Speaker for the Dead

Introduction
     
     
    Speaker for the Dead is a sequel, but it didn't begin life that way--and you don't have to read it that way, either.   It was my intention all along for Speaker to be able to stand alone, for it to make sense whether you have read Ender's Game or not. Indeed, in my mind this was the "real" book, if I hadn't been trying to write Speaker for the Dead back in I983, there would never have been a novel version of Ender's Game at all.
    How did Speaker for the Dead come to be?   As with all my stories, this one began with more than one idea. The concept of a "speaker for the dead" arose from my experiences with death and funerals. I have written of this at greater length elsewhere; suffice it to say that I grew dissatisfied with the way that we use our funerals to revise the life of the dead, to give the dead a story so different from their, actual life that, in effect, we kill them all over again.   No, that is too strong.   Let me just say that we erase them, we edit them, we make them into a person much easier to live with than the person who actually lived.
    I rejected that idea I thought that a more appropriate funeral would be to say honestly, what that person was and what that person did. But to me, “honesty” doesn't simply mean saying all the unpleasant things instead of saying only the nice ones. It doesn’t even consist of averaging them out.   No, to understand who a person really was, what his or her life really meant, the speaker for the dead would have to explain their self-story--what they meant to do, what they actually did, what they regretted, what they rejoiced in. That’s the story that we never know, the story that we never can know--and yet, at the time of death, it's the only story truly worth telling.
    I have received several letters, by the way, from people who are called upon to speak at funerals from time to time, and who, having read Speaker for the Dead, make an effort to turn the funeral service into a Speaking. I hasten to add that they have done this either with the permission of the family or at the urging of the deceased (given, obviously, before death!). Some of them have even sent me the text of their Speaking, and I must tell you that the stories thus told are astonishing and powerful. I hope someone will do a Speaking at my funeral. I think there really is power and truth in the idea.
    But that was not the only source of Speaker for the Dead. I w as also a longtime aficionado of anthropological science fiction--stories in which a scientist studies an alien culture and uncovers the reasons for their strangeness.   The first such novel that I read was James Blish's A Case of Conscience. Not many years later, I read Michael Bishop's story "Death and Designation among the Asadi." Both had a powerful effect on me.   So in the back of my mind, I had a strong desire to add something of my own to that subgenre.
    So when I thought of the idea of an alien species which in order to reproduce, had to slaughter each other in terrible intertribal wars, it was only natural that I decided the story should be told from the viewpoint of a human scientist studying them. Only gradually, over several years. did I develop the idea of the piggies and their strange lifecycle, and the intertribal war receded in importance--so much so that I didn't need to make it an issue in Speak er for the Dead at all.   But it was in trying to think of an evolutionary reason why these little porcine aliens would need to slaughter each other for the species to thrive that I came up with the pequeninos that you meet in the pages of this book.
    I was living with my wife,   Kristine (née Allen), in Orem, Utah, when I made the first breakthrough in creating this book.   The two ideas were still quite separate, and the speaker-for-the-dead idea was still in a very primitive form.   In fact, I had decided that the funeral “oration” should be in song--that it should be a “singer of death.” I suppose I thought of this because I had sung at a few funerals and found it a moving experience even when I didn't know the deceased.   But when I mentioned this singer-of-death idea to Kristine, she winced.   “You've already written 'Unaccompanied Sonata' and Songmaster. ” she reminded me.   "They were both about music. If you do another music story people will think that's all you can do." I realized that she was even more right than she knew!   It happened that "Unaccompanied Sonata" and