Speaker for the Dead feels like home
So many little things spoke to me as a kid and still do.
This brilliant book seems generally to be vaguely known of by some communities I’m in, not at all by others, and on one account, loved. Yet so far, every time I’ve spoken of it to anyone at all, I’ve had to explain exactly what I saw in this book, because none of the people I spoke to saw the same thing.
I find this very phenomenon interesting in its own right—indicative of how different our minds are in some ways—and also probably a testament to the brilliance of this series of books, given that it appeals to so many in such a range of ways.
Still, I’ve just finished a reread of this book, and am in the throes of book-hangover. While it’s still fresh, I might as well note how I resonated with this book this time, and more generally my suspicions on what regularly resonates with me across all rereads.
Real quick contextual information beforehand
I’m not thrilled by the blurbs I’ve found1, but this quote from Goodreads is a decent start, I suppose:
“In this second book in the saga set 3,000 years after the terrible war, Ender Wiggin is reviled by history as the Xenocide—the destroyer of the alien Buggers. In the aftermath of his terrible war, Ender Wiggin disappeared, and a powerful voice arose: The Speaker for the Dead, who told the true story of the Bugger War. Now, long years later, a second alien race has been discovered, but again the aliens' ways are strange and frightening…again, humans die. And it is only the Speaker for the Dead, who is also Ender Wiggin the Xenocide, who has the courage to confront the mystery…and the truth.”
So Ender, upon receiving the news of that death and the request to speak the death as a Speaker for the Dead, travels to the Catholic planet of Lusitania. Amidst the mystery, he digs into the truth of a broken family in order to finish his work.
Something like that, to avoid spoilers.
This book—it's intelligent.
Not in a stuffy way (or at least, it doesn’t feel it to me), mind you. I mean rather that everyone the plot engages with feels incredibly intelligent. The main family is a scientific one. It’s made up of anthropologists and genetic engineering alien-species-studying scientists, for the most part, and they (plus others outside said family that feature in this book) are constantly talking of ecology, biology, culture and philosophy.
Now, this is partially possible—and takes the interdisciplinary form that it does so naturally—because in Card’s world, everyone has an impressively high baseline intelligence and education, at least relative to the real world which I happen to inhabit now2. Thus the anthropologists casually know the physics of the universe, or general biology/ecology, and even the average person is vaguely able to perform the metacognition required to attempt understanding the perspective of other people (see how the characters dryly comment on Novinha’s character or situation). From this, the dialogue is full of irony and philosophy and wit, which plays delightfully with my mind, enhanced by the fact that it feels like someone's finally understood what it's like to be in a head that sees the layers and therefore absurdity in basically everything. In some senses, it’s a utopia, because everyone thinks. Everyone (that is plot-relevant, more or less) can engage. This is how it’s intellectually stimulating—not in the way a textbook or research paper is, but rather in a way that feels a step closer to the dream of a community in one place that is constantly mingling ideas, challenging each other with discourse, and still being humans together, relationally. Without this in my current real life3, immersing in Speaker feels like something precious indeed.
In the throes of book hangover, I miss Ender and Val specifically (or at least what they’re alluded to, and therefore the feelings that formed within my reader experience, despite the lack of actual scenes of it on the page): their intelligent care for people and interest in communities. Through them, the story’s intelligence is saturated with emotion, too. Yet these characters are merely one branch of Card’s brilliance in intertwining the two. Really, the whole book demonstrates this, because it's a story about a messy family and their abusive father. A family that doesn't fit in a religious society because they're analytical humanists. Ender's intuitive empathy is constantly understanding everyone's intentions and loves and pains. And that, aside from all the lovely useful things it does, also simply makes everything so much richer.
I miss sitting in on conversations with Ender and his sister, Valentine—a legendary philosopher writing commentative essays across history—as they conversed about the nature of humans and religion and the Other. I miss being in the company of a scientific family whose daily work it was to explore and engineer the world around them, whose talks involved collaboration on important questions they were asking. I miss the very respect amongst one another for the work they were doing; it was a place, a unit, that understood what it was to be a scholar, and I miss that too.
I cherish and miss the sheer fascination of watching a truly alien species and learning about them. Of watching the ecosystem and learning about it subliminally. Of simply marvelling at the ideas presented in the worldbuilding.
Intellectually stimulating, full of ideas, grounded and human in all its emotion, deeply humanist in its tradition, and full of philosophical wit—this book made parts of me, and I return to it every now and again to remember Ender, remember the whole form of the book, and thus remember myself.
Quotes that resonated
The difference between raman and varelse is not in the creature judged, but in the creature judging. When we declare an alien species to be raman, it does not mean that they have passed a threshold of moral maturity. It means that we have.
Now and then he got so comfortable among the pequeninos that he spoke naturally. Always a danger.
A true scientist in his method, and a humanist at heart.
‘I know. You have no friends, you have no intimate associates, you go to mass but you never go to confession, you are so completely detached that as far as possible you don’t touch the life of this colony, you touch the life of the human race at any point. From all the evidence, you live in complete isolation.’
Novinha wasn’t prepared for this. He was naming the underlying pain of her life, and she didn’t have a strategy devised to cope with it.
‘If I do, it isn’t my fault.’
“Impossible. Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to and the ones she doesn’t belong to. I am this and this and this, but definitely not that and that and that. All your definitions are negative. I could make an infinite list of the things you are not. But a person who really believes she doesn’t belong to any community at all invariably kills herself, either by killing her body or by giving up her identity and going mad.”
“Not insane. Driven by a sense of purpose that is frightening. If you take the test you’ll pass it. But before I let you take it, I have to know: Who will you become when you pass? What do you believe in, what are you part of, what do you care about, what do you love?”
“He lived three thousand years ago, whoever he was, the one who called himself the Speaker for the Dead. But he understood the buggers! We wiped them all out, the only other alien race we ever knew, we killed them all, but he understood.”
“But he did! He made the live again — you’d know it if you had read the book! I don’t know about Jesus, I listen to Bishop Peregrino and I don’t think there’s any power in their priesthood to turn wafers into flesh or forgive a milligram of guilt. But the Speaker for the Dead brought the hive queen back to life.”
‘But you will, everyone does; they all wish I’d go away—” Pipo shrugged. ‘So? Sometime or other everybody wishes everybody would go away. What I’m telling you now is that even at those times, even if I tell you to go away, you don’t have to go away.’
He shook his head. ‘I hoped. I believed in you. I wanted to help you do what you dreamed of doing. As long as it was something good.’
And at that moment he decided that he hated the law. If the law meant allowing this to be done to Rooter, then the law had no understanding. Rooter was a person. You don’t stand by and let this happen to a person just because you’re studying him.
"You think you're annoyed because of Plikt's arrogance, but that isn't so. Plikt is not arrogant; she is merely precise. You are properly ashamed that you have not yet read Demosthenes' history of your own people, and so in your shame you are annoyed at Plikt because she is not guilty of your sin."
Andrew smiled. 'You believe in sin, Styrka, and you do things because of that belief. So sin is real in you, and knowing you, this Speaker must believe in sin.'
Andrew sighed at Styrka's unforgiving attitude; it was the fashion among Calvinists at Reykjavik to deny any weight to human motive in judging the good or evil of an act. Acts are good and evil in themselves, they said; and because Speakers for the Dead held as their only doctrine that good or evil exist entirely in human motive, and not at all in the act, it made students like Styrka quite hostile to Andrew. Fortunately, Andrew did not resent it—he understood the motive behind it.
"My argument? I asked a question. A question isn't an argument, unless you think you know my answer, and I assure you, Styrka, that you do not. Think about this. Class is dismissed."
What Jane had were statistics, but Ender was the Speaker for the Dead; his genius—or his curse— was his ability to conceive events as someone else saw them. It had made him a brilliant military commander, both in leading his own men—boys, really—and in outguessing the enemy. It also meant that from the cold facts of Novinha's life he was able to guess—no, not guess, to know—how her parents' death and virtual sainthood had isolated Novinha, how she had reinforced her loneliness by throwing herself into her parents' work. He knew what was behind her remarkable achievement of adult xenobiologist status years early. He also knew what Pipo's quiet love and acceptance had meant to her, and how deep her need for Libo's friendship ran.
There was no living soul on Lusitania who really knew Novinha. But in this cave in Reykjavik, on the icy world of Trondheim, Ender Wiggin knew her, and loved her, and wept bitterly for her.
"You have Jakt. I have obnoxious students who keep trying to convert me to Calvinism."
"But without her there, Ender grew impatient with his own thoughts; they never came to a point, because there was no one to tell them to." — This is basically what SPARC did for me, or one of the things. I'm realising I need someone else to do this for me.
He did not answer. He was used to the way religious people assumed that their sacred stories must sound absurd to unbelievers. But Ender did not consider himself an unbeliever, and he had a keen sense of the sacredness of many tales.
But he could not explain this to Bosquinha. She would have to change her assumptions about him over time. She was suspicious of him, but he believed she could be won; to be a good Mayor, she had to be skilled at seeing people for what they are, not for what they seem.
"What, wallowing in loneliness?" asked Jane. "I can hear your heartrate falling and your breathing getting heavy. In a moment you'll either be asleep, dead, or lacrimose."
"I'm much more complex than that," said Ender cheerfully. "Anticipated self-pity is what I'm feeling, about pains that haven't even arrived."
"Very good, Ender. Get an early start. That way you can wallow so much longer."
"And humans simply aren't part of the pattern of treeworship. Well, that's likely enough. Except that I've found that rituals and myths don't come from nowhere. There's usually some reason for it that's tied to the survival of the community."
"Andrew Wiggin, anthropologist?"
"The proper study of mankind is man."
Miro was young—surely not yet twenty. But his face and bearing carried the weight of responsibility and suffering far beyond his years. Ender saw how all of them made space for him. It was not that they backed away from him the way they might retreat from someone they feared. Rather, they oriented themselves to him, walking in parabolas around him, as if he were the center of gravity in the room and everything else was moved by the force of his presence.
"You never cease to amaze me, Andrew, the way you turn people into plasma."
"I can say anything," said Ivanova. "His name was Ender, and he destroyed everything he touched." Like me, she did not say.
"Oh? And what do you know of him?" His voice whipped out like a grass-saw, ragged and cruel. "How do you know there wasn't something that he touched kindly? Someone who loved him, who was blessed by his love? Destroyed everything he touched—that's a lie that can't truthfully be said of any human being who ever lived."
"No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one's life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins."
"Miro surprised himself. He was crying. It was all part of what this Speaker could do, even when he wasn't present. He had loosened all the tight places in Miro's heart, and now Miro couldn't stop anything from coming out."
"Yes, you're ungrateful, and a terrible daughter," he said, laughing softly. "Through all these years of chaos and neglect you've held your mother's family together with little help from her, and when you followed her in her career, she wouldn't share the most vital information with you; you've earned nothing but love and trust from her and she's replied by shutting you out of her life at home and at work; and then you finally tell somebody that you're sick of it. You're just about the worst person I've ever known."
"Telling the story of who she was, and then realizing that she was no longer the same person. That she had made a mistake, and the mistake had changed her, and now she would not make the mistake again because she had become someone else, someone less afraid, someone more compassionate."
"I speak to everyone in the language they understand," said Ender. "That isn't being slick. It's being clear."
"'We've always tried to play along with it, and act as if we believed it.'
'How condescending of you,' said Ender.
'It's standard anthropological practice,' said Miro.
'You're so busy pretending to believe them, there isn't a chance in the world you could learn anything from them.'
For a moment they lagged behind, so that he actually entered the forest alone. Then they ran to catch up with him. 'We've devoted our lives to learning about them!' Miro said.
Ender stopped. 'Not from them.'"
"He had not expected him to be so intrusive, so dangerous. Yes, he was wise, all right, he kept seeing past pretense, kept saying or doing outrageous things that were, when you thought about it, exactly right. It was as if he were so familiar with the human mind that he could see, right on your face, the desires so deep, the truths so well-disguised that you didn't even know yourself that you had them in you."
Somewhat spoilery territory
'Why are they so stupid?" asked Human. 'Not to know the truth when they hear it?'
'They aren't stupid,' said the Speaker. 'This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones we really believe, and those we never think to question. They never thought to question the idea that the original Speaker for the Dead died three thousand years ago, even though they know how star travel prolongs life.'"
'"Ah,' said Speaker. "There's so much that we don't understand. And so much that you don't understand. We should tell each other more.""
"'But the Speaker for the Dead, the one who wrote this book, he's the wisest man who lived in the age of flight among the stars. While Ender was a murderer, he killed a whole people, a beautiful race of ramen that could have taught us everything—'
'Both human, though,' whispered the Speaker."
"'I don't know what their fear looks like,' said Speaker. 'I don't know these people at all.'"
The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startlingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis, and when they veer too far, they die. Only one rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation. So, of course, we killed him.
'The Master ate with worse sinners than your mother, and forgave them. Are you better than he?'
'None of the adulteresses he forgave was his mother!'
'Not everyone's mother can be the Blessed Virgin.'
"He didn't win our affection, Mother, he won our trust."
"What am I expecting this brother to do, thought Ender. His people have always measured themselves against the other tribes. Their forest isn't fifty hectares or five hundred—it's either larger or smaller than the forest of the tribe to the west or the south. What I have to do now is the work of a generation: I have to teach him a new way of conceiving the stature of his own people."
Human walked behind Ender, leaned against him, the weight of the young piggy pressed against his back. Ender felt Human's breath on his cheek, and then their cheeks were pressed together, both of them looking in the same direction. All at once Ender understood: "You see what I see," said Ender.
"I'm older than any of the human colonies. It doesn't make me wise, unfortunately."
"We know you now. That makes all the difference, doesn't it? Even Quim doesn't hate you now. When you really know somebody, you can't hate them."
"Or maybe it's just that you can't really know them until you stop hating them."
"I don't think it has anything to do with truth, Olhado. It's just cause and effect. We never can sort them out. Science refuses to admit any cause except first cause-- knock down one domino, the one next to it also falls. But when it comes to human beings, the only type of cause that matters is final cause, the purpose. What a person had in mind. Once you understand what people really want, you can't hate them anymore. You can fear them, but you can't hate them, because you can always find the same desires in your own heart."
"It was a good time, a good place to be, better than Ender had ever dreamed for himself in the sterile corridors of the Battle School when he was little, and fighting for his life."
Emphases are mine.
Upon a cursory search, apparently no one has published a good blurb for this book—at least not one that seems actually descriptive of the main plot elements/focuses, not to me.
This is not a full complaint; a very incomplete statement and lots of caveats, the biggest of which is that this is merely a feeling that I noticed underlying a lot of my reader responses to Speaker for the Dead, and might not, in fact, be true at all about even the reality I think it grafts to.
My friends are fantastic, and, none of us have been educated enough or matured enough in our work yet to have work like this. Or a million other logistical reasons why this doesn’t work out the way I’m relishing it in this work of fiction.