lucis

Speaker for the Dead is the second book of the Ender’s Game series (though it is also an excellent stand-alone book). Many people regard it as Orson Scott Card’s best ever. What follows might have SPOILERS…

The book is very different from Ender’s Game. It is slower, more thought provoking, even somewhat religious (in fact I found the book in the theology library). The book raises some interesting philosophical questions about human interaction with an intelligent alien lifeform more intelligent, but far less developed than us. How much information should we share with such an alien when its intentions are unknown. At first I thought the “dont teach them anything, but learn everything about them” policy of interaction shown in the book sounded absurd and would never work (well, it never does really work in the book anyways). But the more I think about it the more plausible this sounds, even if it might not be the best thing to do in the long run. You cant expect anyone to trust you if you dont trust him first!

I think there are a few flaws in the book. Humans dont seem to have advanced all that much in the 3000 years since the bugger wars. I would also have expected the Starways Congress to have better security valves against a rebellion in Lusitania. The great distances from any other planet (over twenty light years) would have to force much stricter control over the functioning of the xenologers.

Overall I really liked the book, and have already started with Xenocide.

This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe, and those we never think to question.

I also read Ender’s Shadow, which is a parallel shadow to Ender’s Game. It is basically the same story, told from the eyes from a different child, Bean. There are some interesting incidents, but for most part, it is just more of Ender’s Game. It would have been a great novel on its own, but now it is simply a shadow of the original.