Speaker for the Dead

Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead Cover

Speaker for the Dead

Badseedgirl
3/17/2016
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Speaker for The Dead is the second book in the Ender Wiggins Saga by Orson Scott Card. It was the 1987 Hugo winner. The voice and tone of this novel is vastly different from that of Ender's Game, but this is to be expected. Ender's Game was the story of a child trained and tricked into fighting a war against an enemy he did not know or understand. At the end of this first novel, Ender comes to understand the motivations of the "Buggers" and realizes that he has almost killed an entire civilization over a misunderstanding. In Speaker for The Dead, a grown up Ender must confront and come to terms with what he did. It would be only natural for the tone of the novel become more internal and introspective.

I enjoyed this novel as much or even more than Ender's Game. The world building is wonderful. It was smart to move the storyline 3,000 years after the events of the first novel. This gave much more validity to the change in attitudes towards what Ender did in the first novel.

I am looking forward to the next novel in the series.

4 of 5 stars.