Speaker for the Dead Read Free

perpetual adolescents, lone rangers who wandered the universe avoiding commitments.   This shouldn't be surprising.   The romantic hero is invariably one who is going through the adolescent phase of human life.   The child phase--the one I had dealt with most often in my fiction--is the time of complete dependence on others to create our identity and our worldview.   Little children gladly accept even the strangest stories that others tell them, because they lack either the context or the confidence to doubt.   They go along because they don't know how to be alone, either physically or intellectually.
    Gradually, however, this dependency breaks down--and children catch the first glimmers of a world that is different from the one they thought they lived in, they break away the last vestiges of adult control themselves, much as a baby bird breaks free of the last fragments of the egg.   The romantic hero is unconnected.   He belongs to no community; he is wandering from place to place, doing good (as he sees it), but then moving on. This is the life of the adolescent, full of passion, intensity, magic, and infinite possibility; but lacking responsibility, rarely expecting to have to stay and bear the consequences of error.   Everything is played at twice the speed and twice the volume in the adolescent--the romantic--life.
    Only when the loneliness becomes unbearable do adolescents root themselves, or try to root themselves.   It may or may not be in the community of their childhood, and it may or may not be their childhood identity and connections that they resume upon entering adulthood.   And, in fact, many fail at adulthood and constantly reach backward for the freedom and passion of adolescence.   But those who achieve it are the ones who create civilization.
    Most science fiction dealt with adolescent heroes, yes--but only because most fiction deals with adolescents.   This is not to say that fiction about adolescents is necessarily adolescent fiction, either in the sense of being for an adolescent audience or in the sense of being undeveloped or immature fiction.   Still, most storytellers invent their fables about the lives of footloose heroes--or heroes who become footloose for the sake of the story.   Who but the adolescent is free to have the adventures that most of us are looking for when we turn to storytellers to satisfy our hunger?
    And yet to me, at least, the most important stories are the ones that teach us how to be civilized: the stories about children and adults, about responsibility and dependency.   Not being an adult myself, I had concentrated for many years on the child's point of view, but with Speaker for the Dead I was old enough, and perhaps (finally) civilized enough, to create the small community of the family from an adult perspective--not necessarily the parent's viewpoint, but rather the viewpoint of an adult who felt responsibility toward the family.   That adult would be Ender, I knew; and the children would be formed into a family that was suffering, as a whole and individually.   Thus I came to regard Speaker for the Dead as a perfect opportunity to show something only rarely seen in this genre of stories about the strange and wonderful: I could show the miracle of a family in transformation.
    With this decision, of course, the focus changed.   The novel was no longer exclusively about the mystery of the alien pequeninos.   It was now at least as much about the redemption of Novinha's family, the healing of their injured little community.   More than that, it was about the idea of community itself--the community of Milagre, the community of the tribe of pequeninos.
    This was not easy.   Most novels get by with showing the relationships between two or, at the most, three characters.   This is because the difficulty of creating a character increases with each new major character that is added to the tale.   Characters, as most writers understand, are truly developed