Speaker for the Dead Book Review

Guess what?  A giant tower is
never mention anywhere.

Warning:  This review contains spoilers from the book Ender's Game
Speaker for the Dead is the sequel to Ender's Game, and while it still has a focus on ethical issues just like the first book, it feels very different for several reasons.  First of all there is a major time gap between this book and Ender's Game.  Ender is now thirty years older and apparently three thousand Earth years have passed since the last book thanks to Ender's traveling among the colonized planets at lightspeed.  Don't ask me how that works, the book claims its due to the theory of reletivity and all that, but it's all Greek to me. Anyways, Ender is searching among the colonies for a suitable home for the hive queen, the last member of the buggers species which Ender wiped out in the last book.  Ender has also taken on the title of Speaker for the Dead, and is asked to speak for the death of a biologist on the planet Lusitania, who was killed by a newly discovered sentient species known by the colonists as the "pequeninos" or the "piggies."  Ender heads there to not only figure out if the planet is a good place for the hive queen to live but also heal the damaged family of the dead biologist's adopted daughter, and the relationship between the humans and the piggies.  It's a fairly complicated setup, but it results in a much deeper story than the first one.
       Speaker for the Dead has two main plot arcs; Ender helping out the family out while also trying to figure out whether or not the piggies are truly hostile.  The part of the book focusing on the family is where we get to see most of Ender's character come out.  Since he is much older it isn't surprising that there is a radical shift in his attitude and character.  No longer is he a little boy trying to calculate a method for destroying an entire alien race, but a thirty year old with an almost spiritual view of the universe as he tries to piece the lives of the family members together by understanding their point of view.  There's also a mystery surrounding the family, and it's interesting to see all of the pieces come together at the end of the book.
     The mystery surrounding the family is of course intertwined with the deeper mystery surrounding the pequeninos.  This is the part of the book that is much more scientific and poses all of the ethical problems.  On one hand the colonists are in danger from the piggies, while on the other they don't want to commit the horrible crime of xenocide against them, the only other sentient species that humanity has discovered other than the buggers.  I thought Orson Scott Card did a great job portraying the limitations of the human scientists, posed both by themselves and the government, and how their limitations lead to more problems.
Conclusion:  Both of these story arcs are done very well, and they intertwine seamlessly to create a very rich and emotionally engaging book.  That said, the end product feels very different from Ender's Game in almost every way imaginable, with the exception of the underlying issue of how humanity can live with a radically different species of intelligent beings.  Fortunately, these differences never detract from the story.
Rating:  9/10 "Awesome"
Favorite Moment:  Each of the mysteries has its own "aha!" moment in which everything comes together.  Between the two, the one with the family is my favorite, as it is a much more human moment than the scene with the pequeninos, although that one is great too.