Speaker for the Dead (SPOILERS!)

Cafe Society
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This thread contains major SPOILERS for Orson Scott Card’s book Speaker for the Dead. I have elected not to use the {SPOILER} tag to protect these spoilers, because I know that within a message or two someone’s going to make a comment on the spoiler I’m about to post which will give it away anyway.
SO … if any of you don’t want to know what happens in Speaker for the Dead, stop reading NOW!
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I mean it! Don’t read any further! I’m going to ruin it for you if you haven’t read the book already!!

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Still with me? Good.

I am currently about 1/3 of the way through the book. (I’m “reading” it as a book on tape, because I have a long commute and little other free time.)

When I was less than a quarter of the way through the book, I’d already figured out what I am sure is the “secret” of the Piggies. It’s so bloody obvious from all the hints Card has dropped: Rooter wasn’t murdered at all. I haven’t figured out all the details yet – like I said, I’m only 1/3 of the way through the book – but it seems blatantly obvious that the Piggies reproduce in some way that kills the male in the process. Rooter’s evisceration wasn’t an execution, it was how mating was, and had to be, performed. (Later passages imply that the trees that grow out of the eviscerated Piggy bodies may participate in the gene flow to the next generation, thus rightfully giving them the title “father”.)

I mean, it’s not like there aren’t precedents for this in animal species on Earth. Drone bees drop dead the moment they mate with a queen bee, sometimes because part of their abdomen is violently ripped from their body. Praying mantis males cannot impregnate their female mate unless the female eats the male’s head, killing the male. Ocean salmon are driven to spawn and lay their eggs only in fresh water, which kills them in a matter of hours.

What bugs me is how Card’s characters seem so moronically oblivious to this obvious answer. They’re supposed to be super-geniuses, for crying out loud, and yet Pipo didn’t even figure it out until Novenya showed him an animation of the native destruyada [sp?] organelle in action. Neither Libo nor Novenya, also precocious geniuses, figured it out either for over 20 years thereafter.

I mean, come on, Orson! Do you really think your readers are so moronic that they can’t figure it out from the clues you’ve blasted at them so relentlessly? For God’s sake, the Buggers from your own book were based on hive insects, which are notorious for having their drones die in the mating process! Or are we readers supposed to tear our hair out in frustration when the brghtest characters in Card’s universe completely fail, over and over again, to come up with this simple idea?!

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Keep reading.

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Er … um … well … I kinda guessed there might be more to it when I thought of the parallels Card might have been envisioning. Um … that is … I mean, you know how the guy who founded the Children of the Mind of Christ envisioned each of its members eventually deciding to mate and have children, but in so doing they would have to lead the Order? And how the two married-but-celebate members of the Order on Lucitania were afraid to do just that? Parallels between that and the Piggies’ reproductive cycle, I mean.

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Er … leave the Order, not “lead” the Order.

So lemme say what I was trying to say, again, hopefully without typos this time:

The members of the Order are all about acquiring and spreading knowledge – reprodcing in the mind, as it were. The Founder imagined that, eventually, they would want to reproduce in body as well as in mind. But by so doing, they lost their ability to “reproduce in mind”, because they were no longer members of the Order.

I think he has something similar in mind for the Piggies. By being eviscerated in order to mate and reproduce, their brain (where their mind lives) dies. --Or-- maybe their mind doesn’t die, but lives on in the trees. The Hive Queen did say she’d found a mind on Lucitania whose phylotic [sp?] center was much easier to communicate with than Ender’s; maybe it was Rooter’s tree.

This is all speculation, admittedly, but it still seems obvious that the vivisection the Piggies endured at the hands of what the Xenologers call “the females” (whatever they are – the worms on the trees, perhaps?) were a great honor and a necessary precursor to the formation of “father trees.” I still wonder why all of the main characters are so dense that they haven’t thought of anything like this, and still sees the Piggy deaths as tortured executions.

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Does it bug anyone else that Ender’s Game appears to have been written by an entirely different author?
I admit, I stayed up all night to finish reading the 3rd book…but they are just SO different from the first one.
Did anyone else find this, or am I crazy?

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Tatiana,

You are not crazy. There IS a huge difference between Ender’s Game and the following trilogy. I was really surprised as I read them because they were not what I expected at all. (but I love them!) Ender’s Shadow is, necessarily, very similar to Ender’s Game in style.

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Let us know when you’ve finished reading (hearing?) the book tracer, it’s kind of hard to discuss it otherwise.

Having read it quite recently I know what you are talking about though, the characters seemed painfully oblivious to the obvious. Remember however that you are the only one who gets to see all of the pieces to the puzzle, it isn’t quite as apparent to the characters. Everyone else that figured it out before either got planted or wouldn’t share. And don’t worry, Ender figures it out quickly enough.

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That was something that always bugged me about Ender … real-life smart people make mistakes, sometimes mistakes-on-top-of-mistakes, when they speculate about something. Ender is never wrong. Even a vast, 2000-I.Q. super-genius won’t (and can’t) be so infalable.

Don’t tell me … this is because Ender’s phylotic [sp?] brain center has a secret back door to the Akashic Plane, right? :stuck_out_tongue:

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Well, there is Jane…and the hive Queen, too, I suppose.

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If that bugs you, then you need to avoid the Ender’s Shadow series based around Bean like the plague, Tracer. :slight_smile:

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tracer,

IIRC, in the book the scientists on the planet were barred from close contact with the piggies by the Starways(?) Congress. They were working from limited information.

I won’t go further because I don’t want to spoil it for you. I’d be interested in hearing what you thought after reading the rest of the book.

BTW, in the next couple of books in the series Ender is not perfect.

Slee

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Tracer, just adding my caution to those already posted. Don’t assume too much. What Ender figures out, and how, and what happens because of the “non-intervention policy” makes for some great reading.

IMHO, Xenocide is even better.

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Yeesh – that almost sounds reminiscent of Stephen Ratliff’s “Marrissa” storys [sic]! :eek:

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I didn’t like Children of the Mind or Xenocide very much.

LOVED Speaker for the Dead and Ender’s Game.

The Bean series is pretty good. It becomes more of a military series than a science fiction series.

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I hate to admit this, but … after I finished reading Ender’s Game a week or two ago, I had a sudden desire to learn how to win at chess. :o

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If you read a lot of Card, you’ll notice a trend in his series. They start out powerful, insightful and generally very well…and they rapidly degenerate.

Ender’s Game is, IMHO, one of the best SF books ever written…the Speaker for the Dead is good. Xenocide is an improvement, but Children of the Mind probably shouldn’t have been written.
The Bean series is similar. Ender’s Shadow is brilliant, Shadow of the Hegemon gets there after some plotting, and Shadow Puppets was unnecessary.
His other series drop off in quality even more. His Homecoming series starts strong, but by the third book, it should be over…and there are two following. His Alvin Maker series had a lot of potential, but if you can manage to get through to the fifth, you may get the impression (as I did) that Card essentially said “screw it…I’ll just write something else.” It really fizzled.

I prefer his stand-alone stories. Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus is beautiful, Enchantment is a lot of fun, especially if you enjoy classic folk and fairy tales. I really liked Sarah, which is the first of what might actually be a consistent series: it looks at the Biblical Matriarchs from their POV (I haven’t read the second, Rebekah yet). But for the most part, I just don’t think he has enough story in him to put into more than one or two books.

of course, YMMV

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Well duh! That’s because I’m the shiznet!

blessedwolf I agree with you overall about how Card manages to handle his series(es?). They do tend to fizzle out by the end. I will disagree with your assessment of the Homecoming series, however. I felt that the 5 books, as a whole, were the best grouping of books Card has written. They were loosely based off the Book of Mormon and thus had a consistent direction through which the plot could develop. Unlike, say, Xenocide, where I felt he painted himself into a bit of a corner and tried to write his way out again.

Tatiana, you aren’t crazy. As Tangent said, there is a huge difference between the two books. Card actually wrote Ender’s Game as a Novella for SF&F back in 1977 (which I have signed!). He started up first on SFtD in the mid '80s and decided he needed some sort of introduction to the series. He remembered the story of Ender from about 7 years before and started expanding the story. And expanding. And suddenly it became its own novel as a prequel to the series he wanted to write all along. Ender’s Game has a different feel because it’s a standalone story that Card redeveloped because he wanted to use Ender as the main character for SFtD.

tracer, it’s been…I guess a full decade now, maybe 12 years, since I’ve read SFtD, so I don’t know just how much I can discuss off the top of my head. I do know that you’re close in your guess, but not exact. I think it’s only fair that I wait and let you discover the twist rather than spoil it.
I do, however, feel that this thread probably wasn’t the best idea just yet. You rail on Card for giving such a simple plot twist to figure out when you’ll find this not to be the case. You complain that Ender knows too much when there’s a logical explanation for that as well. The problem is that you’re making a lot of assumptions, trying to turn those assumptions into facts, and then using those “facts” to criticize how Card has written the book.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not particularly upset by this. I’m merely saying it would have been better to wait a week, finish up the book, and then start the thread. At the very least, it allows us the opportunity to actually discuss the book without spoiling it for the OP.