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A review by duffypratt
Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
4.0
After reading Ender's Game, I moved on to the Shadow/Bean series, and pretty quickly decided that Card was pretty much a hack who was getting every last ounce of blood out of his one good idea. I was wrong. I don't know what prompted me to pick up this book after drawing that conclusion, but I'm glad I did.
In many ways, this book is more original than Ender's Game. For the most part, that book is a re-hash of many familiar stories of the misfit in school or the military who manages to overcome his initial status and triumphs. It was very well done, but it was also pretty comfortable. Speaker for the Dead has a story in structure which was much less familiar, at least to me.
Mankind has found only one planet with intelligent life since Ender destroyed the buggers. This time, the authorities are being extra careful about how much contact is allowed with the discovered life form. So there is a human colony on the planet whose sole purpose is to study them, but only one person in the colony is allowed to have any direct contact with them. When that person gets vivisected, and staked to the ground, things heat up.
It's a very cool premise, and Card takes things in directions that I would not have expected. I especially liked the idea of the biological adaptation on the new planet, and also the idea of "Jane," who is a benign computer version of HAL from 2001, who longs to be recognized as being a person. The book works as a novel, but it is also an exploration about what it means to be human. Ultimately, I don't think its particularly profound, at least not in the basic ideas that the characters espouse, but there is some depth built into its structure, and it holds a lot of promise for the rest of this series.
My sole big complaint in this book is that Ender has become more like St. Francis of Assisi than like the Ender of the original book. In subjective time, he's only about 35 years old now. But he seems much older, and he also seems to have lost some of Ender's explosiveness and killer instinct. I don't think the character is a total miss from what Ender was in the first book, but if you had taken away then names and the references to his past history in this book, I don't think many people would have identified the adult Ender with the child.
In many ways, this book is more original than Ender's Game. For the most part, that book is a re-hash of many familiar stories of the misfit in school or the military who manages to overcome his initial status and triumphs. It was very well done, but it was also pretty comfortable. Speaker for the Dead has a story in structure which was much less familiar, at least to me.
Mankind has found only one planet with intelligent life since Ender destroyed the buggers. This time, the authorities are being extra careful about how much contact is allowed with the discovered life form. So there is a human colony on the planet whose sole purpose is to study them, but only one person in the colony is allowed to have any direct contact with them. When that person gets vivisected, and staked to the ground, things heat up.
It's a very cool premise, and Card takes things in directions that I would not have expected. I especially liked the idea of the biological adaptation on the new planet, and also the idea of "Jane," who is a benign computer version of HAL from 2001, who longs to be recognized as being a person. The book works as a novel, but it is also an exploration about what it means to be human. Ultimately, I don't think its particularly profound, at least not in the basic ideas that the characters espouse, but there is some depth built into its structure, and it holds a lot of promise for the rest of this series.
My sole big complaint in this book is that Ender has become more like St. Francis of Assisi than like the Ender of the original book. In subjective time, he's only about 35 years old now. But he seems much older, and he also seems to have lost some of Ender's explosiveness and killer instinct. I don't think the character is a total miss from what Ender was in the first book, but if you had taken away then names and the references to his past history in this book, I don't think many people would have identified the adult Ender with the child.