Exactly the same story for me. I think the biggest difference between this book and Ender's Game was the names were not at all phonetically distinct. Keeping all the characters straight was exhausting. .
Great review. One of my favorite books of all time. Enders Game sets Ender up as such an empathetic tortured soul character. His path to becoming the speaker for the Dead and his relationship to the Hive queen and then the piggies is just terrific scifi.
Speaker was always my favorite from this series. Will always be one of my favorite books. And What you said about the piggies being endearing yet unnerving is spot on. They were cute but definitely had some weird…gardening habits.
I liked Ender’s Game, but really, really liked Speaker for the Dead. I read it so long ago that I don’t remember much. I should reread it, but there are so many other books I want to get to.
I read Ender's Game and then Speaker for the Dead when I was 12 and looking back realise I probably was a bit young! That said, I loved it and it's been the source of a lot of my personal understanding of the world and it's people ever since. Exactly like the quotes at the start said, I could never hate Ender Wiggin, even with his good and bad traits and actions, because I know him and that was a really important lesson to learn as a child. It was definitely the more important of the two books for me. Thanks for the review, I really wanted to re-read it and now I'm even more motivated to do so!
It is very nice that Card the author writes of Speaker so understanding, one whe sees something good in every being, who defends Piggies and their strange life cycle and seeks to find a new home for the remnant of the species he almost destroyed. Too bad that Card the person does not extend that understanding to fellow humans who dare to be born with a different sexual orientation to his own. Now, that is a pinnacle of hypocrisy. (But then, Dickens has often been accused of spending all his humanity on his novels, so that nothing was left for his private life.)
It’s a shame that such a great mind like Card, who captivated millions of sci fi readers, feels this way about others in real life He also made an appearance on the Shapiro show which made me doubt him as a person.
@@ulisesx1605 Yup. The question is does Card the author redeem Card the person, or does the person diminish the author. As I am with _The Speaker,_ I choose the former, but not lightly.
I only recently learned about some of Card's bigoted views, about halfway through my reading of Speaker For the Dead. It was... Disappointing. The same man who writes stories focused on empathy and understanding, even to the degree of learning about and loving a completely alien race, not just in name but in every sense of the word... Is also incapable of understanding or viewing his fellow humans as equal, just because they love differently than he does. Kinda makes me wonder if Ender Wiggin wouldn't even like the man who wrote him into existence.
Maybe you should know that our religion does not suggest that homosexuals are condemned to eternal hell, but that the highest joys are found in reproductive marriages. In fact, we hold that homosexuals are viewed exactly the same as others, but are expected (just as I am!) to refrain from sex outside of a man-woman marriage. Even practicing homosexuals are very likely to have an ultimate fate so joyous that it surpasses understanding, because of course God does not hate His children just because they can’t resist the strongest urge given to mankind. This is why Card takes such a humanist perspective, because we are taught that almost all of humanity will ultimately be redeemed because of the goodness in their hearts.
Speaker for the Dead 'job' was something Ender created with his two book. He is the one who made himself in a villain by writing the 'The Hive Queen' that help humanity understand the the Buggers. Jane was created by Ender trying to understand the Buggers and The Hive Queen trying to understand the humans. It is almost a digital child of Ender and the Hive Queen. (Just some notes on the story). (In regards to the spoiler section) It seems like Ender regrets the xenocide, but he is more forward thinking and comes to terms with it. He knows if Hive Queen brings the Bugger race back to ''life' that the same Xenocide would most likely happen again. This is why he is traveling so much. To give humans the time to come to terms with the war and learn from the mistakes of that war. The third species and understand of them would help him with that goal. That's the only reason he settles down and lay out his roots. HIs third book 'The Life of Human" (that was the name of the Piggie that Ender spoke for with that book, although I forget if Human was turned into a 'tree' or a 'real' death. It's been awhile.
The end of the book is NOT the end of the story. There are two more books that follow and that doesn’t include the “shadow series” which, sort of, parallels the Ender Wiggin story.
Speaker for the Dead is perhaps Orson Scott Card expressing how to be a better person than he is capable of being in real life. It's been a long time, but I thought a chief motivation for Ender's flight is the knowledge that he'd be used by one side to decimate the other, and then assassinated for being too dangerous?
Interesting thought on the trees. I had read it as them being an extremely old life form, in the same vein as the Formics. What generally floors me about the Formics is that they’re more of a “consciousness which manifests” rather than just a race of insectoids. The way they communicate with the trees makes me think that it’s the same way, on a smaller scale - the consciousness originating on the planet has its life cycle, starting as “piggie” and ending as tree, but always of the one consciousness. I might also be including thoughts from later books, so apologies! I read the entire Enders saga back to back, including Shadow series and prequels, so it all blends together after a while
Enders Game is still the book that reshaped me. Speaker for the Dead was an incredible follow up with all the added, mature complexity. Helped me see the world with more complexity. Children of the Mind was a great read too
Yes. I remember being a huge fan of Ender's Game and Shadow as a kid but not being able to appreciate the speaker trilogy back then. Recently I got the itch to reread all of the books in the Ender universe in chronological order and have just now gotten into Children of the mind and man did I not understand what I was missing. I can't wait to finally get to the last shadow. If anyone's curious as to the order its; Enders game, Enders Shadow, shadow of the hegemon, shadow puppets, shadow of the giant, ender in exile, shadows in flight, speaker, xenocide, children, then last shadow.
In 'Ender's Game', Ender knew he was training for war, yet he did not know his practice was actual war. Ender was the best at this game, and as a result, won the war. Not only was Ender still a child, he was not given the opportunity for moral decisions about his actions. Saving humanity meant committing an unconscionable act, but the guilt lay with the military leaders. In essence, Ender became a martyr for peace (scapegoat), so I'm OK with Mr. Card proselytizing about peace in 'Speaker for the Dead".
That and I don't feel like Ender needs to be facing the physical punishment for what he was tricked into doing, it wouldn't bring any justice to the Formics and it wouldn't help Ender atone for what he did
like you suggest, i was absolutely disappointed as i read more of the book, bc it wasn’t the scifi war novel of Ender’s Game. i was thoroughly pissed by the halfway mark, but curious enough to keep going. by the end it became my all-time favorite book, and the tropes/themes/motifs - even the ones from the beginning of the book - hit me like a truck as the book started to wind down. and they’ve stuck with me all these years later. i got halfway through Xenocide before i had to set it down due to having zero free time from being so busy doing college + baseball as a student athlete. i randomly came across this video today after not giving the book much thought recently, and it’s inspired me to start the series over again and finish the entire quintet/however many books are in the series
It’s just funny to me that left wing readers will find it “surprising” that a writer who is right wing would write about some right wing ideas in his books. But yet they would never mention any left wing ideas pushed in books written by left wing writers. Maybe it’s because there’s so much left wing literature that anything different seems “weird” or “wrong”. Or maybe they lack open-mindedness to learn to accept diversity of ideas? Close-mindedness is universal. I also have to say that whoever says Ender’s game, or any of the books of the series, is pro-war has to be dishonest or is a complete failure at understanding the context of the books; which are not hard to get. That or they only read reviews of the actual books and not the books themselves. Also you can believe faster than light plausible, plus time dilation, galactic civilizations… but not a simple alien life form that is an animal in its infancy and a plant in its adulthood? Have you ever heard of sponges? Some start off as little larvae that move, until they find a spot to be stuck to and then they grow into sponges. The cycle is pretty interesting and makes biological sense because first they depend on organic matter until they mature and can turn light into energy. That combined with the evolution stressors that had destroyed the biodiversity of their ecosystem; which influenced their more self-sufficient cycle. The stressors are a theme that comes to light more in later books… more specifically in Children Of The Mind.
There is no known examples of Earth life where an animal is capable of photosynthesis, including sponges. The ONLY lifeforms capable of photosynthesis are plants and bacteria. Sponges are animals, evolutionarily ancient yes, but animals nonetheless, of the phylum Porifera. They don't photosynthesise, but rely on water passing across their pores to provide oxygen and nutrients, as well as removing waste. I also don't think "left wing literature" is as prevalent as you are suggesting, but I don't have the data to back that up...
I just finished it, and I can't form a solid reaction, but it was a different experience, may be not good as I expected it to be, but it kept me reading and anticipating till the very end. I give it 3/5 at maximum.
For me seeing direct repercussions for ender in the book would have been a meaningless sidebar that is done well to be avoided. No sane person can argue that blaming a manipulated 6yo for genocide is a realistic position to take. Having the genocide have as a repercussion only the widespread belief that it was thoroughly wrong is probably the best way to approach it. Draw parallels to the real world and you realize that the only country that took responsibility for it's involvement in extermination is Germany. Nobody talks about Spain effectively exterminating its unwanted (mostly jews) through work before African slavery. The armenian genocide is "fake news" for everyone living in the area of the old Ottoman Empire. And there are many more. The most atrocious example are serbs that not only face no repercussions for the genocide they tried to commit, they actually have apologists such as the subhuman trash that is Noam Chomsky that are actually held in high regard in the US.
I come from the same religion as card, and I don’t think the third life was a metaphor for heaven. This is evidenced by his comments on killing off ender when he says that he felt like ender was still alive as Peter. He does toy with theology when talking about the outside, when he suggests that there is a being that created the universe and is just waiting for someone like Jane to come out of it, which is much closer to our view of heaven in some ways. Also, his take on consciousnesses having always existed in infinite number hearkens directly back to teachings from Joseph Smith.
Why do we seem to care so much about the author's beliefs (eg. third life as tree = heaven), it's HIS book after all! Or am I wrong? :) He writes whatever he likes, and it's for us to like or hate the final product, but it's not our place to criticize whether he should've added his personal beliefs. Tree=next life is an insanely interesting concept, without which - the book would have been so much more blander, eg.. how would the queen have been talking to piggies throughout the space, if not through the trees? I'm sure you can come up with your own answer to this. But I loved the trees talking to the queen. For sure I would have not loved the book as much without it, as I did with it! Book = absolute gem IMO.
For the same reason people care about JKR's politics: they wrote some hugely popular stories that created large fan followings then made their politics public which alienated large portions of that following. The outrage is the fan response to being hurt by someone they admired and looked up to. You are right that it is the author's book, but the fans aren't wrong either. The issue boils down to separation of the art from the artist, which is not always easy.
I find many of his books carry a light core of his religious philosophy while avoiding the theology and ritual of it. A basic general moral veiw instead of a distinct religious one. But again that's many of his books, there are a few like homecoming where he is a Mormon C.L. Lewis. Even so I have found none of his stuff to feel like religious propaganda or influence as he is very up front about which books are Mormon allegory and adaptation in public and on the books themselves. All writing of note has a philosophy or moral statement in it, people just get weird when it doesn't have a mainstream source. Narnia is a classic yet "Circle of Light" gets blasted for having it's cosmology based on a Dharmic model and is pulled from schools while Pullman's cosmology is Milton through a Gnostic lens and people call his work Satanic. Card is openly Mormon so is assumed to have planted religious messages before the book has even come out.
Honestly I think you screwed up when you tried to interpret it through your religious lens, I don’t think it has parallels to heaven at all. The trees were conscious, this should have been obvious as they all speak to the natives and the speaker, I am shocked you would even question that. This was why the speaker was so often at odds with the church in the book, their religious views and those opposing those religious views hid the truth and it took an unaffiliated speaker to be able to uncover the actual truth behind everything and connect with the natives
This is more of a short summary of the book than a review. 🙄 I've read the book and your summary is accurate but it wouldn't be useful if I hadn't read it and was trying to decide if it was worth my time.
Great book. Reading this book as middle schooler was difficult but upon reading it again when I was older I grew to appreciate it more.
Exactly the same story for me. I think the biggest difference between this book and Ender's Game was the names were not at all phonetically distinct. Keeping all the characters straight was exhausting. .
Great review. One of my favorite books of all time. Enders Game sets Ender up as such an empathetic tortured soul character. His path to becoming the speaker for the Dead and his relationship to the Hive queen and then the piggies is just terrific scifi.
Speaker was always my favorite from this series. Will always be one of my favorite books. And What you said about the piggies being endearing yet unnerving is spot on. They were cute but definitely had some weird…gardening habits.
I liked Ender’s Game, but really, really liked Speaker for the Dead. I read it so long ago that I don’t remember much. I should reread it, but there are so many other books I want to get to.
I read Ender's Game and then Speaker for the Dead when I was 12 and looking back realise I probably was a bit young! That said, I loved it and it's been the source of a lot of my personal understanding of the world and it's people ever since. Exactly like the quotes at the start said, I could never hate Ender Wiggin, even with his good and bad traits and actions, because I know him and that was a really important lesson to learn as a child. It was definitely the more important of the two books for me. Thanks for the review, I really wanted to re-read it and now I'm even more motivated to do so!
Great book! I enjoyed Speaker much more than I did Ender's Game..
It is very nice that Card the author writes of Speaker so understanding, one whe sees something good in every being, who defends Piggies and their strange life cycle and seeks to find a new home for the remnant of the species he almost destroyed.
Too bad that Card the person does not extend that understanding to fellow humans who dare to be born with a different sexual orientation to his own. Now, that is a pinnacle of hypocrisy. (But then, Dickens has often been accused of spending all his humanity on his novels, so that nothing was left for his private life.)
It’s a shame that such a great mind like Card, who captivated millions of sci fi readers, feels this way about others in real life
He also made an appearance on the Shapiro show which made me doubt him as a person.
@@ulisesx1605 Yup. The question is does Card the author redeem Card the person, or does the person diminish the author. As I am with _The Speaker,_ I choose the former, but not lightly.
I only recently learned about some of Card's bigoted views, about halfway through my reading of Speaker For the Dead.
It was... Disappointing. The same man who writes stories focused on empathy and understanding, even to the degree of learning about and loving a completely alien race, not just in name but in every sense of the word... Is also incapable of understanding or viewing his fellow humans as equal, just because they love differently than he does.
Kinda makes me wonder if Ender Wiggin wouldn't even like the man who wrote him into existence.
@@wholefttheydogatcentralpoint Yup... Sad.
Maybe you should know that our religion does not suggest that homosexuals are condemned to eternal hell, but that the highest joys are found in reproductive marriages. In fact, we hold that homosexuals are viewed exactly the same as others, but are expected (just as I am!) to refrain from sex outside of a man-woman marriage. Even practicing homosexuals are very likely to have an ultimate fate so joyous that it surpasses understanding, because of course God does not hate His children just because they can’t resist the strongest urge given to mankind. This is why Card takes such a humanist perspective, because we are taught that almost all of humanity will ultimately be redeemed because of the goodness in their hearts.
Speaker for the Dead 'job' was something Ender created with his two book. He is the one who made himself in a villain by writing the 'The Hive Queen' that help humanity understand the the Buggers. Jane was created by Ender trying to understand the Buggers and The Hive Queen trying to understand the humans. It is almost a digital child of Ender and the Hive Queen. (Just some notes on the story).
(In regards to the spoiler section)
It seems like Ender regrets the xenocide, but he is more forward thinking and comes to terms with it. He knows if Hive Queen brings the Bugger race back to ''life' that the same Xenocide would most likely happen again. This is why he is traveling so much. To give humans the time to come to terms with the war and learn from the mistakes of that war. The third species and understand of them would help him with that goal. That's the only reason he settles down and lay out his roots. HIs third book 'The Life of Human" (that was the name of the Piggie that Ender spoke for with that book, although I forget if Human was turned into a 'tree' or a 'real' death. It's been awhile.
Read Xenocide and Children Of The Mind. Human is a tree in those books. The chapter sections are of him and the Hive Queen talking to each other.
The end of the book is NOT the end of the story. There are two more books that follow and that doesn’t include the “shadow series” which, sort of, parallels the Ender Wiggin story.
Speaker for the Dead is perhaps Orson Scott Card expressing how to be a better person than he is capable of being in real life. It's been a long time, but I thought a chief motivation for Ender's flight is the knowledge that he'd be used by one side to decimate the other, and then assassinated for being too dangerous?
Interesting thought on the trees. I had read it as them being an extremely old life form, in the same vein as the Formics.
What generally floors me about the Formics is that they’re more of a “consciousness which manifests” rather than just a race of insectoids. The way they communicate with the trees makes me think that it’s the same way, on a smaller scale - the consciousness originating on the planet has its life cycle, starting as “piggie” and ending as tree, but always of the one consciousness.
I might also be including thoughts from later books, so apologies! I read the entire Enders saga back to back, including Shadow series and prequels, so it all blends together after a while
Enders Game is still the book that reshaped me.
Speaker for the Dead was an incredible follow up with all the added, mature complexity. Helped me see the world with more complexity.
Children of the Mind was a great read too
Yes. I remember being a huge fan of Ender's Game and Shadow as a kid but not being able to appreciate the speaker trilogy back then. Recently I got the itch to reread all of the books in the Ender universe in chronological order and have just now gotten into Children of the mind and man did I not understand what I was missing. I can't wait to finally get to the last shadow.
If anyone's curious as to the order its;
Enders game, Enders Shadow, shadow of the hegemon, shadow puppets, shadow of the giant, ender in exile, shadows in flight, speaker, xenocide, children, then last shadow.
Who would think that Ender's game was pro war?
How woukd they come away thinking that?
Fantastic book. It really spoke to me.
In 'Ender's Game', Ender knew he was training for war, yet he did not know his practice was actual war. Ender was the best at this game, and as a result, won the war.
Not only was Ender still a child, he was not given the opportunity for moral decisions about his actions.
Saving humanity meant committing an unconscionable act, but the guilt lay with the military leaders.
In essence, Ender became a martyr for peace (scapegoat), so I'm OK with Mr. Card proselytizing about peace in 'Speaker for the Dead".
That and I don't feel like Ender needs to be facing the physical punishment for what he was tricked into doing, it wouldn't bring any justice to the Formics and it wouldn't help Ender atone for what he did
@@israelsalgado2499 so right, Ender atones for his crimes of universal scale by speaking for the dead, quite poetic really
like you suggest, i was absolutely disappointed as i read more of the book, bc it wasn’t the scifi war novel of Ender’s Game. i was thoroughly pissed by the halfway mark, but curious enough to keep going. by the end it became my all-time favorite book, and the tropes/themes/motifs - even the ones from the beginning of the book - hit me like a truck as the book started to wind down. and they’ve stuck with me all these years later. i got halfway through Xenocide before i had to set it down due to having zero free time from being so busy doing college + baseball as a student athlete. i randomly came across this video today after not giving the book much thought recently, and it’s inspired me to start the series over again and finish the entire quintet/however many books are in the series
Your awesome bro I loved Enders game!
Some great reviews and stories breakdown
It’s just funny to me that left wing readers will find it “surprising” that a writer who is right wing would write about some right wing ideas in his books. But yet they would never mention any left wing ideas pushed in books written by left wing writers. Maybe it’s because there’s so much left wing literature that anything different seems “weird” or “wrong”. Or maybe they lack open-mindedness to learn to accept diversity of ideas? Close-mindedness is universal.
I also have to say that whoever says Ender’s game, or any of the books of the series, is pro-war has to be dishonest or is a complete failure at understanding the context of the books; which are not hard to get. That or they only read reviews of the actual books and not the books themselves. Also you can believe faster than light plausible, plus time dilation, galactic civilizations… but not a simple alien life form that is an animal in its infancy and a plant in its adulthood? Have you ever heard of sponges? Some start off as little larvae that move, until they find a spot to be stuck to and then they grow into sponges. The cycle is pretty interesting and makes biological sense because first they depend on organic matter until they mature and can turn light into energy. That combined with the evolution stressors that had destroyed the biodiversity of their ecosystem; which influenced their more self-sufficient cycle. The stressors are a theme that comes to light more in later books… more specifically in Children Of The Mind.
There is no known examples of Earth life where an animal is capable of photosynthesis, including sponges.
The ONLY lifeforms capable of photosynthesis are plants and bacteria. Sponges are animals, evolutionarily ancient yes, but animals nonetheless, of the phylum Porifera. They don't photosynthesise, but rely on water passing across their pores to provide oxygen and nutrients, as well as removing waste.
I also don't think "left wing literature" is as prevalent as you are suggesting, but I don't have the data to back that up...
Should the xenocide be something to regret, in this case?
Orson Scott Card is in the elite of all fiction writers.
I just finished it, and I can't form a solid reaction, but it was a different experience, may be not good as I expected it to be, but it kept me reading and anticipating till the very end.
I give it 3/5 at maximum.
For me seeing direct repercussions for ender in the book would have been a meaningless sidebar that is done well to be avoided. No sane person can argue that blaming a manipulated 6yo for genocide is a realistic position to take.
Having the genocide have as a repercussion only the widespread belief that it was thoroughly wrong is probably the best way to approach it. Draw parallels to the real world and you realize that the only country that took responsibility for it's involvement in extermination is Germany.
Nobody talks about Spain effectively exterminating its unwanted (mostly jews) through work before African slavery. The armenian genocide is "fake news" for everyone living in the area of the old Ottoman Empire. And there are many more.
The most atrocious example are serbs that not only face no repercussions for the genocide they tried to commit, they actually have apologists such as the subhuman trash that is Noam Chomsky that are actually held in high regard in the US.
I come from the same religion as card, and I don’t think the third life was a metaphor for heaven. This is evidenced by his comments on killing off ender when he says that he felt like ender was still alive as Peter. He does toy with theology when talking about the outside, when he suggests that there is a being that created the universe and is just waiting for someone like Jane to come out of it, which is much closer to our view of heaven in some ways. Also, his take on consciousnesses having always existed in infinite number hearkens directly back to teachings from Joseph Smith.
The ansible is the same thing from the leguin books
this book changed my life.
I feel like you would have to be astonishingly dumb to think Enders Game is pro war.
Why do we seem to care so much about the author's beliefs (eg. third life as tree = heaven), it's HIS book after all! Or am I wrong? :)
He writes whatever he likes, and it's for us to like or hate the final product, but it's not our place to criticize whether he should've added his personal beliefs.
Tree=next life is an insanely interesting concept, without which - the book would have been so much more blander, eg.. how would the queen have been talking to piggies throughout the space, if not through the trees? I'm sure you can come up with your own answer to this. But I loved the trees talking to the queen. For sure I would have not loved the book as much without it, as I did with it!
Book = absolute gem IMO.
For the same reason people care about JKR's politics: they wrote some hugely popular stories that created large fan followings then made their politics public which alienated large portions of that following.
The outrage is the fan response to being hurt by someone they admired and looked up to.
You are right that it is the author's book, but the fans aren't wrong either. The issue boils down to separation of the art from the artist, which is not always easy.
I find many of his books carry a light core of his religious philosophy while avoiding the theology and ritual of it.
A basic general moral veiw instead of a distinct religious one.
But again that's many of his books, there are a few like homecoming where he is a Mormon C.L. Lewis.
Even so I have found none of his stuff to feel like religious propaganda or influence as he is very up front about which books are Mormon allegory and adaptation in public and on the books themselves.
All writing of note has a philosophy or moral statement in it, people just get weird when it doesn't have a mainstream source.
Narnia is a classic yet "Circle of Light" gets blasted for having it's cosmology based on a Dharmic model and is pulled from schools while Pullman's cosmology is Milton through a Gnostic lens and people call his work Satanic.
Card is openly Mormon so is assumed to have planted religious messages before the book has even come out.
Good 👍
He definitely dose not condeam xenocide he simply condems violence against anyone you can comnicate with in any way no matter how different from you
Honestly I think you screwed up when you tried to interpret it through your religious lens, I don’t think it has parallels to heaven at all.
The trees were conscious, this should have been obvious as they all speak to the natives and the speaker, I am shocked you would even question that.
This was why the speaker was so often at odds with the church in the book, their religious views and those opposing those religious views hid the truth and it took an unaffiliated speaker to be able to uncover the actual truth behind everything and connect with the natives
This is more of a short summary of the book than a review. 🙄
I've read the book and your summary is accurate but it wouldn't be useful if I hadn't read it and was trying to decide if it was worth my time.