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Science Fiction & Fantasy |
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Speaker for the Dead (Ender Wiggins Saga)
written by Orson Scott Card
Studio : Macmillan Audio
by Macmillan Audio
Release Date : 2005-08-11
Publisher : Macmillan Audio
Released : 2005-09-01
Availability : Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Number of Items : 1
EAN : 9781593974763
Avg. Customer Rating: (based on 408 reviews)
List Price : $49.95
Our Price : $28.54
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Product Description |
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The thrilling sequel to Ender’s Game and winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards—this full cast unabridged recording includes an original postscript written and recorded by the author.
Three thousand years have passed since Ender Wiggin won humanity’s war with the Buggers by totally destroying them. Ender remains young, traveling the stars at the speed of relativity, but a hundred years or more might pass on Earth while he experiences a month-long voyage. In three thousand years, Ender’s books The Hive Queen and The Hegemon, written under a pseudonym, have become holy writ, while the name of Ender itself has become anathema: he is the Xenocide, the one who killed an entire race of thinking, feeling beings, killed the only other sapient race humankind had found in all the galaxy.
The only ones, that is, until the planet called Lusitania was discovered and colonized. The discovery was seen as a gift to humanity, a chance to redeem the destruction of the Buggers. This time, the Starways Congress vowed, there would be no tragic misunderstanding leading to war. But once again men die, killed by the aliens in a rite no one understands. Ender, now known only as the Speaker for the Dead, comes to Lusitania to speak for those who have died and discovers that in order to tell the truth about them, he must unravel the secrets of Lusitania.
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Americancivilwar.com |
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Ender Wiggin, the hero and scapegoat of mass alien destruction in Ender's Game, receives a chance at redemption in this novel. Ender, who proclaimed as a mistake his success in wiping out an alien race, wins the opportunity to cope better with a second race, discovered by Portuguese colonists on the planet Lusitania. Orson Scott Card infuses this long, ambitious tale with intellect by casting his characters in social, religious and cultural contexts. Like its predecessor, this book won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. |
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Not Card's best |
Don't get this if you liked Ender's game and are looking for a sequel. Speaker for the Dead has only one of the same characters - Ender - and he's much older. No one he knew is in this book, and there's little that relates to his past or future.
If that were not enough, I found the book to be subdued and tedious, and somehow off-center. It certainy isn't Card's best at all. The story doesn't have a lot of coherence, and none of the characters are very memorable or admirable at all. Alot of details and features of the story really iritated me.
I think if he wanted to write this story, he should have just presented it as a totally new book. I came to this wanting a sequel to Ender's Game (a masterful and original book) but instead got a book that had nothing to do with Ender's game besides Ender himself appearing in it. I know Speaker for the Dead has a lot of sequels too but a far more interesting line of sequels to follow, if you liked Ender's Game, is Ender's Shadow, followed by Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets and Shadow of the Giant, which deal with the story of Ender's Game from Bean's point of view and then the other students of Battle School and what happens back on Earth. Read those instead of Speaker for the Dead. |
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Interesting premise, disappointing execution |
It has been thousands of years since Andrew "Ender" Wiggen fought against the alien buggers when he was just a young boy in battle school. Initiallly thought of as a hero, he is now remembered as a horrible person that wiped out an entire species. Humans populate a hundred worlds but still do not know of any other species with which they inhabit the world - except for on one colony, Luisitania. In this world, there is a species of creature known to humans as the piggies. Scientists on Luisitania are studying the piggies and interacting with them, but under strict law not to impart any human knowledge to them lest it interfere with the natural evolution of their culture.
Tragedy befalls Luisitania when the piggies kill the lead scientist. One of his apprentices makes a call for a Speaker for the Dead. The Speakers have the authority to travel to a world where a human has died and speak the deceased's life so that all may know the truth of their life. The Speaker that answers this call? None other than Ender himself. He, along with his sister Valentine, has spent his adult life traveling from world to world at light speed so that although the worlds have aged thousands of years, he is only in his thirties. He realizes that it is time for him to find a place to settle down and live out the rest of his existance and this particular world seems to call to him more so than any other has previously. What Ender may not realize is that the interaction between the humans and the piggies is remarkably similar to previous interactions with the buggers and humankind is not ready to coexist with an alien species. Ender must use his amazing abilities of persuasion to try to save both humans and alien lifeforms.
Ender's Game was one of the best books I have ever read. I looked forward to this one with eager anticipation. It was somewhat disappointing. The story moved very slowly and did not have any of the action or drama of the first in the series. This installment was much more moral and philosophical. While still interesting, it was a very different type of book as a result. I appreciate the book more now that I have finished it and can contemplate the theories that were put forth, but during the reading of the book I longed for the action packed adventure of the first one. Read this one for the human emotional and moral dilemmas posed and not for war games and blistering paced adventure. |
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There are other better options |
I've read a lot of Orson Scott Card's books, and have always found myself coming away from them a little frustrated. The ideas always seem to be interesting, but end up getting lost in mediocre storytelling. Card dwells on the same unique ideas so persistently, going back to the same well so often, that by the end of the book what I had originally found unique now just seems hackneyed. And now that I've found out Card is so outspoken politically with such (literally) fascist and discriminatory views, I don't even want his books in my house. I've sold them online and donated the money to a worthy charity.
If you find Card's story ideas at all interesting, I'd suggest the following authors for a more satisfying storytelling experience:
Neil Gaiman. Gaiman has the same unique flavor to his ideas, but he also has the execution to deliver an incredible story as well. His work is more on the fantasy side, like Card's Alvin Maker series. The only problem is that Gaiman writes so few books that I find myself becoming incredibly impatient waiting for his next story to come out.
Stephen Baxter and Isaac Asimov. Asimov's works can sometimes be a little less accessible then Card's, but Baxter's are not; they are just as easy a read. Both men are visionaries scientifically, and tell gripping, page turning stories. Both are sci-fi based, like Card's Ender Series.
Stephen King. Most people groan when I say how much I love King's writing, but universally I come to find out that those people have never read his Dark Tower series, just his horror. The seven books that comprise the Dark Tower story, widely considered King's Magnum Opus, are a truly unique blend of equal parts fantasy, sci-fi, and western. Note these are not in any way like King's horror writings, though once you've read the Dark Tower you'll see characters from it turn up in ancillary roles in many of his other books. The Dark Tower, like the Alvin series, is set is a world that is kind of our world, kind of not. The Dark Tower series is hands-down the best series I've ever read. Period.
I hope this helps some readers find some great stories they may have otherwise not found. Happy reading! |
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A step behind the first novel... |
...but an excellent follow up. Worth reading and some excellent concepts explored. Highly recommend it. |
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4.5 stars |
I had been warned that even though Speaker for the Dead continues the story of Ender's life, and is set in the same universe, that it's not that much of a sequel--that is, it's not the same kind of book. Which was a relief to me, to tell you the truth. Ender's Game was a complete story, and I'd been dreading the kind of sequel that would be Ender vs. a different kind of alien, which would just spoil the whole thing.
Instead, it's set 3000 years later, but due to a whole lot of light-speed travel, Ender's only in his 30s (I think--I'm not positive, and I'm not going to search for it. It's not that important. At any rate, he's an adult, in his prime.). He's become a Speaker for the Dead, the original Speaker for the Dead, but nobody realizes that. His purpose is to learn all about someone's life--not just the good things, like in a eulogy, but everything--their hopes, dreams, fears, and failings--and then Speak for them. It's what he did for the Buggers after destroying them, then published the book, earning for himself instead of the accolades he'd received, the title of "Ender the Xenocide," and his name is now reviled.
Humanity has learned a lesson, and now contact with alien races is strictly limited. On the planet Lusitania is the only other sentient race humanity has discovered: nicknamed the Piggies. The humans are required to stay within their fences and observe only, not give any information to the Piggies. But the Piggies learn anyway, from the questions they're asked, and then the anthropologist studying them is brutally slaughtered, and nobody knows why.
Ender is summoned to speak a death on the planet, and ends up bringing pain and healing. And, well, here's the whole point of the book: to know him is to love him that truly knowing a person, or an alien race, understanding them completely, is to love or at least care for them. The message got a little heavy-handed for me by the end, hence the half-star reduction.
Otherwise, the story was interesting, the characters compelling, the mystery intriguing. I'll be reading more. I've already got Xenocide (Ender, Book 3) (Ender Quartet) in my TBR pile. |
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