Speaker for the Dead
1986 novel by Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead is a 1986 science fiction novel by American writer Orson Scott Card, a sequel to the 1985 novel Ender's Game. The book takes place around the year 5270, some 3,000 years after the events in Ender's Game. However, because of relativistic space travel at near-light speed, Ender himself is only about 35 years old.
This is the first book to describe the Starways Congress, a high standpoint legislature for the human space colonies, and the Hundred Worlds, the planets with human colonies that are tightly intertwined by Ansible technology, which enables instantaneous communication across any distance.
Like Ender's Game, the book won the Nebula Award (1986) and the Hugo Award (1987). Speaker for the Dead was published in a slightly revised edition in 1991. It was followed by Xenocide and Children of the Mind.
Setting
3,000 years after the eradication of the Formic species (in Ender's Game), Ender Wiggin writes a book called The Hive Queen, describing the life of the Formics as described to him by the dormant Formic Queen whom he secretly carries. As humanity uses light-speed travel to establish new colonies, Ender and his sister Valentine age slowly through relativistic travel. Ender's older brother, the now-aged Hegemon of Earth, Peter Wiggin, recognizes Ender's writings in The Hive Queen, and requests Ender write for him once he dies.
The public source identifies “Speaker for the Dead” as 1986 novel by Orson Scott Card. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Speaker, Dead and novel.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2291295. The first chronological checks are 1986, 1985, 1987 and 1991.
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This entry incorporates text from “Speaker for the Dead” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.