this future world must be interpreted through (and in some cases alter) religious doctrine. The planet where the action takes place has been settled under a “Catholic charter,” meaning that Catholicism is the official religion and culture of that world. By separating different faiths and factions on separate planets, humanity has created a fragile but long-lasting peace. All of these simple ideas lead to real insight of humanity and our real world.
Speaker for the Dead kept me in the dark in terms of unfolding plot (which is rare and welcome), presented an intricate and recognizable future society, explored foreignness with responsible frankness, and deeply engaged my emotional attention with complex and flawed characters. I loved it, and it now sits on my list of favorite novels at #49. I hope, however, that I never have to look at its unconnected cover again.