Speaker for the Dead

Speaker for the Dead is a 1986 science fiction novel by the American author Orson Scott Card, published by Tor Books as a 415-page book.

The premise is unusual for a sequel about a war hero. Ender is no longer a soldier but a speaker for the dead, a role that involves giving an honest account of a person's life at their funeral, and the novel's central problem is that a second alien war is approaching and he is the person who understands what happened in the first. That makes the book's action explanatory rather than tactical. The book is set around the year 5270, some three thousand years after the first, and Ender is only about thirty-five because of the relativistic travel in between. It was followed by Xenocide.

Card pairs the alien material with a colonisation story set on a world where a small human community lives alongside a native species. The combination of a first-contact problem and a domestic community is why the book is usually read as the point where the series turns from military science fiction towards anthropology.