(Review by Nick Gevers, Ph.D., Cape Town, South Africa)

Although published by non-genre literary imprints in both the USA and Britain, The Sparrow (1996) is an urgent and superb work of SF. It has been adopted as such by readers and critics, recently receiving the Arthur C. Clarke Award in the UK; simultaneously, it has become popular in broader mainstream culture, and will shortly be filmed (starring, it seems, Antonio Banderas). The Sparrow’s importance for the SF of the 1990s stems from this wide impact: it takes SF out of what seems a diminishing ghetto, relegitimizing the genre among a larger readership (and, soon, viewership); at the same time, it refreshes SF from without, with a humour, a sympathy, and a pathos that are bracing. I have no doubt that Mary Doria Russell is the most significant new author to emerge in American SF in the current decade, well exceeding in stature Neal Stephenson, Patrick O’Leary, Elizabeth Hand, and Tricia Sullivan; The Sparrow is replete with reasons why.

Russell, who has an academic background in palaeoanthropology, has revived the anthropological SF that was so central to the genre in the 1970s. Her object of study is partly us, and partly two species of aliens, whose resemblance to us is both profoundly misleading and disturbingly enlightening. This duality of focus is seen in the novel’s narrative structure: chapters alternate between a Jesuit mission to a far world, in which the reader is invited to gaze outward to the alien, and the sad aftermath of the mission, in which vision must turn painfully inwards. The outward chapters are extrovertedly blithe and jaunty, as a gangling young radio astronomer detects musical signals from Alpha Centauri, tells his friends, becomes famous, and is recruited (along with the friends) to join the Jesuit Order’s clandestine first human mission to the Centaurian world Rakhat. The true hero is Father Emilio Sandoz, a Jesuit who hopes his duties as linguist to the mission will at last dispel his spiritual doubts (in Sandoz, Father Ruiz-Sanchez of James Blish’s A Case of Conscience is clearly echoed). The humans reach Rakhat in great (indeed excessive) good humour; they make contact with surprisingly sympathetic rustic aliens; all proceeds well for a while. But then cultural misunderstandings, human hubris, and sheer bad luck intervene… The inward chapters of The Sparrow occur years later, when Sandoz, the sole survivor, must face his superiors, and the state of his own soul, back on Earth. The VaRakhati have stood as a distorting mirror into which we can gaze; now Sandoz, on our behalf, must look within. Others do their best to help him, and he can move towards redemption, but the joviality of Russell’s writing has turned sombre, as the story’s full implications, anthropological, moral, psychological, and theological, sink in.

Russell has considerable literary gifts. Her witty and affecting characterizations, her eloquent prose style, her general humorous exuberance, all combine superbly with her sympathetic feminism and her understanding of the stark realities of colonialism and intercultural incomprehension to make The Sparrow one of SF’s most compelling stories of First Contact. In her descriptions of the alien Runa and Jana’ata, Russell has achieved a wonderful and sensuous portrait of alien splendour. All of these virtues continue into a sequel, Children of God (1998), which I will review in due course.

BLACK SWAN (UK). 1997. TRADE PAPERBACK.

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