Speaker for the Dead

Orson Scott Card

New York: Thor, 1991 [1986]; ISBN: 0-812-55075-7. Pp. xxx, 382

The Ender Saga continues, 3,000 years after the events in Ender's Game. The alien bugs are wiped out, or so everyone thinks, and the human race has settled on a hundred worlds, many of them previously colonized by the aliens. Andrew Wiggin, who used to be hailed as the savior of humankind, is now reviled as the Xenocide, the murderer of an entire intelligent (perhaps vastly superior) alien species. It is Andrew/Ender himself who is the instigator of this emotional shift for the book that he authored, The Hive Queen and the Hegemon, recounts the tale of the buggers' destruction from their perspective; the viewpoint of a race that had stumbled across another, unaware of the lethal response that it might provoke when its actions are misinterpreted as threatening the survival of humanity. And so the aliens were destroyed because humans could not communicate with them and because they were afraid of them. Yet not everyone perished in the First Xenocide, one hive queen survived, and Ender is forever carrying her cocoon across the galaxy in a search for a suitable home where he can repay the debt by resurrecting her. On this quest, he is accompanied by his gifted sister Valentine who writes under the pseudonym Demosthenes of the travails of the Speaker for the Dead, who unbeknownst to the rest of humanity is also Ender, the Xenocide.

In this sequel, the settlers of Lusitania, a remote planet 22 light-years away from the nearest inhabited colony, discover that the pequeninos, or piggies, are not animals but sentient beings. Under the laws of the Starways Congress, this newly discovered intelligent life-form is to be protected at almost all costs. All contact with them is to be limited to the visits of a couple specially trained xenologers who would not reveal anything about human culture as they are trying to discover more about the aliens. It is this premise that makes the book the powerful read that it was for me. I do not know whether Mr Card intended it or not, but the story has remarkable relevance to our own Western prejudices today, namely the questions of how much right, if any, we have to intrude on less advanced cultures, and how much responsibility, if any, should we bear for the consequences of such intrusions.

We have heard it many times, the repetitive and predictable refrain about how the West has enslaved the rest of the world, how the whites have built their riches, their advanced technological civilization on the labor of the oppressed and disenfranchised, how our protestations of democratic ideals are nothing but sanctimonious rubbish designed to conceal the truth of naked aggression. This is not the place to argue with these ludicrous claims and the extent to which they confuse cause and effect. What I want to draw on, is the so-called "multiculturalist" idea that all cultures, while different, are equal and none deserves to be privileged as more "civilized" or being "better" in any moral or ethical sense. It is this line of thinking that combines with powerful voices in non-Western societies who clamor for freedom from Western yoke that produces the idea that the West should not meddle with the indigenous ways of Africans, Asians, Pacific Islanders, or what have you. That we have no right to impose our cultural norms on them, that we cannot judge them because our standards are not theirs and because we often fail our own standards. It is this chorus that bemoans the cultural pollution the West spreads to the rest of the world, with the relentless march of commercialization driving out the last vestiges of indigenous culture and replacing them with a mind-numbing bland Western replica designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator. We have no right to do this, these voices say. You are wrong, this book answers.

Yes, it is a fictional setting, but it makes the point nevertheless. The humans have isolated the piggies in an elaborate version of a zoo, complete with a fence and supervisors. All ostensibly for their own good, but really to protect us from whatever dangers a technologically advanced alien species would pose. In this we are determined to deny them all the benefits that our knowledge has given us, we have made the choice for them. In our unbelievable cultural arrogance, we have usurped their right to determine their own destiny. By keeping them blind, and half-starved, and naked, by keeping their lives nasty, brutish and short, as Hobbes would say, we are forcing them to follow their "natural" evolution, as if there is anything natural about anything that involves human agency. For the piggies are human too, at least in the most important sense of being sentient, of being intelligent. We pat ourselves on the back that we have managed to preserve the archaic ways of life even though our tools can make the lives of these people so much better. We roll our eyes when someone suggests that perhaps we owe it to them to reveal everything we know to help them make their lives better. We laugh at such people as being naive and perhaps even hint that they are stupid or, even worse these days, they are guilty of noblesse oblige, an arrogance beyond measure. Why do you want to despoil their pristine culture? Why do you want to make them into copies of Western men and women? Don't you see how their so-called "primitive" society is so infinitely wiser and closer to nature and more humane than ours? Or words to that effect.

And what do you answer? It should be obvious. Yes, it is true that technology cannot be bestowed without at least part of the culture that supports it. You cannot just bring electricity to a village without bringing something of the culture that produced it. Yes, any contact would irretrievably alter that society. But perhaps it will also alter our society? Perhaps we are naive to believe that our values will overpower and drive out the others? Perhaps their customs would combine with new ideas to form new perspectives, new viewpoints, that can enrich both our cultures? It is not as naive as it sounds: humanity has progressed precisely through such cultural cross-pollination, shameless borrowing, stealing, and adaptation of ideas developed by foreign cultures. Learning from each other, we have grown together. And that is the only way to continue. A savage may drop his spear and put on clothes, he may convert to Christianity, he may learn our language. But in the process we will learn his, we will write about his world and his ideas, and through our superior technology his world will become known to many others. It will touch some, and it will silently make its way into our own lives eventually. It may be slow, it may be in ways we shall never know for sure, but it will happen, just as it has happened so many times in the past. And throughout all this, the former savage would live a better life, would learn of strange ideas, would change too, and will begin to think new thoughts, thoughts that are constructed out of the clash between our two cultures, and that will represent a mix, a unification of the two, perhaps even reconciliation. We should stop patronizing other cultures as if they are helpless children who will be overwhelmed by our superiority. We should not be afraid to let others learn from us for perhaps they will have something to teach us in return.

This is the core of the book as I see it, and Mr Card makes a powerful case indeed. The xenologers identify with the piggies to such an extent that they violate the law eventually, and this brings terrible retribution on the colony. But there is no doubt that this was the right path to follow, that opening up the lines of communications with these creatures was the only way for humanity to remain human, albeit at the risk of having to fight for its survival again in a millennium or so.

But this dilemma is not the only thing that makes this book so fascinating. I found the mundane human relationships absolutely engrossing. The life in a colony under Catholic license, although not delineated in much detail, is an intriguing universe in and of itself. Novinha's life-long trial, her love that she could not deny, her terrible pain, and the suffering in her family, all were powerful reminders that what matters in a story, in the end, are people. And it is the story of this small community that struggles to heal itself from a disease it is not even aware of that captivates. Ender's relationships with Novinha, her sons and daughters, with Jane, the sentient program, and with the clergy, are the focus of many pages, and his healing through telling the truth is as palpable in this novel as it will probably impossible in real life.

I do have a few minor annoyances with the book, as usual. First, I don't find the future very convincing. After three thousand years we still type on computer terminals? Come to think of it, there isn't much in a way of technology that Mr Card actually dwells on. It's as if I parachuted with a laptop and a satellite link into a remote Tibetan village. But we have seen technology change our lives in the last decade, surely more will happen in three millennia. Second, Ender's journey is implausible, and not the least because he never has any trouble adapting to any new world after sometimes centuries (that to him are months) of travel. But imagine if we plucked even the smartest person who lived during the Peloponnesian War and then put him on Times Square in New York City. There will be at least some confusion, right? I mean, he or she won't be able to just waltz to an ATM, withdraw some cash, and buy a Big Mac. Third, I have already griped about this in my review of the first novel, the children are impossibly perceptive. And here we're don't even have the excuse of genetic selection. I could continue, but I won't because as I said, this book is a truly enjoyable read. It is the rarest species of speculative fiction: both intelligent and entertaining. Naturally, I will now march to Barnes & Noble to buy the sequel.

October 15, 2005