Speaker for the Dead hits a few milestones in Hugo history. It's the first sequel to win, and the first time an author won two years in a row. It's a good book, and the story that Card really wanted to tell, but it falls a little flat compared to Ender's Game.

3000 years after the events of the first book, Ender is still a young man thanks to frequent interstellar travel, adrift out of time with his sister Valentine as itinerant speaker for the dead. No one knows that Andrew Wiggin is the first Speaker, the author of the books Hegemon and Hive Queen, which form the basis of popular secular religion, or that they're the same as the semi-legendary and cursed xenocide Ender. Ender and Val lead ordinary lives as scholars, moving to a new planet every few months of life-time, and losing decades in the process. Ender is searching for a planet to incubate the Buggerqueen he carries, and remedy his distant crime.

Meanwhile, the colony planet of Lusitania, settled by descendants of a Brazilian-cultural planet, is home to the only other sentient species humanity has encountered, the Pequeninos. Small, porcine humanoids, the Pequeninos have stone age technology and an easy facility with language. Humanity, taking the opposite approach from the tragedy of the Bugger War, limits contact as much as possible. One Xenologer and one apprentice, no technology, minimize cultural contamination. When the elder xenologer (anthropologist to the aliens) is brutally slain by the Pequeninos, Ender is called to speak his death by a rebel in the staunchly Catholic colony. As expected, he arrives and uncovers terrible secrets, using his uncanny insight and stark approach to the truth to set things right.

Some parts of this book really work. Much of the drama centers around Novinha, a brilliant girl and then cold and distant woman. Orphan daughter of xenobiologists, Novinha calls for Ender at the start of the story, and then rejects him when he arrives, having created a self-made martyrdom of a large and incredibly unhappy family, which Ender falls in love with and sets right. The vividness of Novinha's family in it's overt abuse, secret poisons, and prison of "love" is one of those things which give the "let's psychoanalyze Card" crowd lots of material. The rising biological drama towards the end, with Ender uncovering the life-cycle of the Pequeninos, the role of the terrible descolada disease in the planetary ecology, and why the xenologers keep getting killed, is truly moving and wonderful.

But there's also a lot that doesn't work. The book takes a while to get moving, and the elder Ender is less appealing, less fully fleshed out in many ways, than the boy genius of Ender's Game. This book's journey towards understanding is a lot less gripping than the struggle for survival and a fragmentary ethical existence from the last book. There's a lot less depth and ambiguity once the mysteries are stripped away. The basic message of looking for interior reasons for why people do things (even when those people are pig-like aliens who have killed twice), offers less to think about than the shades of winning and gaming in the last book.

Finally, there's stuff that doesn't work at all: like Jane, a superhuman AI that has developed awareness in the ansible network that ties humanity together, and who only talks to Ender. She's a literal deus ex machina for much of the book. The humans on Lusitania never really came into focus as particularly Brazilian, particularly Catholic, and worst of all, particularly a tiny frontier community on a unique planet in human space, devastated by a terrible plague in the recent past. The human side of the setting just collapsed.

For all my criticism, I do quite like Speaker for the Dead. It's far from perfect, but still a worthy successor to Ender's Game.