Week 12: book intro

Speaker for the Dead & The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I love sci-fi tales, they make me happy, they satisfy both the traveler in me and the mystic. They make me stop breathing with tension, but the good kind not the repulsive and vile kind of horror stories. Not the terrifying one of the apocalyptic ones where I always sense a grain of true fear that the grim predictions can actually become a reality. The kind of science fiction that I like is set so far out in other galaxies and times that I can enjoy it with no reservations. And if it is also a good story with complex characters it’s a pure joy. Perhaps a modern legend will be a good way of approaching this genre; with villains and good people and bizarre occurrences and foreign landscapes.

Two of my favorite books of this class of books are Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card and the Hitchhiker Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

These are very different stories by two writers that are as different from each other as the day from the night still they represent two sides of the same genre; the deep spiritual Card and the quirky, smart and funny Adams.

I liked Speaker for the Dead for a completely different reason than most anyone else seems to and often wondered if I am the only one who saw this side of the story. Perhaps as it is so often happens to me I did not understand it at all, was sidetracked by a minor point and got lost in my own wilderness. I liked the book for its name and the notion he presents that someone should speak for the dead.

This could stem from me being  second generation to a Holocaust surviving populace growing up to learn about millions who lost without even a name left to help remembering their life. “Each of us has a name given by God and given by our parents, each of us has a name given by the sea and given by our death. …” Is a poem I heard over and over again, every year, on that gloomy day of memory we call Holocaust day. I still can hear the lists of names being read on the radio all day, names and more names and more. Yad Vashem, just around the corner from where I grew up is a huge complex of buildings shrouding lists and lists of names. I spent the last few years reconstructing parts of my family’s history from bits and pieces. Speak for the dead, these words swallow me, consume me and maybe touch a universal fear we all have of being forgotten and our life meaningless.

I might be carried away here, after all this is science fiction we are talking about. Ander Wiggin, a fallen hero, who grew up and turned from a whiz kid who with the power of technology and his hands destroyed a whole species to a somewhat sad and wise young man. A man who understands the magnitude of what he did and the tremendous second chance he got to mend the wrongs.  With renewed sensitivity and deep understanding of human nature he realizes why is it so important to mention the dead and to give them a voice that will carry them over the generations.

Now the Hitchhiker, just as smart, put the humorous spin in and carries the totally bizarre story to the far end of the unknown Galaxy. Reading it I am freed from all constrains of reality. No more sad reflections on humanity, wiped out cultures, meeting strangers face-to-face or my own roll in the big scheme of things. Its quirkiness is focusing the light on the ridiculous and amusing. Douglas is just as accurate in pointing out with a sergeant like precision where we as humans are lost not only in the vast boundaryless galaxy but on our own planet. He sticks the knife in and then with the utmost pleasure turns it on and on.

Yes, we get it, it’s funny, it’s bizarre, and it’s crazy, it is us.