Speaker for the Dead
by Orson Scott Card
Summary
Three thousand years after Ender Wiggin destroyed an entire species, he is thirty five years old, kept young by relativistic travel, and works under an assumed name as a Speaker for the Dead: someone called to a funeral to research a life completely and then tell the truth about it aloud, without excuse or flattery, to everyone who knew the person.
He is summoned to Lusitania, a Catholic Brazilian colony sharing a world with the only other intelligent species humanity has found. The pequeninos, called piggies, are studied under strict rules forbidding cultural contamination, and they have now ritually murdered two xenologists in a way that involves planting a tree in the opened chest.
Ender arrives to speak the death of one of them and finds a family destroyed by secrets, a woman who called him and then spends decades trying to prevent him coming, and a species whose life cycle nobody has understood, which makes the killings something other than murder.
This is a completely different book from its predecessor: quiet, talky, concerned with anthropology, forgiveness and the impossibility of judging a culture from outside. Card has said he conceived it first and wrote Ender's Game to get a protagonist for it.
The Ribeira family is the best thing Card has written: a mother who has spent her life hiding data, six damaged children, a dead abusive father, and a priest who cannot help any of them. Ender's method, which is simply to find out everything and then say it in public, is devastating applied to a household.
The pequeninos themselves are a genuine puzzle rather than a metaphor, and the biology that explains the killings reframes every scene that came before it.
Around four hundred pages, mostly conversation, set almost entirely in one small colony.
Read Ender's Game first, then decide, because readers who love one book often dislike the other. Best for readers who want first contact treated as a moral problem rather than a military one.
Historical Context & Significance
Speaker for the Dead won the 1987 Hugo Award for Best Novel and the Nebula Award, one year after Ender's Game had taken both. Orson Scott Card is the only writer to have won the Hugo and the Nebula for Best Novel in consecutive years.
The novel introduces the Hierarchy of Foreignness, Card's four level scheme for how much moral consideration a stranger is owed, from a fellow citizen down to a being with which no communication is possible, which has been picked up well beyond science fiction.
Card has since become a divisive figure through decades of public opposition to same sex marriage and his board membership of the National Organization for Marriage. Many readers separate the books from the positions, others do not, and the question has followed the Ender novels through every adaptation.