The Grok

Author: Orson Scott Card

Before I get into the details, I have to warn you that reading SoTD would be a waste of time unless you are a die hard fan of Orson Scott Card. The pace of the story is extremely slow and unless you are gifted with a lot of patience, I would recommend you skip this book.

In Speaker of the Dead, Ender has grown old and has spent three thousand earth years in relativistic travel across the known universe colonized by humans. Due to this faster than light travelling, Mr. Ender has managed to stay young and age only by twenty odd years since the last book! He still repents his actions against the buggers and is looking for a planet habitable by the Hive Queen. So, as luck would have it, he gets a request to travel to a strange Portugese planet called Lusitania. Lusitania hosts an alien species, the second alien species that humans have encountered since the buggers. The sole purpose of inhabiting Lusitania has been to study this alien culture. Unfortunately due to a policy of non interference, xenologers are having one hell of a time!

As the story starts off, we get to know of three xenologers - Pipo, Libo and Novinho. This brings me to my first criticism of the book, what was the necessity for such wacky names? Every name seems to have been coined by some five year old! It makes it really hard to take the book seriously. The amazing aliens under study are referred to as "piggies", which promptly terminated any seriousness I had while reading the book. Now, Pipo gets killed when he discovers a secret about the genetic makeup of these aliens. Libo also gets killed. So you think two dead xenologers would cause some uproar and they would bomb Lusitania? But in this wacky world people just continue their work acting like as if nothing ever happened. As a display of their concern, they call up their local SoTD. Ender has to figure out what the heck happened in Lusitania and deliver a professional eulogy!

The main reason why I probably didn't like the book was because most of the prose seemed pointless and served to prolong a boring event. (SPOILER) In the final quarter of the book, we find out that the reason the aliens killed the two xenologers was because they expected humans to move into some kind of third level of life, without realizing that humans died when they were stabbed! Arrrgghhh...

There is a lot of mumbo jumbo about the biology and society of the alien piggies, but hardly interesting enough to captivate anyone's interest. I would have given this book a 0 but out of respect for the first book and the fact that it won a Hugo, I softened up to give it a 1. Avoid this book at all costs!!

Rating: 1.0 / 5.0