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The Sparrow
The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell's first novel, is not easily labeled. Though the plot features interstellar travel and first contact with an alien race, it is not strictly a science fiction novel. Many of the characters are members of a religious order (the Society of Jesus), but the book never assumes a pious or moralistic tone. The story ultimately reveals immense suffering, but it also sparkles with wit and word play. Fortunately, what Ellington said of music (there's only two kinds: good and bad) is also true of books. Whatever category of novel The Sparrow may fit into, it is certainly a good book.
The first part of the novel introduces two story lines, and the narrative shifts between these stories until the very end of the novel. The first story is set in early 21st century Puerto Rico. Jimmy Quinn, a young radio astronomer at the Arecibo array, detects signals originating from a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. Upon analyzing these transmissions, Quinn hears music of an obviously non-human variety. He first shares this discovery with his friends, including a Jesuit priest named Emilio Sandoz. Sandoz immediately proposes mounting an expedition to Alpha Centauri. He quickly convinces his Jesuit superiors to sponsor the adventure, populating the crew with both priests and lay people. They find their way to Alpha Centauri aboard a dugout asteroid powered by a mass driver, where they discover the planet Rakhat, populated by two sentient species.
The second thread, a courtroom drama of sorts, features the Jesuit hearing into the events of the expedition to Rakhat. In late 2059, Sandoz has returned to Earth alone, physically and emotionally shattered. He is preceded by bizarre allegations of murder and prostitution, transmitted by a UN-sponsored followup expedition to Rakhat. The Jesuit order is desperate to dispel this mounting scandal and nurses Sandoz back to health so that he may tell his story. With calculated and sometimes sadistic effort, the Father General of the Society of Jesus flattens Sandoz' defenses and forces him to describe the horrible truth of his experience on Rakhat.
As a science fiction novel, The Sparrow breaks very little new ground. The reader will find no startling new technological or social ideas here, though Russell does a fine job of constructing two distinct alien races. The real value of this book is its exploration of spiritual matters. The the first few months on Rakhat go so well that even the agnostic and atheistic members of the crew begin to think that God might be watching over them. Nonetheless the mission ends in disaster, with most of the crew dead. Sandoz, who despite his priestly vows never developed a personal relationship with God, survives to ponder the implications. What kind of God would abuse human faith in such a callous manner?
In contrast with the weighty nature of its central issues, this book is quite an enjoyable read. This is due in part to the author's liberal application of humor. Russell has created a handful of genuinely funny characters who deliver one-liners and make smooth pop-culture references with frequent grace. She also takes pains to create real emotion in the religious figures, including imperfect faith and sexual attraction. This adds up to an engaging collection of people who draw the reader into the story. When it comes time to pay the piper, we know enough about them to truly appreciate the turmoil they endure.
The Sparrow is definitely worth a few hours of your time. It doesn't map any new sci-fi territory, but it will provoke you to examine your spiritual world-view. Fortunately Russell offers no pat, hollow answers in this book. Instead she offers a painful and wonderful look at what it means to exist. She gets it right: it's hard to be human no matter what planet you're on.
Purchase this at fatbrain.
It's because of the volunteer nature of the reviews; sometimes you'll read a book, think "Wow, this is really good! I want to evangelize it to others!". If the book was indifferent, there's no such impulse. For example, I read David Gelertner's Machine Beauty a while back, and thought it made some good points, but lost its focus and ultimately was a disappointment. Not much impulse to write a review that says just "Enh."
i found it a very unique look at the whole story of alien contact and human exploration. of course i read it about a year ago and submitted my own review back then. congrats to the reviewer for an excellent review and the ability to withstand the blackhole that is /. book reviews...
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Our deacon recommended this book to me a few months back. In fact she (I'm Episcopalian) didn't stop pestering me until I read it. Since then I've made several folks read it from a wide variety of backgrounds, all of whom ate it up. This includes my wife who is ordinarily not very fond of SF.
Having said that, I should warn anyone who reads it that it is quite an emotional roller-coaster if you care about the characters. I usually describe the book to people as starting off as a mix of L'Engle and Sartre and eventually doing a sudden nose dive through Stephen King and ending up reading like Elie Weisel. She does truly awful things to some of her characters that make you have to put the book down and stare at a wall for a while.
The comparison with Weisel is also a good reason for recommending the sequel Children of God. Weisel's life did not stop at the end of Night , and Sandoz's does not stop at the end of The Sparrow. The end of his journey (and that of the other characters) is as important as the beginning.
So please read it, but brace yourself.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
You just managed to confirm your stupidity by not catching the error in your .sig, even when it was brought to your attention.
Well done. Try not to get yourself nominated for a Darwin Award...
Courses focusing on science fiction are being taught in many (most?) Literature curriculums and there's a long, solid history of quite literate science fiction. (Granted, one sometimes has to dig through the never-ending "novelizations" to find them, but "mainstream" fiction has no shortage of pulp either.) But some people still Don't Get It ... and clueless marketers don't help.
(Nitpick: Not all science fiction is set in the future.)
First of all, my wife ran (before we moved and lost our website) a book review website. She put many bad reviews up, usually based on only a partial reading of the book.
Secondly, while a boring fiction book would probably get a bad review, those are the only kind that would do so. For instance, a highly inaccurate technical book would as well. I read one such a couple years ago, but didn't realize how wrong it was until I tried using the printed source code. Talk about errors! Not just misprints, but actual logic problems, missing functions, etc. It was clear that no one had ever created a working program from this code.
My point is that it's not enough to be guided TO good books, we also need to be warned AWAY FROM bad ones.
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Why are ALL Slashdot book reviews rated at [6|7|8|9]/10? Why don't we just renormalize to 1-5?
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I won't argue with the rest of your overly simplistic review of Heinlein (mostly because this is not the forum for the discussion), but I have to object to the phrase I quote in the subject line.
The only extent to which Heinlein (or his characters) had an "elitist philosophy" was insofar as it was true.
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I can think of a far superior one, but modesty forbids...
The textbook definition of an atheist is someone who believes that it can be *proven* that God doesn't exist. Is this what you believe?
Um, it can't be proven that god dosn't exist, just like it can't be proven that Santa Claus dosn't exist.
It dosn't mean you should belive in ether one though...
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I should have mentioned that in my last post, I should also not be up at 4:56 AM. but in any case I am.
I personaly feel that there is no reason to belive in god, and I don't mean like "It's good for you" or whatever.
If you want me to belive somthing, you need to prove it, or at least come resonably close. There is no evidence that god exsists, so why belive in him?
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
So the book doesn't try to delve into scientific advances which make this mission possible. Good science fiction literature is good literature, set in the future. This work clearly qualifies and is a great read to boot. Although the Jesuits I know will not be tickled by this, even they will agree that many aspects of their order are spot on. They might not be able to complete all the engineering though.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
I've read a modest assortment of sci-fi and the same things keep popping up in most (of the bad) books.
1. Exploring humanity and concluding that "Because we have emotions, that makes us better than aliens and androids."
2. Assuming that emotions are a requirement of sentience and/or an advantage--not just rules-of-thumb with a purely logical core created for beings lacking the mental power to analyze every situation in real-time.
3. Exploring religion and/or God and getting Christianity wrong.
4. Creating singular alien cultures (planet-wide language, religion, clothing, etc.) or aliens that are an exaggeration of a "human" quality such as greed or selfishness.
5. Assuming that most every sentient alien you'll ever see looks 98% human (Two arms, legs, and eyes... One head, speaks at our frequencies, 6'1", and differs only in a bump on the forehead or pointed ears).
6. Using impossible or completely implausible technologies.
7. Every story has to be about something going horribly wrong.
I concur for the most part with your assessment of Heinlein (heresy, of course, for the older Slashdotters), but the only emotion Vonnegut is really familiar with is contempt. His disgust for humanity as a whole pervades his work, and makes it rather unreadable.
PKD I'm not that familiar with -- read the requisite Androids/Sheep, but High Castle and Albemuth read like he really, really needed his meds. It's rather odd that people are claiming it's not sf -- space travel and aliens aren't required for a story to be sf, but surely a story with those elements cannot be other than sf.
Of course, if by 'hard' SF people mean plot- and characterization- free techno-wankfests like everything Niven ever wrote, I suppose this isn't SF.
gomi
Also, there's not a whole lot of exploration of the alien species in this book. We aren't allowed to really know what makes them tick, and we don't get to know them too well even after the story moves to Rakhat. The whole time we're focused on the human characters. Again, somewhat unusual for a scifi novel.
Neutron
I get my kicks above the
...I didn't expect to enjoy this book. I thought it'd be a proselytising tome, aimed at recruiting.
To Ms. Russell, I'd no like to apologise, and thank her for writing what I consider to be the finest book of 1997.
If you're interested, its sequel, Children of God manages miraculously to be every bit as good.
In short: this is a book you have to read. If you have non-sf-reading friends, give them this book as an example of everything that good science fiction can be.
I'm still waiting for her third book, and I'll buy it the nanosecond it's available.
None of these books reviewed ever gets less than an 8/10... and "Sparrow" certainly doesn't deserve a 9/10. I would save a near-perfect rating for something like "Canticle for Leibowitz", if you're going the religion-in-science-fiction route, or a classic like "Brave New World".
Sparrow's not *bad*, but it's not a 9/10 either. It's a slightly-better-than-mediocre first attempt at sci-fi by a decent author, there's good ideas in there, but half of the book could have been edited out and left none the worse. Parts read more like a soap opera than a serious novel -- I like personal conflict and characterization, but with development and growth (beyond a single axis of personality), please! I'd give it a 6/10. If you like religion in your scifi, it's probably worth a read; but I can think of a dozen Heinlein, P.K. Dick or Vonnegut books that can tear this to shreds.
"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - Major Mike Shearer, UK