Speaker for the Dead Themes

Speaker for the Dead is the story of Ender finding a community. His actions in the bugger war have left him damaged and without a home, and he's got a case of intergalactic PTSD. He's so alienated...

Speaker for the Dead is one long orgy of compassion and forgiveness. Marcao beats his wife; Novinha commits adultery; the piggies kill Libo and Pipo; Ender kills all the buggers in the biggest geno...

Speaker for the Dead is both really enthusiastic about otherness and really nervous about it. To embrace the other, to make peace with and respect the piggies, is seen as quintessentially ethical....

There's a lot of talk of language in Speaker for the Dead, but surprisingly little actual alien language. We hear bits of Portuguese, and there are Nordic terms, but we don't ever hear any actual W...

Speaker for the Dead is here to tell you that lies are bad. Lying makes you hurt people, and true stories put you back together, albeit with some pain. Though at the same time, Speaker for the Dead...

Ender is a fantasy of the writer as supergod. He has a near-mystical (or just plain mystical) ability to see everyone's story and know them better than they know themselves just by seeing their fac...

Speaker for the Dead doesn't have much sex (see the "Steaminess Rating" section), but it sure has a lot about sex. There's human normal but wrong sex, like Novinha and Libo's adultery, and Miro and...

Speaker for the Dead doesn't have a war, but there's lots of war around various corners. Ender's Game, the preceding novel, was all about war, and Ender is still dealing with the fallout. The piggi...