One prime aspect of Speaker I wanted to comment on (in class next time, hopefully) is the nature of community that we see in Speaker. Card makes a note in his introduction that this isn't just the second Ender novel, it's much more than Ender's Game set out to be. We all know now the story of little Ender and his military battles, but Card took the aspect of community in his previous novel (Ender's "jeesh") and put it on steroids! Soft and cuddly "community" in an Ender novel? Yes! But maybe not so soft and cuddly, even in Speaker. Here we have the Novinha family, which is, to put it lightly, highly dysfunctional. Ender steps into a family where an abusive father's dead is being lamented, a brother and sister are within an inch of a love affair, and a other cast of other children including the religious fanatic, silent daughter, and the homicidal toddler. If you're reminded of historical fiction novels, or just regular vanilla fiction, I'm with you. This whole scenario sounds deeply similar to something that is NOT science fiction. Let's pull back a little further to the living situation of the town (colony really) of Lusitania. Surrounded by a gate, this small colony is self-sufficient in a world set against it (don't ask me what's on the cover, but it's definitely NOT Lusitania). No proper nutrients to be found, harsh natives, and few people make this essentially an alien old-west border town, run by Catholics.
So, yes, if we take away the relatively brief science fiction moments from the work, we can boil the story down to something very familiar. In fact, I can't help but jump off of Yaniv's post in comparison of this book to fellow "going native" plot lines. One of the foremost struggles the protagonist faces in these types of plots is his defection from his own community to another community entirely different from his home. This is where Speaker stands unique amongst these trite plots - it makes the native community weirder than we could ever imagine. If Card does one thing well with the piggies, it's the complete sense of unease associated with them, at least in the first half of the book. All we know is that if you do something unique with the piggies, they gut you completely. Death. Murder. No where in movies like Avatar do we actually have this deep sense of uncomfortableness with the natives. Card actualizes very well just HOW different an alien tribe can be from a human community. Yet there is no doubt that the piggies are a community all their own.
Does Ender, like other protagonists, join the piggie community and renounce his own? Hardly at all. In fact, Ender continually references how "humans have thrown me out". Clearly, he really isn't that much of a member of the Lusitania community, or even the human race for that matter. Which makes Ender the perfect candidate to resolve the differences between the piggies and the humans, without the ridiculous fanfare of Ender defecting to the piggies side. One of the most poignant scenes in the book is the making of the treaty under the Mother Tree. I can perfectly imagine Cameron's vision of the Mother Tree, seeing as though he included the concept right in Avatar. But Card writes an almost horrific Mother Tree, one filled with maggot-like piggies feeding off their mothers, emerging and draining the sap from this tree. It really isn't something that even Ender is comfortable with. And at that, the sterile females of the piggies (the "wives") are continually using cultural conventions (even insults!) that Ender cannot understand, and definitely does not facilitate. But this scene constructed by Card is poignant because it shows the capability of communication and reconciliation among communities that otherwise are completely alien. Ender doesn't need to defect to the piggies to show the worth of the piggies. In fact, Ender only shows strong human will and character completely disowned by movies like Avatar. And unlike Avatar, one community isn't obviously the better choice over the other. Card willingly shows the shades of grey between these two species, and does it without sacrificing originality.
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