Foreignness In Orson Scott Card's Speaker For The Dead

“But when it comes to human beings, the only type of cause that matters is final cause, the purpose. What a person had in mind. Once you understand what people really want, you can't hate them anymore. You can fear them, but you can't hate them, because you can always find the same desires in your own heart” (271). In Orson Scott Card’s, Speaker for the Dead, we are met yet again with Ender Wiggin, on a foreign planet, with foreign people, a new foreign alien species, and one he has carried with him for the last 3000 years. The book in it’s entirety is essentially based on the concept of foreignness. Orson Scott Card does a not at all subtle analysis of foreignness, posing the questions: are actions that seem foreign. evil, and against us necessarily wrong? Throughout the novel you are faced with …show more content…
Would we not do the same? Actions against us are not necessarily evil actions but instead a conflict between foreignness or simply a community’s desire to do everything in it’s power to help itself first.
From even the first book in the Ender’s Game Quartet we are faced with a society foreign to us, and location, situations, and species foreign to Ender Wiggin. In Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card introduces a new alien species to the readers, nicknamed Piggies, and also an entirely new planet: Lusitania. Right from the start of the novel we are, not surprisingly, faced with death. First, it is the introduction to a deadly disease that killed of a vast majority of the population of Lusitania, and then the murder of both one of the piggies, Rooter, and Pipo, one of the three scientists observing this foreign species. Both the piggy and Pipo were split open, down the middle, with organ arranged carefully around them, and tree seeds right in the center of the corpses, “Rooter laid spread eagled in the cleared dirt...out of the center of his chest cavity, which was otherwise empty now, a very small seedling