Speaker for the Dead

Speaker for the Dead (1986) is the second book in the Ender’s series; it is preceded by Ender’s Game (1985) and followed by Xenocide (1991) and Children of the Mind (1996). Card also published a prequel to the series, First Meetings in Ender’s Universe (1999), and he later published a novel set between the events of Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead—Ender in Exile (2008)—but Speaker for the Dead is still considered the second installment of the series. The books are intricately linked, with Ender’s Game developing the context for Speaker for the Dead, and Speaker for the Dead developing the context for Xenocide and Children of the Mind.

In Ender’s Game, Ender is born because his older siblings, Peter and Valentine, were too violent and too passive, respectively. He is taken to Battle School, where he is trained to be a soldier to fight against the hive queens in the Bugger Wars. Ender’s training is intense, and he becomes exhausted by the end of the process. During his final examination, he uses the Little Doctor, or the Molecular Disruption Device, to destroy the hive queens’ planet. His superiors mislead him into thinking he is participating in a training scenario when in reality he is fighting the actual war and destroying the hive queens’ species.

The main plot of Ender’s Game is summarized throughout Speaker for the Dead. As a result of the unintentional xenocide (wholesale destruction of an alien species), Ender is motivated to obscure his identity. Intensely guilty over his role in the destruction of the hive queens’ species, he becomes a speaker for the dead. He begins his work as a speaker by writing The Hive Queen, which inspires sympathy toward the previously hated hive queens and hatred for Ender the Xenocide. Ender’s experience with the computer games in the first text establishes the conditions for Jane’s existence; however, it is not until Xenocide that Card reveals Jane was created by the hive queens to serve as a liaison between them and Ender. Jane’s existence allows the hive queens to lead Ender to their last remaining cocoon, which is the cocoon Ender carries with him and releases on Lusitania. The Little Doctor also ties the two novels together. The destructive power of the Little Doctor is revealed in Ender’s Game, and its appearance in Speaker for the Dead is portrayed as ironic since Ender is the only person to have used the doomsday device and is now at risk of dying from it himself. The third and fourth books in the series center on the coming Lusitanian fleet. The threat of planetary destruction demonstrates the importance of the theme The Importance of Cross-Cultural Empathy across the Ender’s series. The novels also carry satirical elements regarding abuses of authoritarian power.

Although the novels are intricately linked through their themes, plots, characters, and symbols, they can each be read as stand-alone texts. Card incorporates the pieces of relevant backstory, so that the reader can comprehend the plot and character relationships without having read the preceding books. He also provides relatively satisfactory endings which provide closure, but which are also open-ended to encourage readers to continue with the series.