A Different Kind of Sequel

Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card

I actually first read Ender’s Game when I was in college, much later than when most sci-fi and fantasy buffs come across Card’s classic. I actually started using it with students I tutored in middle school as a way of trying to get them hooked on reading. It almost always worked.

In Speaker for the Dead, Card fast forwards 3000 years. In the aftermath of Ender’s victory over the buggers, instead of being honored as being a savior, he is vilified as one great murderer. The fault for this is his – after the final battle, Ender had gone off and found the hive queen and learned all about the bugger race, realizing that the buggers had never been enemies to begin with. He ends up writing a treatise that casts him as the villain and reshapes his own legacy. This book finds humans making contact with a new race and trying to correct the mistakes from the past.

Reading Card’s sequel, although one has to use that term loosely, was both an entertaining and ultimately disappointing experience. Critics have hailed this as a better written book, which is hard to argue against. The moral and religious overtones are explicit, as are the attempts at showing the emotional depth and pain many of the characters feel. But is it better than its predecessor? Sadly, it does not even come close. The success of Ender’s Game was in its innovation and creativity. Here, Card seems as if he’s struggling to become more of a literary writer, a writer with something to say. His point of view is well-received, but it is too heavy-handed. He may as well have written a philosophical treatise.

Overall, you don’t have to read this thread of the Ender series to have closure. Stick to Ender’s Shadow and the more recent thread following Ender’s brother than this and the two books that follow it.