Dr. Science: While you make a good case for the other books you cite, I think you are misreading Speaker for the Dead. First, about your comment about birth control solving various characters' problems: Lusitania is presented as an explicitly Roman Catholic colony (of Portuguese ethnic descent), where the church is shown as a co-equal power center to the civil government (and which seems to have preserved most of its positions on human sexuality over the centuries). Pretty much every human on the planet, except for Ender and the governor, who come from off-world, is either Catholic or lapsed Catholic. Given that, and the fact that the colony is still trying to rebuild its population years after a devastating plague, where would you expect the characters to find artificial birth control? Given the setup, I would expect birth control to be at best a contraband item of dubious availability, smuggled in on the occasional supply ship and only available erratically through whatever black market exists, if that. Second, I think you are misreading Novinha's motivation. While she was traumatized as a child by being orphaned, far from being abused, she was idolized by the rest of the population as the child who could do no wrong. As an adult she married Marcos, who became abusive, but his abuse was directed at her, not the children (except for one power struggle involving one son). The children were affected in various ways by the family dynamic, but they weren't directly targeted. (Mild spoiler ahead, much milder than the detailed info in the Wikipedia article on the book): . . . As for Novinha's motivation, Ender reveals at the conclusion of his Speaking Marcos' life and death, and in a subsequent scene, that nearly everything Novinha did, including putting up with the abuse, was motivated by trying to protect people she loved from secrets that she was convinced could lead them to their deaths, if discovered.

@MayhemMatthew - Even though the score of the 9th symphony is long out of copyright, recordings of individual performances are still subject to copyright. So unless the hotel hired their own orchestra and chorus to perform the piece (and then released the performance into the public domain), it is still likely subject to someone's copyright, which is probably what happened here.