Speaker for the Dead

By: Orson Scott Card

Narrated by: David Birney, Stefan Rudnicki

Length: 14 hrs and 8 mins

Publisher's summary

In the aftermath of his terrible war, Ender Wiggin disappeared, and a powerful voice arose: the Speaker for the Dead, who told the true story of the Bugger War. Now, long years later, a second alien race has been discovered by Portuguese colonists on the planet Lusitania. But again the aliens' ways are strange and frightening...again, humans die. And it is only the Speaker for the Dead, who is also Ender Wiggin the Xenocide, who has the courage to confront the mystery...and the truth. Orson Scott Card infuses this tale with intellect by casting his characters in social, religious, and cultural contexts.

This, the author's definitive edition of the sequel to Ender's Game, also includes an original postscript written and recorded by the author himself, Orson Scott Card!.

Browse more titles in the Ender Wiggin series.

©1986, 1990 Orson Scott Card (P)2002 Fantastic Audio, an Imprint of Audio Literature

Critic reviews

• Hugo Award Winner, Best Novel, 1987
• Nebula Award Winner, Best Novel, 1986

"The most powerful work Card has produced. Speaker not only completes Ender's Game, it transcends it." (Fantasy Review)

All time Favorite

This is an emotional and imaginative novel that makes me marvel. The characters are all so well developed, and I will listen to it many times.

An excellent dive into sci-fi and philosophy.

An excellent book, perhaps one of my favorites, although the audiobook has an annoying musical string that plays at seemingly random times, and the narrators are sometimes inconsistent, switching out to play particular characters semi-randomly.

Still, the performances were solidly done. If you enjoy science fiction and philosophy, I'd definitely recommend Speaker for the Dead.

HSC does it again

What an elegant telling of life and death. This work is brilliant and should be read in conjunction with Enders game for sure.

Greatest Science Fiction Novel Of All Time

Scott clearly has a ragtag of devoted readers as all his books are performed by the same people, and I like that. They are very excellent narrators. Very strong performances do true justice to what I believe to be the very best science fiction has to offer. Outstanding.

Honestly!

I didn't like it as much as the first book, but still 100% worth the listen. loved all the drama, very interesting direction for the series

The Enderverse

This is my favorite science fiction series. The characters are easy to identify with, and you will find yourself sucked into this imaginary universe, nicknamed the Enderverse by fans.

Recommended order of reading (in my opinion): Ender?s Game, Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind. Reading the books in this order will keep you interested and keep the story moving more naturally.

If after reading all of these wonderful books you are still itching for an Enderverse fix then read First Meetings. The list above is sorted by the Enderverse timeline. Meaning that the flow of events in the stories are uninterrupted. If you were to read the books in the order they were published, you would bounce back and forth in between time and few of the plot twists in future books would be revealed before you wanted them to be known. First Meetings, however contains short stories that occur both before and in between the list above within the Enderverse.

Good story!

This takes place after Ender's Game and begins a sort of different type of story. Ender's Game is more action based, and the rest of the series has more geo-political and sociological themed. I'd recommend giving this a listen, but if you find it a little too thoughtful for you, you may want to skip directly to the Shadow series - those follow Bean, and are written more similarly to EG.

Great story, strange narration.

As expected speaker for the dead was a solid story rom Orson Scott Card. However, the narration left much to be desired. For reasons I can't quite understand the Audio publisher opted to use multiple narrators, using them interchangeably for no apparent reason. it is my belief that they had intended to shift the narrative from one character to the next however that's not at all what happened with the end result. Instead what was heard was a confusing mixture of different narrators some of which seemed very poor. if you're going to try to publish an audio book with some sort of theatrical flair then consistency would be advised. and there was one particular female narrator that seemed as if maybe this was her first day reading a book, Azhar Annunciations were stilted inter technique felt as if somebody was reading they book aloud in a high school classroom. Overall the story was great and the narration served its purpose but the choices they made with narration we're jarring at best.

Not bad - a little slow - but worth the time!

Good narration, but a bit too soothing of a primary voice for a long commute. Still - well done on the narration, overall. The story was good, but not full of nearly as much action as its predecessor ("Ender's Game"). As a sequel - not bad, but also not consistent with the pace/story of "Ender's Game". Intriguing plot - but at a VERY slow pace. Glad I listened to it, but it didn't draw me in, much. The plot concepts were solid (and intriguing), but you had to be listening for depth. Probably not a great "casual" listen. I had to replay several scenes when I failed to catch the subtleties of some plot points.

Speaker for the Dead

Speaker for the Dead has been the best book I've read or heard in years. Orson Scott Card did a remarkable job with his characters and setting. I caught myself crying and laughing out loud. I related to the characters as if they were friends. I liked Ender's Game,and think it is necessary to understand Ender. However, I think Speaker for the Dead is spectacular and the main reason for reading the series.