Speaker for the Dead is the first book in the Beyond Ender series, but it is also a standalone sequel to the Hugo and Nebula award-winning science fiction epic novel, Ender’s Game. Speaker also won both Hugo and Nebula awards.
Ender’s Game was about Andrew Wiggin, a gifted young boy, whose mind was his greatest asset. Because he was the third child, under government enforced breeding restrictions – if he was suitable as a soldier, the government could take him from his family to a place in Space called Battle School where he would be trained to fight, to lead, to command – against the aliens called Buggers who when first discovered, attacked and killed many humans years before.
The Buggers were defeated by luck and one hero – Mazer Rackham, during the First Invasion. It was expected that they would come back, and Earth needed to be ready. So Andrew, Ender – a nickname his sister, Valentine gave him when they were kids, was trained to become a brutal weapon against the aliens, to prepare for the Second Invasion. What he didn’t know is that the games he played in Command School were actual battles taking place via ansible (like faster than light speed internet.)
He destroyed the buggers, won the war and blew up their home planet in the first book.
But the more he learned about the buggers, the more he realised that this war was a mistake and that he loved the buggers. So he wrote a book which began a religion – Speakers for the Dead – who talk about the lives, choices and desires of those who died, in order to fully understand and love those who have died. His book enabled the world to love the buggers, and as a result they hated Ender, calling his war, Xenocide.
The original Speaker for the Dead, Andrew Wiggin is also Ender, but nobody knows this. The discovery of the ansible was mostly accident, it was something called philotic strands that the buggers used and left behind when they were defeated and killed. The humans don’t know how it works, but are able to use this scientific discovery to provide instantaneous communication via ansible and also faster than light travel using the same technology, but it is expensive. Andrew is rich, though and he has powerful friends. Now an outcast, he travels the Universe speaking for the dead – and, unknown to the rest of the world, looking for a place to hide the cocoon of the last bugger queen, so she can be reborn.
History is about to repeat. The first discovery of an alien species since the buggers, has come about on Lusitania; a planet under Catholic licence. But some scientists were tortured to death by this new alien species – Pequeninos, called the Piggies. And people are starting to hate again, war will come.
So Andrew decides to go there to learn to love the Piggies and save them. And perhaps this will be a place where he can save the Buggers as well. But Andrew’s main reason for visiting Lusitania is a young girl, Novinha. She will be middle-aged by the time he gets there in 2 weeks – due to relativistic travel. Her parents were killed while discovering the cure to a plague which almost wiped out Lusitania’s people years before. There is sadness, and suffering in her face. Andrew loves her, and he wants to go to her, to try and save her also. And perhaps earn redemption for the Xenocide.
Speaker for the Dead is about religion, redemption, anthropology, history, war, politics, love, betrayal, suffering, technology, aliens, and family.
Ender’s Game was about a brilliant tactician who is also a young boy, who lives a life that is more vicious and violent than most grown men live. And he does this because he is Earth’s only hope to survive.
Speaker for the Dead undoes everything that Ender’s Game creates, and yet takes nothing away from the power of the first book. These and all books in the Ender series and Beyond Ender series can be read in any order, and are each standalone stories. My advice is to read in this order: Speaker for the Dead, Ender’s Game, Ender’s Shadow, Xenocide, Children of the Mind.
the joy of eating and the folly of thinking 