I began my Amazon and Goodreads reviews of this
book by stating: “This is what science fiction ought to be," and I
concluded the reviews with the statements: "Strongly recommended for the
thoughtful reader, including readers of mainstream and literary fiction. Not
recommended for fans of hard SF or space opera.”
I read one negative review by someone who had
to be one of the latter.
The spiritual
quest that forms the central theme of the book obviously left this person cold,
and certain scientific facts such as a possibly flawed portrayal of the red
star called Alpha Centauri C or Proxima (Centauri) drove this reviewer to
express great scorn.
This person
obviously is somewhat lacking in the ability to see beyond
mundane
SF and to suspend disbelief!
I could write a thesis about this book, but I'll
restrict the present discussion to two aspects, beginning with the technique.
The plot is really quite simple: The SETI project
picks up beautiful godlike music from the Alpha Centauri system and the Jesuit
order mounts an expedition to find the planet at the urging of Fr. Emilio
Sandoz. The group of close friends who
form the mission crew arrive at Rakhat and make first contact with the Runa,
learning later that the planet harbors a second ILF called the Jana’ata. They remain woefully clueless
about the culture and the relationship between the two species until it’s too
late.
The POV does not conform to the rule of consistency
(it changes from one character to another under the overall umbrella of an
omnipotent narrator) and yet the action moves forward with a seamless
relentlessness in a subtle give-and-take between past and present. I can imagine the author outlining the plot
and then manipulating the alternate sections in order to produce the wonderful
suspense. The odd thing is, you know
from the beginning that the mission ended badly; you're introduced immediately
to the appalling aftermath. And yet you
don't know why the project ended in this way; you learn first in little morsels,
bits of the future, dropped at intervals into the plot. I found it impossible to predict what was
going to happen next. I correctly
anticipated only one thing, something I think I can say without playing the
spoiler: I assumed all along that there would be another expedition to Rakhat
and that it would form the subject matter of the second volume, The
Children of God. And I believe I was
correct in that.
As a conlanger, I have to make a quick remark about
the use of language in the first contact.
Emilio Sandoz is a skilled linguist, responsible for communicating with
the extraterrestrials. I don’t know how
much work the author did on the two alien languages, but we have at least
naming languages here, and a few rules of word formation are stated. If I ever read the book again, I’ll make a
list of the words. But likely somebody
else in the conlanging community has already done that.
The book is much more than its technique, of
course. I’m not going to touch on the
subtleties of characterization here, even though that’s what the book is about.
Instead, I’m going to talk about the
theme by comparing the book to my own writings.
That may seem a bit audacious, because, while I think I’m a good writer,
I definitely lack Mary Doria Russell’s intense ability to focus. However, two people whose opinions I respect have
commented that my books reminded them of The
Sparrow, and that’s what impelled me to read it.
And we do write on similar themes. I've written three first-contact stories. In the novella "Monster Is in the Eye of
the Beholder" (which is quite focused, actually) the first contact with a
very bizarre species has an outcome every bit as disastrous as in The Sparrow. Both books present a flawed contact between
two cultures that are incompatible, although in my book it's the humans and not
the ILFs who precipitate the tragedy. In
The Sparrow an innocent human cultural practice disrupts the status
quo of the alien culture (I won't spoil it by saying what it is), while in my
book it is a human psychological breakdown that does the harm.
My two-volume novel The Termite Queen deals
with a first contact between Earthers and the intelligent termite species called
the Shshi. However, neither TQ nor “Monster” deals with THE
first contact, the very first time humans encountered aliens. That event happened in the 28th century, when
Earthers met Prf. A'a'ma's bird people, and it forms the topic of my big old
floppy WIP The Man Who Found Birds among
the Stars. Since then Earth has
formed amicable relationships not only with the Krisí’i’aidá but with the Te Quornaz and the
Pozú, and they know of the existence of many other intelligent lifeforms. Meeting the termite people is unique only in
the difficulty of communication.
Both TQ and The Sparrow have anthropologists and
linguists for main characters, a circumstance that would not be unusual for any
first contact situation. However, I had
the feeling all the way through The Sparrow that this crew was
fragile, undertrained, and clueless about what they were getting into. When you assume God is underpinning your
mission – that a sort of divine fate is at work and God will keep his eye on
you and protect you as he does the sparrow – you're very likely to get into
trouble. The Termite Queen crew
is not like that. Earthers have had too
much experience with aliens. Space
travel is ubiquitous, a joint undertaking by several alien species, organized
on a regional galactic scale. Both the
crews and the scientists have wide experience with off-world missions. Of course, that doesn't keep them from making
mistakes, but it does make them well qualified to take on a first-contact project.
The Sparrow
was published in 1996, so the year 2019, when the book starts, was 23 years in
the future. That can seem like a long
time, but that date is now only seven years off and obviously we aren’t going
to be mining asteroids and using them for space travel by that date. This is why I place my stories in a time way
beyond any possibility that a person of today might still be alive to know what
actually developed, and I leave the period between the present and at least a
hundred years off purposely vague. The
only thing I mention happening in the 21st century is a cycle of disastrous religious
wars, and the way things are going on Earth, that certainly is within the realm
of possibility.
But Russell isn't out to write future history as
I am, so the connection between the present moment and what happens when we get
where we are going is less important than the events themselves. Her purpose is
to explore the relationship between God and human beings – does God exist? Does he interact with his creation? Should we hold God responsible for the evils
that happen in our world or on other worlds?
Now, while some of these questions come up in The Termite Queen, answering them is not
my purpose. In my future, society has
developed a humanist culture and those questions are already answered. God has moved into the realm of myth, from
which you can draw wisdom but which gives you no absolutes because the nature
of god or even whether a god exists can’t be known (Mythmaker Precept No. l). People might study god(s) and beliefs
academically but ordained clerics and religious institutions no longer exist, and people
generally don't concern themselves the role of gods in their lives.
That being said, the end of both books has
spiritual implications and is strangely similar: the achievement of at least
partial redemption. The whole final
section of The Termite Queen is
called “Absolution.” In The Sparrow Sandoz gains forgiveness and
absolution through speaking and through words – Absolvo te, says Father Candotti in the traditional language of
Catholic confession. Griffen Gwidian gains
forgiveness through personal atonement, although words would have been enough
had circumstances been different.
Kaitrin’s absolution comes from a symbolic release of guilt – the “dark
bird” that flies away and settles on a scapegoat.
The strange thing about The Sparrow is that even among these
Jesuits, these most Christian of men, nothing is said about the central
doctrine of Christ’s vicarious atonement for the sins of humanity. The emphasis is on God the Father, not God
the Son. My humanist book ends with a resolution
that is more conventionally Christian than the end of The Sparrow, albeit portrayed in a context that is completely
alien.
So I would conclude by
saying, yes, there are similarities between my Termite Queen and Russell’s The
Sparrow, and they lie not merely in plot points (the first contact, the
off-world expedition and the preparations for it, the linguistic-anthropologist
characters, the use of constructed language).
There are also thematic similarities.
I would hope that some of you who like The Sparrow would also be moved to try reading my books as well.
