Movies - The Sparrow

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	Movies - The Sparrow

The Sparrow (1996) is the first novel by science fiction author Mary Doria Russell. It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award.

The novel begins when the SETI program, at the Arecibo Observatory, picks up broadcasts of music from the vicinity of Alpha Centauri. The first expedition to the world that is sending the music is organized by the Jesuit order.

Only one of the crew, a priest, survives to return to Earth, and he is damaged physically and psychologically. The story is told in flashback. In 2059 a Vatican inquest is begun in order to find the truth. The survivor, Emilio Sandoz, slowly reveals the fate of the expedition, starting with the discovery of the signals in 2019, up to his rescue from the planet Rakhat. His return has sparked great controversy. Not just because the Jesuits sent the mission independent of United Nations oversight, but also because Sandoz, the sole survivor, was found by his rescuers apparently engaging in prostitution, with the aliens apparantly now deeply hostile to humanity. In fact, when the rescuers appeared, he savagely murdered the alien child who had guided them to him. Contact with the UN mission, which sent Sandoz back to Earth alone in the Jesuit ship, has been since lost.

From the beginning, Sandoz, a talented linguist born in a Puerto Rican slum, believed the mission to Rakhat was divinely inspired. When he was posted to his hometown on Puerto Rico, he invited his friend Anne Edwards, a physician with a background in anthropology and her husband George, a retired engineer, to work with him. George volunteered at Arecibo, where he met astronomer Jimmy Quinn. Sophia Mendes, a computer expert (and former prostitute), came to Arecibo to create an AI program based on Quinn's work. She had previously worked with Sandoz to make a linguistics training AI. In Sandoz's mind, only God's will could bring this group of people with the perfect combination of knowledge and experience together at the moment when the alien signal was detected by Quinn.

The Society of Jesus quickly organized a mission to find the origin of the beautiful singing heard coming from Alpha Centauri. A small asteroid, left over from a defunct mining operation, was quietly purchased and converted to an interstellar vessel. The crew would consist of Sandoz, his four civilian friends, and three other Jesuit priests. D.W. Yarbrough was an ex-military pilot and the leader of the expedition. Marc Robichaux was a naturalist and Alan Pace, a musicologist.

The Stella Maris arrived in the Alpha Centauri system one year later, ship-time. Seventeen years had passed on Earth in the mean time. The crew found that the signals they had heard were radio broadcasts being reflected off of the planet Rakhat's moon, a necessity since the planet possessed no ionosphere. They landed on the surface away from signs of civilization, to acclimatize themselves to the new world. They experimented with eating local flora and fauna and the mission seemed to be going well until Alan Pace died suddenly and inexplicably.

Despite this blow to their faith in the mission, they continued. After spying a village with their solar powered glider, they decided to make contact with the inhabitants. The cat-like Runa of the village of Kashan were a peaceful agricultural people. They were clearly not the singers of the radio broadcasts, to the crew's disappointment.

Sandoz set about learning the language of the Runa, with the help of the Runa child Askama. Mendes, although admittedly attracted to Sandoz, decided to marry Quinn. And Yarbrough's health slowly began to fail.

While on a trip to obtain supplies from their orbital landing craft, Mendes and Robichaux crashed the glider. Neither was seriously injured but the glider was a total loss. They flew the landing craft back to Kashan, not realizing until they arrived that they used up too much fuel to ever return to Stella Maris with the craft. The crew accepted that, barring the arrival of another craft from Earth or discovery of a local fuel source, they were stuck on Rakhat.

The crew got their first glimpse of the culture of the singers in Supaari VaGayjur, a merchant with a trading relationship with Kashan. Supaari was a Jana'ata, a similar but separate species from the Runa. He promised to show the crew his city Gayjur but seemed in no hurry to deliver on this promise.

What the crew did not realize was that Supaari was a member of the lowest caste of his people, a third-born Jana'ata with no right to reproduce. He was economically comfortable due to his ease of interaction with the Runa but had little social status. In the crew from Earth, he saw an opportunity to raise his status. The crew had brought with them many things, like coffee, that were of great fascination to the inhabitants of Rakhat.

The crew introduced the concept of gardening to the Runa, who had previously only harvested wild plants growing outside their villages. With new nearby food sources, they grew quite fat and fertile.

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