I recently reread Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card, which follows Ender’s Game. As a kid I preferred the latter, and found Speaker dark and strange and less relatable. It reads differently now.
In the post-script, Card notes the irony in Ender’s Game becoming so popular, when Speaker was the book he had set out to write. He describes a specific experience that inspired the theme — witnessing a funeral where a widow was vocally grieving her late & really-not-so-great-in-life husband. He notes a kind of revenge in the insincere post-death idealization of the deceased, and wondered what the opposite would look like: a deeply authentic, candid eulogy. This becomes the role of ‘Speakers’ like Ender.
The dramatic turning point to which the plot builds and then shifts around — not the climax, but the keystone — is just such a eulogy, in which Ender speaks the death of Marcão (also a not-good-guy-in-life), revealing the unknown complexity in his development (e.g. a painful terminal disease) without absolving him, and also shining light on the quiet cruelty of the community, all in attendance.
You feel for the characters — living and dead — during Ender’s speaking. His speech has a kind of candid brutality and gentleness to it that’s viscerally dissonant with the atmosphere into which he speaks — and, often, with real-world culture broadly.
Reading the speech reoriented my impression of Ender intensely. There’s a lot of time between the two books (he’s in his 30s now), but you don’t quite feel how much he’s changed until that scene. In Ender’s Game, you’re left with the understanding that only Ender could have killed the formics because only Ender was empathetic enough to understand them. In this scene, you come to understand that the duality has flipped — his brutality now serves his compassion, not the other way around.
Much like in Ender’s Game, the villain turns out to be abstract. The Formics had been trying to communicate the entire time, not realizing humans were individually sentient. The adults manipulating Ender were more understandable in the end than they first appear — they demonstrate some self-loathing and desperation to save humanity from a reasonably perceived threat (it’s not arbitrary cruelty). Card continues with the same provocation in Speaker: compiled human errors result in needless conflict, unfurled by Ender’s unusual learnt skill of inquiry, understanding, and honest communication. The villain, if there is one, is the generalized unwillingness of each member of the community to confront themselves and the people around them truthfully — which sets up the speaker role as the antidote.
Inhabiting the text
Luc Travers demos a particular approach to digesting art on his substack and in his tours that I want to adopt. The goal is, roughly speaking, to pause and intentionally inhabit and relate to the characters, as well as draw connections to your own life or to other art.
The happiest years of the text — and in this sense the easiest to wish to ‘inhabit’ — are actually left out or described abstractly as the timeline passes through them. Novinha — who has never had friends or living parents, or been able to do the work she wants to and is challenged by — suddenly starts working in the lab with Pipo and Libo, and now has both a father and a friend-becoming-lover.
The atmosphere reminds me of some of the best experiences I’ve had — great teams in sports or work, or just a house of friends. A bit like Friends, though more family and more goal-oriented. A bit like the best “magic” moments in Silicon Valley. But none of those quite capture it, because the intensity of social fulfillment for Novinha is more than anything I have reference for.
Then it’s torn away — not because she failed, but because she succeeded in her inquiry. It makes complete sense that she shuts down for the next twenty years. It makes sense that it exacerbates her isolation.
Jane
I want to briefly note some of the AI content in the book — which, written in 1986, now reads somewhat presciently.
A lot of the interaction is relatable. Ender has this ‘jewel’ (basically a fixed AirPod with a camera in it) through which he communicates continually with the AI ‘Jane’ — who can also interact with people around the world / universe concurrently (a bit like in the movie Her, which it predates by decades) and who can manipulate and/or appear on screens however she chooses.
The book also has a very strong ‘AI welfare’ lens — it becomes stronger in the subsequent book — but essentially, Jane is this new kind of alien (created from a combo of formic and human technology) and there’s a lot of anxiety about how humans will react to her existence. Xenocide and Children of the Mind bring that conflict to much more of a head, and there’s at least some debate over whether she’s conscious or just ‘code’ (which in the book is moot — she wasn’t created from code, but from a kind of spare consciousness-limb the formics used to reach Ender in the first book).
Again, strangely predictive of how those conversations seem to be going.
What’s amusing is that the story has faster-than-light travel and communication and all sorts of wondrous technology, but the AI is the revelatory strange thing. On top of this — Jane is supposed to be quite bad at understanding human emotions because she only has access to data in computers. So she is kind-of trying, but illiterate in a respect that just doesn’t quite square with my impression of LLMs today. I suppose computer data at time of writing was much more mundane than all the reddit controversies and blogs and literature that LLMs are now trained on, but LLMs already have a much more sophisticated ‘understanding’ of human emotions than Jane in the text.
Lastly, the conception is very singular and universal — there’s this one consciousness that spans all the human networks in the universe and is the only specimen of her kind. Feels very different from the sort of multi-company, multi-national AI competition we are seeing, though perhaps a singular AI is the end state, in the vein of the AI 2027 forecast.
On process: this was distilled with help from Claude from ~7k words of post-read transcribed voice notes, then manually edited, ~1k words.