The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
This has been on many “must read” science fiction book lists, and I picked up a used copy but hadn’t read it for many months because the first time I tried, I found it dense and daunting. It’s not a cheerful read, or an easy read. You pretty much know going into it that it’s going to be the story of an unspeakable tragedy. Emilio, the heart if not the head of the mission, is the only survivor.
This is a “first contact” story about a group sent by the Jesuit society on a mission to meet the creators of an alien song, which has been bounced by radio off the moons of an apparently habitable planet. As soon as the decision is made to go, things seem to fall into place with uncanny ease. The travelers begin to believe that God himself is guiding this mission.
This book has quite a bit of hard science, from AI generation, astronomy, and linguistics to engineering and space travel. If you like to geek out over conjectures, you might appreciate that this book pays homage to its nerdy SF roots. It also has a lot of amazing characters, and the bulk of the story is devoted to developing them and explaining their relationships.
Russell also develops pretty cool alien races. I enjoyed learning about their social structure, their diets, their cities, and their relation to each other. For that reason alone, this would make a great book-club book. But there are also a lot of moral discussions. For many people, the main draw of this book is how it uses the SF elements to discuss religious faith. Emilio is sent, chosen, and betrayed by God, and Emilio has a crisis reconciling these facts. Apparently “God is an asshole” is not an acceptable explanation to Jesuit priests, no matter how the evidence supports that hypothesis. (I’ve heard that God’s great plan is resolved in the second book.) Once you accept it as reasonable to travel across the galaxy to please a God who, IMHO, ain’t all that great, why is it so awful to commit a crime equivalent to eating whale meat? And is it worse to have sex than to murder a child? What if you eat the child, is it okay then? You have the Jesuits, whose beliefs I’m not 100% with, and the aliens, whose society is arguably cruel and arguably logical and no more cruel than ours, and after a while it’s pretty much all one gray swath of moral relativism. That’s what really makes it a good book club book. Instant discussion!
But even for people who classify the biblical God in the same category as sentient aliens and ftl travel, the character building and first-contact elements are enough to make it well worth reading. Be warned: it’s dark. Almost everyone you like dies and/or gets tortured.
