The Sparrow, by Maria Doria RussellRead about the other entries on the list.
Russell makes the case that a religious mission will be the first to make contact with alien societies in the very prologue: “It was predictable, in hindsight,” read the opening lines. While the temporal governments of the world were debating could and should, the spiritual government in the Vatican had already decided to send priests off to a newly discovered, inhabited planet. The only questions were who and how. The story of the Jesuit mission to Rakhat that unfolds from this decision is as much a spiritual story as a science fictional one. The aliens’ biology and society are carefully constructed—the one arising from the other—and come into deep and abiding conflict with human biology and society. The motives of the people who mission to visit Rakhat aren’t necessarily pure, and things only get messier on the ground.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
