The Sparrow by Mary Dora Russell

Sorry, this is a Sic-Fi book that doesn’t stand the test of time: twenty years, and it’s laughable.  It might have been a reasonable guess 25 years ago, that religion was going to be a major future factor in world history.  Things didn’t turn out that way though; secularism won the war.  This was for a strange and unpredicted reason: global warming.  Granted, major world –isms were conflicted around the turn of the millennium.  But they had no believable answer for global warming, which continued into the 21^st century for year after year, forcing people to accept scientific survival theory.

Unfortunately for Russell, having bought into the Western, Christian, Catholic doctrine, hook, line and sinker, she was locked into supporting an unrealistic, unpopular dictum about celibacy and sex in general [centuries away from any female issues with these topics].

This was a first novel. As such, it is uniquely open to both praise and criticism. The topic and plotline were relevant at the time because of the coming 3^rd millennial celebration. This was a generational thing: Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles”, Clark’s “2001”, & Sagan’s “Contact” each stirred huge new audiences to consider what it would be like to confront an alien people. All thoughtful people including writers want to take a stab at this topic.

Science Fiction allows an author to re-invent society in their own image, God-like.  “The Sparrow” looks twenty years ahead, enough to disavow any prognosticating ability.  This allows the author, Russell in this case, to proclaim her position on politics, religion, sex, and relationships; all taboo subjects normally, but she’s working under the guise of genre-writing; she has carte-blanc to create her own world.

As a novice, Mary Doria fell prey to the temptation to use omniscient narrator at the extreme in this first book of a series.  Personally, I feel that novels benefit from multiple points of view.  “The Sparrow,” having a great focus on spirituality, foregoes the atheistic POV, with God-adoring characters, combined with an omniscient God analyzing the human interactions.  

Besides the Sci-Fi imperative about an author defining the ingredients of a better-designed world, which Mary Doria does nicely, there is a need to define the inter-personal relationships between people and peoples who must co-relate in an alien environment.

Since Russell’s themes are captivity and sex, eventually rape, I can’t help but draw the conclusion that things went wildly in a different direction from when she conceived this novel.

We’ve now in the last 20 years had long-running [read popular] series about: Pelican Bay, a men’s prison, and more recently “Orange is the new Black” about women’s prisons.  The majority of people here in the US understand that sex is a dominant factor in prison life.  Send a healthy, young man or woman to prison and besides incarceration, you’re probably sentencing them to be raped, by inmates, guards or both.  We, the people, know this and continue to do this.