Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Today is the Red Army Day. In connection with this, I am re-posting a post about a child soldier in a science fiction tale by an American author – a child soldier who was charged with using his brain to defeat a whole race of beings guided by one motherly brain. The post is about Orson Scott Card’s books Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead. I wrote it on December 9th of 2010, the day before I started my trek across the Bay Area.
Warning! This book review contains spoilers.
In this book, as well as its prequel – Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card pits the humanity against two alien races, the Buggers and the Pequeniños. Although the author does not explicitly state this, in my mind these two races represent the two types of cultures that have been seen as threats to the American nation and its cultural relatives (Great Britain, other nations of Western Europe and the descendants of Western European nations’ overseas colonies) since the full-force start of Western European colonialism in the sixteenth century.
The buggers resemble communists (Russian, German, Chinese, Vietnamese, and so on), with their hive mind, emphasis on the communal well-being and de-emphasis of individuality. The pequeniños resemble the native peoples (of North and South America, Hawaii, Australia, Africa, the Pacific, and so on) – their harmonious co-existence with nature taken to the extreme, as they even reproduce in tandem with local flora. These books, then, provide a useful biological metaphor for cultural ecology and evolution. Specifically, if we, American citizens, wish to view ourselves as citizens of the world, these books may help us directly understand some of the most prominent conflicts in our country’s history.
For instance, conflict with the buggers can be seen as a misunderstanding – one that was most readily seen by Ender, the foot soldier that defeated the buggers in the first place. Upon killing all the buggers, Ender is hated by the rest of the humanity – the same way that soldiers in Vietnam and Korean wars were often ostracized by the American citizens when they would return home. Ender then sets out to tell the story of the buggers and to look for a place where humanity can coexist with this alien culture. Perhaps some of the people best qualified to make peace with communists are the simple soldiers that have been used by the government of the United States to fight communism abroad.
The inability of humans to co-exist peacefully with the Pequeniños is also rooted in the differences in the biology and culture between the two races. The bizarreness of the Pequeniños, however is most obvious in terms of their genetics, as opposed to their social structure – their genes are intermingled with those of the local plants and rely on a deadly virus to reproduce. Pequeniños wouldn’t dream of cutting down the trees that carry the genes of their own community and they are not threatened by the virus. Similarly, the Native American nations encountered by the English in North America rarely cut down the forests where they lived for agricultural or pastoral purposes and those encountered by the Portuguese in the Amazonian jungle learned to live with the host of deadly diseases that permeate it. Ender feels that the planet of the Pequeniños is the place where humans and buggers can finally co-exist. Perhaps by fully understanding the Native American cultures as they were before the coming of the Europeans, we can make peace with all the other perceived threats that we feel surround us in this world.
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Guess where I’m coming from today? I was tutoring in Cupertino on De Anza Boulevard, then I went to do some pull-ups and other exercises involving long metal tubes at De Anza college. Then I drove to a nice little cafe in Mountain View called Spica. Lovely hot chocolate, pictures of customers on the walls, cozy, friendly and hospitable atmosphere. Then I drove to my place of lodging in Palo Alto. 
