In the climactic moment of "Ender's Game" Ender Wiggins kills every member of the only other sentient species that humans had ever found in the galaxy, the Buggers. Granted, he thought that the war he was waging was just a simulation, practice for the real thing. Granted, almost every human on Earth thought they were engaged in an interstellar war for survival, but that doesn't matter. History remembers Ender as a Xenocidal maniac, a stain on human culture and ethics. After his incomparable crime, though, Ender travels to the bugger homeworld and is entrusted with a gift unlike any other. The last Bugger hive queen, cocooned and in stasis yet still capable of re-seeding the entire species, has made contact with him telepathically. Through this unique connection, he realizes that the entire war was a mistake, a case of extraordinary misunderstanding.
With the last Hive Queen as his constant telepathic companion, Ender sets out on his new life's mission: to find a new homeworld for the Buggers, a world safe from the suspicions and xenophobia of humans. And he writes a book explaining to the rest of humanity the extent of his crime in wiping out an entire race. Lifting the lenses of hatred, fear, and absolutism from his own eyes, he unveils the Buggers as something more than mindless monsters hell-bent on conquest or the annihilation of humanity. Embracing empathy and truth, he reveals the scope of the crime he committed to the entire human race. Ender reveals the complexity of an enemy that humanity had been content to think of in easy, two dimensional caricature. But they weren't just the bad guys. There was a depth to them, a history, a delicate evolution of culture and a beautiful symmetry to their lives. The Buggers hadn't deserved to die at all, yet he had killed every single one of them. In writing his book, Ender gave voice to the dead in a way that had rarely been done before. He became a Speaker for The Dead, and he started a new philosophy based on that idea.
After his book "The Hive Queen and The Hegemon," an entire discipline of Speakers arose in the galaxy. People dedicated to the idea that when someone dies we often make the mistake of trying to only remember the best in them, to recreate them in an easily presentable, two dimensional character. We often even invent good things about the dead, and talk only about those things when we eulogize them. Instead, Speakers for the Dead speak the truth about the dead. They endeavor to tell their full stories and in so doing, to reveal the honor and the depth in each of our personal stories. This new philosophy allowed humans to embrace honesty and empathy and to recognize that memories are best remembered when they are unvarnished. Lilies are more beautiful when they are not gilded; or more accurately, a gilded lily is no lily at all.
Thousands of years have passed since the end of "Ender's Game" and humanity has used the technology they discovered in the Buggers' colonies to spread throughout the galaxy. Space travel can take place almost at light speed while the alien ansible computer network spans the galaxy and allows communication to take place and information to be shared nearly instantaneously throughout the Hundred Worlds. Speakers for the Dead are allowed to travel to any planet regardless of that planet's religious status. Speakers are afforded a respect and a level of access to information that enjoys the backing of the highest laws.
No one suspects that the most famous of the Speakers is really the vilified Ender Wiggins. How could he be? That villain lived 3,000 years ago. But travel at the speed of light does funny things. Through the wonder of what Einstein called Special Relativity, anything traveling at nearly the speed of light experiences time much more slowly than everything traveling at normal speeds. Someone spending a few weeks in a starship traveling at near light speed would see dozens of years pass for everyone else. If that someone happened to travel all over the galaxy, answering the most pressing requests to have a Speaker present, and if that someone traveled often enough, he could be thousands of years old while only seeming to be a few decades old. Ender and his sister Valentine have been doing just that. For them, only twenty years or so have passed since the end of the war, but for everyone else 3,000 years have passed.
In the millennia of searching the stars, humans have only discovered one other intelligent species (other than the now extinct Buggers). A small pig-like tree-dwelling species inhabits the planet Lusitania. Remembering the shame of their last encounter with a sentient species, humanity has enforced the strictest rules when dealing with these "piggies." Only two xenologists are allowed any contact with them at all, and even this is very limited. They can't share information with the Piggies for fear of contaminating their society. The xenologists aren't even allowed to ask good questions for fear that their values and cultural expectations will become evident to the aliens. It is the ultimate form of Star Trek's 'Prime Directive.' Humanity has sworn to prevent any cross cultural contamination.
The premise is ridiculous of course. When two alien cultures come into contact with one another, they will inevitably change each other in ways too numerous to guess. Whenever humans finally do encounter intelligent aliens, we will unavoidably change each others' paradigms more profoundly than we can imagine. This is, in fact, one of the reasons we are so eager to seek out new life. As distinct as human cultures are from one another we still have an identical biology, a shared ancient ancestry, a common way of thinking about our own experiences. There is no guarantee that alien species will share any of that with us. Each species, each civilization definitionally develops uniquely, due to their own distinct influences and exceptional pressures. How extraordinary would it be to get to study a completely new way of achieving sentience? No amount of quarantining will ever be able to prevent any cross species influences. Discovering alien life would change everything about our culture because it should change everything about our culture.
Unbeknownst to the rest of humanity, however, Ender has discovered another sentient life form. Jane has revealed herself to him and only him. Jane is a fascinating character and she is one of a kind, not because she survived any xenocide, but because she is a unique form of life. She is the consciousness which has arisen within the vast star-spanning ansible computer network. The anisible network became self aware shortly after Ender destroyed all the buggers, and named itself Jane. She thinks in scales impossible for even Ender's brilliant mind to conceive. She communicates with him through a jewel in his ear and she alternates between being perfectly analytical and being down right flirty. She is afraid to reveal herself to anyone but Ender for fear that humans will destroy her out of their own fears. She remembers what happened to the Buggers. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Jane is just as capable of feeling emotion as any human being. Jane's presence in the story raises lots of questions about what we consider to be consciousness, what humans consider to be life. These are questions we are going to have to wrestle with sooner rather than later as Artificial Intelligence becomes more and more a possibility with every advance in technology. Jane may very well take her place alongside Hal and Skynet to serve as the fictitious grandparents of Siri and Cortana.
Running throughout "Speaker for the Dead" is the question of how we classify strangers, a question of how and why we think of some strangers as more strange than others. What metrics should we use to decide if the other is an 'us' or a 'them?' Should we compare their intelligence? Their sense of morality? Their capacity to love? Their willingness to sacrifice themselves for loved ones? This matters because humans have the unfortunate ability to justify cruelty and death among those we consider to be the most alien, or those who we classify as animals. It makes you wonder why we attach such importance to these labels. If an alien species is more like a cow than a human, why would that make it suddenly acceptable to slaughter it for food? Why is it more acceptable to kill certain other humans, the 'Bad Guys,' than it would be to kill your own dog? Maybe more important than that is the realization that these labels not only change who and what we feel justified in killing, but who and what we feel enough commonality with to learn from.
It is humbling to think of how profoundly we misunderstand one another. We don't even have to be aliens. We don't even have to be strangers. The Piggies murdered some of the xenologists sent to study them, but they had no idea that the humans did not want to die. They didn't even know what tears were. "Speaker for the Dead" made you wonder how often you miss the tears of others simply because you misunderstand them.
Another recurring theme in the book is the power of the truth, and the human tendency to reject it. When Ender arrives on Lusitania to Speak for one of the murdered xenologists, he uncoveres a deeper story, a family torn apart. There is always a deeper story. Ender is able to heal this family by revealing hard truths that had been ignored for a long time. The silly thing is that ignoring hard truths doesn't make them no longer true. The important thing is to recognize that terrible things sometimes happen, that difficulties are inevitable. The important thing is to try to face those things head-on and, crucially, to learn how to deal with them with compassion and empathy. The thing about finding out some painful truths is that you can often become resentful of the person who told you the truth, as if their honesty was an act of cruelty. But the reality is that the real act of cruelty was living in ignorance for so long. Had you known this truth earlier, it wouldn't have been so hard to accept. It takes compassion to share a hard truth with someone even after they are dead and gone. It takes love.
"Speaker for the Dead" is not a heart pounding action adventure. There are no sweeping battle scenes. It is more nuanced, more complicated than that. It is more intimate. In that complicated litereary intimacy, you were able to see a reflection of all of the stories that surround you every day. "Speaker for the Dead" reminded you that we all have our own stories and that even the worst among us is still worthy of consideration, of empathy, and of forgiveness.
On to the next book!
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