Speaker for the Dead

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 through their relationships with others.   If there are only two significant characters, then there is only one relationship to be explored.   If there are three characters, however. there are four relationships: Between A and B, between B and C, between C and A, and finally the relationship when all three are together.
    Even this does not begin to explain the complexity--for in real life, at least, most people change, at least subtly, when they are with different people. The changes can be pretty major--I remember well my summer as a performer at the Sundance Summer Theatre in Utah. I was a 19-year-old trying to convince myself and others that I was a man, so with the other performers I became at least as profane--nay, foul-mouthed and filthy-minded--as the most immature of them. I worked hard to develop some fluidity and cleverness in my vulgarity, and won my share of laughs from the others.   Yet during this whole time I lived with my parents, coming down the mountain at insane speeds late at night, only to end up in a home where certain words were simply never said.   And I never said them.   Not once did I slip and speak in front of my family the way I spoke constantly in front of the other performers at Sundance.   This was not by any herculean effort, either. I didn't think about changing my behavior; it simply happened.   When I was with my parents I wasn't the same person.
    I have seen this time and time again with my friends, with other family members.   Our whole demeanor changes, our mannerisms, our figures of speech, when we move from one context to another.   Listen to someone you know when they pick up the telephone.   We have special voices for different people; our attitudes, our moods change depending on whom we are with.
    So when a storyteller has to create three characters, each different relationship requires that each character in it must be transformed, however subtly, depending on how the relationship is shaping his or her present identity.   Thus, in a three-character story, a storyteller who wishes to convince us of the reality of these characters really has to come up with a dozen different personas, four for each of them.
    What happens, then, when you start with a family with a mother, a dead father, and six troubled children, and then add a stranger who intrudes into the family and transforms every one of them?   It seemed to me like a sisyphean task, for I had to develop (or at least imply) dozens of personas, including