Reviews

• Arrived quickly, and in great shape.

  Arrived quickly, and in great shape.

• We shall never cease from exploration

  We shall never cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. - T. S. Eliot We start off where the last book ended. Now Ender the writer of “The Hive Queen and the Hegemon”, after traveling three thousand years of penance as a Speaker for the Dead is summoned to a planet where there is a new race and an opportunity to put things right. Even though the author says that you can read this book as a complete story without reading the first novel it is actually part of a five book series. True the essential background will be repeated or contemplated in this volume it is still not as complete as reading the first volume. Once again you can bypass the introduction but then you will have missed crucial information on the author and his intent. The introduction can also be used as part of a good writing course. The first book was thinly veiled as a version of “Starship Troopers” and you can see that somewhere the author must have read some field manuals. In “Speaker for the Dead” you can see that Orson Scott Card knows his Catechism. I used to teach RCIA so he could not fake it. I also come from a strong LDS background. I suspect he spiced it up with a little “Tony Hillerman.” Our main character may have changed focus a tad form the first book but people change, authors change, and we change. The only part of the writing the did not go too smoothly was the inclusion of references to “The Tempest” it seemed a tad forced where other authors such as Dorothy Sayers for example with “stale flat and unprofitable” would not be spotted if one had not read “Hamlet” but it fits her story like a glove. I can see why this book has a problem with being pigeonholed as sci-fi or space opera, etc. as it has all the elements needed to thinly veil a message. What is the message you ask? Read the book. --------------------- FYI I purchased the kindle version and even though I made sure it had Text-to-Speech: Enabled and X-Ray: Enabled, I also purchased Whispersync for Voice (Audible Audiobook) the Audible did not contain the introduction. They used to even read the cover.

• Ender's Gameを越えた！

  普通続編ってのは、最初のやつより劣ってるが、 この本は違う。Ender's Gameよりいいかも。 今度は子どものEnderでなく、大人になったEnderの 活躍が見れる。中のいいシーンはいっぱいある。例えば、 Macrosの死をspeakするシーン、piggiesと条約を 結ぶシーン、等々。第1巻よりやや哲学っぽくなってきたが、 まだ耐えられる。実をいうと、結構自分を考えさせる 設問がいつかあった。とにかく、この本はおすすめ！

• I read Enders Game not long ago and I was excited to read this book. I was afraid that I was not going to be able to get into it as much I did in Enders Game but I was more than pleasantly surprised. It was a great book that kept me reading from beginning to end. Honestly, it was hard for me to put down.

• Una storia allo stesso tempo ricca di elementi classici della fantascienza rimescolati però in una storia non complicata ma originale e che tocca vari temi non banali. Ho apprezzato particolarmente l'ideazione e la presentazione degli alieni: apparentemente "molto terrestri" ma in molte cose davvero stranianti.

• La suite parfaite aux aventures d'Enders, peuplée de créatures attachantes et située dans un monde très bien décrit, avec en prime une philosophie plus complexe qu'il n'y paraît.

• I really enjoyed Ender's Game, but Speaker for the Dead was even better. While Ender's Game was written as background for Speaker for the Dead, I think that the books should be read in the order they were published which also makes it chronologically correct: First Ender's Game, then Speaker for the Dead (Ender in Exile is chronologically in between, but I haven't read it yet and it was published years later) In Ender's Game the story evolves around very intelligent children, which makes it interesting for both young and old. Speaker for the Dead seems more mature to me. (Be aware) I'm not sure if the book would be comprehendable and interesting enough for younger kids. The books combine an interesting sci-fi story with intelligence and unusual characters. Personally I enjoy following Ender's thoughts the most. Card describes the characters' reasoning in great detail, which is the interesting part to me while not describing every detail of every landscape or room as so many other fantasy authors do. I really appreciate that since it keeps the story going forward all the time. Even though I have to agree it is not an adventure story in the normal sense, I think in the way it discusses humanity, the impact of truth it never feels boring or too long. There is not a lot of fighting going on, rather an understanding and questions about the way humans treat other species. All in all it is a very intellectual book about how we should also treat each other in understanding our differences. I'm currently reading the third book "Xenocide", and would already recommend reading the whole series.

• As much as I enjoyed Ender's Game, I wasn't really looking forward to Speaker for the Dead. I didn't see, truth be told, that there was much left to exploit in the world outlined in the first book. So, I started reading it with some trepidation. It took a little bit of time to warm up, but before too long I was drawn deeply into the story. By the end, I felt that it was a measurably *better* book than Ender's Game. Not only is it a more confident story, it's also a richer, deeper, and more important story. While Ender's Game toyed with ideas of social context, the role of consent, and the burden of duty, Speaker for the Dead takes on much more important topics. It asks 'what does it mean to be human', and 'what is the value, and utility, of truth'. It's about reaching out between alien races and finding common ground. More than anything else, it's ultimately a story of redemption, through a journey of explicit soul-searching through millenia. It's also a book that delights in language - specifically, an almost fetishistic recitation of truly lovely words. Some of this is a natural byproduct of the Portuguese within, but the words are so well chosen that they just feel good to say out loud. The names and the places are all given a l'il lyrical twist to the point that I now sometimes find myself intoning the words for no reason other than to enjoy the shape they take in my mouth. Not a lot of books have such a deep, integral focus on the poetic of language, and very few of *those* are explicitly narrative works. So, yes - a better book than Ender's Game, and one that made me very enthused about reading the next in the series.

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