Substantive: Speaker for the Dead

I can't remember when I first read this book, but I remember liking it better than Ender's Game. I was, say, thirteen or so, eager to continue the series, and was, quite literally, blindsided by Speaker for the Dead, which is-and-is-not a sequel. It's a sequel in the sense that there's Ender, except thirty years older, and, yes, there's Valentine, kind of, and the Hive Queen. And yet, this Ender is so much more himself than the child who was manipulated into essentially being a weapon. This is a man who has been hardened by three thousand years of universal guilt.

I remember when we were talking in class about how, in War of the Worlds, Wells essentially takes the triumph and the victory away from mankind. I feel as if, in order to create a better world, Ender has deliberately sabotaged his own reputation. In writing The Hive Queen and the Hegemon he condemns his hero-self to millennia of ignominy because, if humanity were to consider itself triumphant, flush in the victory of having eradicated an alien species, the next would be disposed of in the same way, and for the same reasons. He also does so in the hopes that, when the Hive Queen is finally restored, she will be greeted by a universe explained into understanding by Ender's book.

This is a very different world in which to introduce a new alien species, and it shows. And yet, I'm not sure that humanity learned the right lessons from the Bugger Wars. Ender makes the point of explaining that the reason for this policy of non-interference is not, as might be imagined, a policy of tolerance engendered by his book, but a policy designed to prevent the exact kind of technological advancement that enabled the humans to defeat the buggers in the first place. It is the scientists who see these pequeninos as people who really treat them as ramen, in terms of Valentine's Icelandic-sounding hierarchy, and the government who treats them as children or varelse. It's almost as if the government is refusing to acknowledge them as equals, on an equal political plane, but treat them as some kind of endangered species. As an animal, as opposed to an alien. The result of this is, of course, that the pequeninos learn significantly more about humanity than they do about them.

There is a small hint of Ender's influence, though. When the xenologers are killed, there is no retribution from Starways Congress or the government. I could feel Ender's thoughts behind this in some way: What may be considered a travesty by us may be something completely different to them, in the same way that the buggers understanding of death and murder was entirely different from humanity's at the beginning of the Bugger Wars. The piggies a) believe that these people that they "kill" are anesthetized; b) do not realize that tears are a sign of human suffering; and c) reserve the ritual dismemberment for their most honored citizens. These are things that Ender notices almost immediately as meaning that their notions of death are different, but is this because he is inherently empathic or because he's seen it all before? What I thought immediately of was ethnocentrism. These xenologers were so absorbed in their own culture that even venturing into other ideas (like realizing that the trees were actually alive, and not totemic) was almost beyond their comprehension.