Week 12: Intro

Speaker for the Dead (again) 

I love sci-fi tales, 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.

Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card is all of that, most everyone likes it for the science fiction richness and complexity but I liked Speaker for the Dead for a completely different reason. I 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, maybe I was sidetracked by a minor point and got lost in my own wilderness. I liked the book for its name and the notion it 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  were 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 memorial day we call Holocaust day. I still can hear the lists of name 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 what it means to meet the “other” how to relate to what we perceive as different and possibly threatening. But what I personally take from his experience and mine as a reader is why is it so important to mention the dead and give them a voice that will carry them over the generations.

I have read many different books over the years but only few stayed with me over time. I am not sure that Speaker for the Dead is one of the best literary works I read, probably not, but it strikes a chord in my heart and that is I believe what makes a book, any book, become a friend.