Book 27: "Speaker for the Dead" by Orson Scott Card
Saturday, July 16th, 2011 09:07![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittiwake"Will you have the meeting?"
"I'll call it. In the Bishop's chambers."
Ender winced.
"The Bishop won't meet anywhere else," she said, "and no decision to rebel will mean a thing if he doesn't agree to it." Bosquinha laid her hand on his chest. "He may not even let you into the Cathedral. You are the infidel."
"But you'll try."
"I'll try because of what you did tonight. Only a wise man could see my people so clearly in so short a time. Only a ruthless one would say it all out loud. Your virtue and your flaw-- we need them both."
The events of "Ender's Game" are three thousand years in the past, but Ender and Valentine Wiggin have spent so much time travelling between planets at near light speed, that they are still in their thirties. Ender became a Speaker for the Dead, someone who speaks the truth of a person's life at their memorial service, not whitewashing their life, but getting to the heart of who they were and why they acted as they did.He started by speaking the life of the Bug... Queen, whose race he destroyed and of his bother Peter, and many other people since Ender have chosen to become Speakers for the Dead. So when an inhabitant of the planet Lusitania, the home of the only other intellgent alien species ever discovered, request the services of a Speaker for the Dead to speak the life of a man killed by the Piggies, they do not realise that the first Speaker for the Dead, the author of the "The Hive Queen and the Hegemon", is coming.
I found it hard to get into this book because to start with I did not like the main characters, but I gradually warmed to most of them. I have always liked stories where anthropologists, linguists or archaeologists are studying alien species, whether living or long-dead, to try and figure out what makes them tick. It gradually became clear that the policy of trying to avoid cultural contamination of the Piggies, by neither asking or answering questions, has caused nothing but misunderstanding and heartache on both sides, and that we can never hope to share the galaxy with alien species unless we open ourselves fully, and really come to understand each other's culture and customs. So the moral of this story is not exactly subtle, but it was enjoyable all the same.
Reviews of Books 24 to 27 cross-posted to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
50bookchallenge.
"I'll call it. In the Bishop's chambers."
Ender winced.
"The Bishop won't meet anywhere else," she said, "and no decision to rebel will mean a thing if he doesn't agree to it." Bosquinha laid her hand on his chest. "He may not even let you into the Cathedral. You are the infidel."
"But you'll try."
"I'll try because of what you did tonight. Only a wise man could see my people so clearly in so short a time. Only a ruthless one would say it all out loud. Your virtue and your flaw-- we need them both."
The events of "Ender's Game" are three thousand years in the past, but Ender and Valentine Wiggin have spent so much time travelling between planets at near light speed, that they are still in their thirties. Ender became a Speaker for the Dead, someone who speaks the truth of a person's life at their memorial service, not whitewashing their life, but getting to the heart of who they were and why they acted as they did.He started by speaking the life of the Bug... Queen, whose race he destroyed and of his bother Peter, and many other people since Ender have chosen to become Speakers for the Dead. So when an inhabitant of the planet Lusitania, the home of the only other intellgent alien species ever discovered, request the services of a Speaker for the Dead to speak the life of a man killed by the Piggies, they do not realise that the first Speaker for the Dead, the author of the "The Hive Queen and the Hegemon", is coming.
I found it hard to get into this book because to start with I did not like the main characters, but I gradually warmed to most of them. I have always liked stories where anthropologists, linguists or archaeologists are studying alien species, whether living or long-dead, to try and figure out what makes them tick. It gradually became clear that the policy of trying to avoid cultural contamination of the Piggies, by neither asking or answering questions, has caused nothing but misunderstanding and heartache on both sides, and that we can never hope to share the galaxy with alien species unless we open ourselves fully, and really come to understand each other's culture and customs. So the moral of this story is not exactly subtle, but it was enjoyable all the same.
Reviews of Books 24 to 27 cross-posted to
50bookchallenge.
