rachelmanija | The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell

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The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell

This is one of several classic novels about Jesuits in space.

The book takes place in two timelines. In the present, Father Emilio Sandoz has returned to Earth as the sole survivor of a trip to a newly discovered planet which went disastrously wrong. He is near death from malnutrition and general bad treatment, and has been tortured, gang raped, and horrifically mutilated by kangaroo-like aliens. He was discovered in this condition in an alien brothel, and literally everyone on Earth seems to believe that he just randomly decided that he'd like to be a whore for aliens.

People often do refuse to believe that any given survivor was actually raped and instead claim that the sex was consensual. But if there's ONE situation in which people are likely to believe that a rape happened, it's when the victim is the sole survivor of a massacre and is discovered starving, tortured, mutilated, injured by violent sex, and locked in a brothel.

So that entire storyline, which is an enormous part of the book, was one that I found impossible to believe. Especially since until near the end of the book, literally nobody even considers the possibility that Emilio – who, don't forget, was mutilated so he is literally unable to use his hands – had been raped rather than having consensually had incredibly brutal and violent sex with a bunch of aliens.

The other thing everyone blames him for is that he killed a child. We get no details on that until the end of the book, so I'll just say that once we learn the details, I had a big problem believing that blame too.

This book got an incredible amount of mainstream acclaim. Unsurprisingly, it has a number of the flaws common to science fiction written by writers who don't normally write it, and largely read by people who don't normally read it. It has genre tropes but not the underpinnings that make them make sense.

What it also has a lot of is whump. If it was written for Whumpfest for the prompt "Everybody blames character for being gang raped, mutilated, and nearly killed," I would say, "Excellent job!"

At least 50% of the entire book consists of Emilio being accused of terrible things, being so traumatized that he's unable to defend himself, having nightmares, having migraines, throwing up, not eating, doing agonizing physical therapy with painful prosthetics, etc. I felt like I was reading a Bucky Barnes fic circa 2018.

The second timeline is the story of the expedition to the alien planet Rakhat. It's discovered when a low-level tech working on SETI, Jimmy Quinn, hears aliens singing on radio waves. Jimmy, who is friends with Emilio and his group of friends, gets together with them one night. They decide it would be cool to visit the planet, and come up with the idea of making an asteroid into a spaceship. They present this to the Vatican, which is the only entity who cares enough to send a spaceship. It hires the entire friend group who came up with the idea to be the crew, plus a couple redshirts.

I cannot think of a less-qualified crew for a first contact mission. It consists of Emilio (linguist and priest), Sofia (another linguist), an elderly doctor, her husband the elderly engineer (all sorts of engineer, he does everything from mechanical engineering to nanoparticles), another priest, and Jimmy, the low ranking dude at SETI. None of them are qualified to go on an expedition to another planet! None of them are capable of designing a spaceship on the back of an envelope!

Once they get to the new planet, which is really under-described, they open the hatch and breathe the air. They test the local plants and animals for edibility by eating them. Didn't anyone think to bring some mice so they could feed the alien plants to something other than themselves to find out if it will kill them???

They meet the indigenous people, who do not appear to be the singers whose song was first heard by SETI, but who are friendly. This was by far my favorite part of the book, as they learn the new language and hang out with aliens. They do not do any investigation of anywhere but the small area they're in, or ask basically any of the questions you'd think they were there to answer. They do not ask about religion. They do not look for the singers, or draw any conclusions from their friends being terrified of singing.

They brought no medical imaging equipment, and although they knew the lander had only a tiny amount of fuel they waste it and then get stuck there permanently.

The shit hits the fan in an extremely rushed section in which everyone but Emilio dies off-page.

It turns out that there are actually two species on the planet. The species they've been hanging with is the prey. The other species eats them. The expedition grew gardens to supplement their own food, and they generously share it with the locals. It turns out that their breeding is tightly controlled by the predatory race, and the females only go into estrus when they get enough calories. So the prey starts breeding like mad, attracting the attention of the predators, who show up and kill them all.

Emilio, the lone survivor, is FED BABY MEAT. Then he's horribly mutilated. Then he's sold to a brothel where he's repeatedly raped by aliens. The rape aliens write pornographic songs about raping him. ~~Then an earthquake makes the brothel fall on him and he's impaled on rebar. Then he gets cancer.~~

Eventually another expedition of humans arrives and asks about the first one. The alien child Emilio befriended leads the humans to the brothel, which I guess has extremely poor security. (I can't think why he didn't just walk out, if a child could walk in. Maybe she was only able to get in because there were humans with her?) Emilio, meanwhile, has decided he'll kill the next person who walks in the room, since nobody ever comes in the room except to rape him. The kid opens the door and Emilio slams her against the wall, killing her, before he realizes who she is.

The humans are horrified and send a message back to Earth that Emilio is a whore and a child murderer. This arrives twelve years before Emilio does, so he's a famous villain for years.

This makes NO SENSE. Everyone on Earth knows aliens killed the entire party, so would they really think an alien child deserves the same consideration as a human child? Would they find the distinction so meaningless that they don't even mention that she's an alien when they talk about her?

More importantly, it's incredibly obvious that Emilio had no intention of killing a child, but was so traumatized and freaked out that he jumped the first person who walked in and killed her accidentally, having no idea who she was. It even says the room was dark! If you walk into a room where the sole survivor of an expedition murdered by aliens is being held, tortured and mutilated and they jumped the first person walks in the room, this seems obviously an act of intended self-defense or at worst revenge gone wrong, not deliberate murder.

Religion is a huge part of the book but it's weirdly unmoored from the science fiction part. There's tons of discussion of Emilio's celibacy (the most boring aspect of being a priest IMO) but despite the Catholic Church funding the expedition and putting multiple priests on it, there's no discussion about the theological implications of aliens. Nobody even asks the aliens whether they have a religion!

Back on Earth, Emilio agonizes over how a benevolent God allowed the terrible events he experienced. This is a very understandable reaction, but there is an entire field of study devoted to that exact question. It's called theodicy and it ought to be something a priest would be aware of. Even if Emilio is too traumatized to think of it, the other priests ought to be bringing in actual theology when they talk to him about it, because THEY'RE ALL PRIESTS.

Also, nothing about Emilio's crisis of faith had to be science fictional. He'd be having the exact same crisis if he got caught up in a war on Earth where his friends were killed and he experienced the exact same trauma only done by humans.

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Wow that's... how did it get so much acclaim? That whole storyline sounds like something a 13-year-old would've come up with and thought was edgy.

I recall reading and enjoying this when it first came out, but the only thing that’s stuck in my mind was the bit where Emilio realised his alien predator patron/protector (?) thought he’d consented to the hand mutilation due to a translation failure. Something to do with the word for people who’d had the procedure (which if I recall was far less painful/traumatic with alien physiology than to humans) being related to a weeping-willow-analogous plant, so the poor priest thought they were talking about botany?

I recall enjoying the extreme whump and the whole predator/prey alien societies, while also thinking all the human actions were wildly implausible.

Yes! The procedure is called something like "making you like an alien weeping willow" (ie, dependent) and Emilio didn't realize that his hands would be mutilated so his fingers were doubled in length and fell uselessly from his wrists like alien weeping wilow fronds. I actually liked that.

I also liked the predator/prey societies. I love the idea of intelligent predator/prey societies in general. One of my very favorite takes on it was a brief mention in Nick O'Donohoe's The Magic and the Healing, where we see a wedding between two deer-people that involves rituals which derive meaning from them being prey.

Edited 2023-10-23 19:00 (UTC)

Now I want to read a load of SF about human idealistic Space Federations being horrified by species in a variety of predator/prey relationships where “stop eating your neighbours” isn’t a viable or culturally acceptable solution. Like, the predator species literally needs to eat the prey species in order to be able to breed, and no one has been able to synthesise the required protein, or the prey species religion is based on ritual consumption.

Or maybe it turns out humans are the only species who _hasnt_ evolved with a predator/prey relationship with another intelligent species, and all the aliens are horrified and find this deeply perverse. (I’m now imagining a well meaning alien campaign encouraging humans to “eat more dolphins! They’re intelligent!”)

SOMEONE must have done it, surely.

Yes! I find the idea really interesting. I think the closest I've seen to it is two books where mate-eating spiders are intelligent, Diane Duane's excellent Star Trek novel The Wounded Sky and Adrian "Of Course It's Him" Tchaikovsky's Children of Time.

Yep, I can think of multiple books where a species devours itself under certain conditions (usual reproduction, usually spider-based physiology), but I’m completely drawing a blank on predator/prey relationships between two different intelligent species in SF. Other than The Sparrow, of course.

I really want something that delves into the prey species' rituals and culture.

I really want something that delves into the prey species' rituals and culture.

I am reminded of:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42711/the-heaven-of-animals

Thanks, that was gorgeous. I love the image of the predators descending for years.

The Traveller RPG has the Hivers and the K'Kree. Who didn't evolve on the same planet, but do have competing interstellar empires.

The Hivers are omnivorous giant starfish, who eat their non-sentient young as a form of population control. IIRC they can't stop themselves constantly spawning young as it does nasty things to their biochemistry.

The K'kree are centauroid herbivores and did have a competing intelligent carnivore species on their planet, until they wiped them out at about the early gunpowder stage. And then they got into space, and kept on wiping out carnivores and omnivores.

And then they run into each other.

Star Trek Discovery had a predator/prey storyline, and one of the main characters is from the prey species. However, it was not done very well or consistently and we never really got the predator side of the story.

The exact hand mutilation and the cultural reasoning behind it (and Emilio's misunderstanding of it) is the one thing I remember really liking about the book, which is otherwise, as you said, full of characters making so many mind-boggling assumptions.

I totally would be behind the sheer whump of "character gets blamed for their own gang rape and mutilation" in an idfic, but when you combine it with some ostensibly serious (if, like you said, weirdly disconnected from actual religious thought) theology, it loses the iddy suspension of disbelief and just becomes ... weird. Which, for all its faults, isn't a trap A Little Life falls into.

Yes! The procedure is called something like "making you like an alien weeping willow" (ie, dependent) and Emilio didn't realize that his hands would be mutilated so his fingers were doubled in length and fell uselessly from his wrists like alien weeping wilow fronds. I actually liked that.

I feel like if you want to lean into the "tragic misunderstanding caused by radically alien cultures and physiology" aspect, you then kind of spoil it if you go "and also they imprison, starve and rape him a lot."

Like. Presumably they do not think he is consenting to that that?

Kangaroo Alien # 1 did the hand mutilation. Later he sold Emilio to Kangaroo Alien # 2 for money and social standing. Alien # 2 was the one who really wanted to rape him, and the one who installed him in the brothel so all his friends could also rape him and then write songs and poetry about it. I'd say that everything after the hand mutilation was definitely knowingly noncon.

They do not ask about religion.

Ah, one of the classic errors of 1950s/60s science fiction, along with not asking about the aliens' reproductive cycle, or their relationship to any other sentient species on their planet ("the other alien species is the adult form of the first species" being a common discovery).

Emilio, the lone survivor, is FED BABY MEAT. Then he's horribly mutilated. Then he's sold to a brothel where he's repeatedly raped by aliens. The rape aliens write pornographic songs about raping him.

... is there a particular motive for this? I realize that on Earth humans frequently rape and mutilate other humans, but even if these aliens are just like that, Emilio is presumably their first contact with someone from off their planet, so you'd think he'd be of some scientific interest and even if they are purely evil, they'd at least want to vivisect him or something?

Also "hey, these aliens are really into rape and mutilation" seems like contextual information that it'd be relevant to pass back to Earth, and, again, might contribute to people not assuming that Emilio decided to have sex with them for fun.

h, one of the classic errors of 1950s/60s science fiction, along with not asking about the aliens' reproductive cycle, or their relationship to any other sentient species on their planet ("the other alien species is the adult form of the first species" being a common discovery).

Yes! Though this was from 2008. The Jesuits notice all sorts of things that are odd, like the aliens being terrified of music when it was singing that alerted the humans to the existence of their planet, but give up on asking about them when it seems hard to translate.

... is there a particular motive for this?

Baby meat: They had a lot of baby meat and had to feed him something. There was another survivor who refused to eat it and died, which makes Emilio feel even more guilty and terrible.

Mutilation: This was possibly a cultural misunderstanding. It was a ritual which makes one person another's dependent, and is less excruciating for the aliens who have fewer nerves in their hands. It was possibly one alien trying to protect Emilio, who consented to "Let me protect you" without realizing how that was done.

Rape: The aliens thought Emilio was really hot, apparently.

Also "hey, these aliens are really into rape and mutilation" seems like contextual information that it'd be relevant to pass back to Earth, and, again, might contribute to people not assuming that Emilio decided to have sex with them for fun.

You'd think. Especially since they murdered the rest of the party! Why didn't that make humans seriously side-eye the aliens instead of blaming Emilio?

Edited 2023-10-23 18:51 (UTC)

Though this was from 2008.

It's from 1996; it won the then-Tiptree in its year, I would imagine because of the handling of male rape, because otherwise I can't remember very much about gender in the novel.

Oops, thanks. I must have mistaken the reprint date for the pub date. That makes more sense.

IIRC, the judges said they thought it handled celibacy in interesting way.

IIRC, the judges said they thought it handled celibacy in interesting way.

Okay, that's cool.

Rape: The aliens thought Emilio was really hot, apparently.

Like, him specifically, or humans in general (in an "And I Awoke And Found Me Here On The Cold Hill's Side" way)?

Unknown as by the time he met the aliens who ended up raping him, he was the only human left alive. I did get the impression it was him specifically though.

"And I Awoke And Found Me Here On The Cold Hill's Side" is really hard to top (as it were) when it comes to alien sex stories. You've read

skazka's fic of it, right?

You've read skazka's fic of it, right?

OH YES. It's so good.

Yes, all the things you said. I sort of loved the alien linguistics and important stuff (like whether Emilio consented to the weird mutilation and rape-prison thing) getting lost in translation, in spite of everything else. Also Sofia is a Jewish character in a not at all the typical ways that the one Jewish person in the [generic SF setting] tropes go. I think MDR started off Catholic and converted to Judaism, (which normally I wouldn't bring up, since someone who is Jewish is just Jewish whatever their pathway to where they are now), but it feels like she was working through some emotions about Christianity and theodicy, while also coming to a very personal interpretation of why Judaism is better.

I feel like some of the buzz about this was based around, isn't it amazing to explore the rape of a celibate male character. I don't think that can have been so unusual in the 90s, but the SF community really got very enthusiastic about it. The book even won the Otherwise which is supposed to be for really innovative takes on gender.

I think MDR started off Catholic and converted to Judaism, (which normally I wouldn't bring up, since someone who is Jewish is just Jewish whatever their pathway to where they are now), but it feels like she was working through some emotions about Christianity and theodicy, while also coming to a very personal interpretation of why Judaism is better.

Oh, that does make sense. So does the part about male rape being seen as new and original. Probably it was the first time many readers had seen it taken seriously rather than as a prison joke.

Re rape of male character: honestly yes, it was pretty unusual. The 90s was where some elements of it started to be engaged with, but the idea that men were as vulnerable to rape in violent situations as women was not something that especially a mainstream, literarily praised book did. It was still pretty unusual in the early 00s, even as it became a pretty common trope in specifically fandom and (usually woman-authored) some ends of SF.

As Rachel notes, it was almost certainly the first time a lot of readers had seen it actually engaged with, rather than merely as the lolarious punchline to raunchy prison jokes (which would still actually find some way to victim-blame in that case, usually by framing it so that somehow being in prison sexually perverted the men who had it happen to them so that they would put up with it).

The 80s and 90s were honestly pretty horrific on every level still in terms of ideas that men could only be victimized if somehow they failed their manliness and that being victimized inherently meant they did so and become other-than-men. Which, see the Otherwise award.

The thing about Russell is that she writes well, on a technical level, but the stories she tells are just not very good. I've always felt that she would have benfitted from four or five years on ff.net writing those Harry Potter novels where Harry (or whoever the designated woobie is) gets raped and tortured by the Death. Eaters for a while, and then all his friends turn on him for a while and he is very sad. Just to get it out of her system, you know?

You can also see the ways in which she was influenced by Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles, but just takes it all so far over the top that it gets a little silly.

I've always felt that she would have benfitted from four or five years on ff.net writing those Harry Potter novels where Harry (or whoever the designated woobie is) gets raped and tortured by the Death. Eaters for a while, and then all his friends turn on him for a while and he is very sad.

It felt just like that.

I had to go look up the dw entry where I stopped writing about one book to break off into a rant aobut how much I hated Russell's WW2 book, Thread of Grace -- it's the sense that she's enjoying the pain a little too much. Which is OK when you're writing about Jesuits being tortured by aliens, I guess, but a little less so when about the Shoah.

Link?

https://vaznetti.dreamwidth.org/4749.html

It starts out about my eternal hope that Alan Furst will improve as a writer or plot and character someday, but then I got distracted.

Here is my favorite review of that book from Goodreads:

"There is no Status entry for RIP - but that is what this fine book is now doing. It met its demise at the hands of an overflowing pot of beans. It all started when my mother-in-law advised me to soak beans overnight with a bit of baking soda. When I forgot the overnight bit, I thought I'd be clever and just boil them for an hour with plenty of baking soda. Having slept through elementary science class, I had no idea that I was creating a volcanic eruption like none ever seen in a classroom, and off I went to do some laundry. My dog's frantic barking and a mysterious odor drew me to the kitchen where there it was. A flow of bean lava coming out of the pot, onto my counters, down the side of my cabinets and into my shoes, taking with it this book. The bean mush was thick, hot and bubbly and wound up everywhere. So ended A Thread of Grace."

That is a delightful review.

how much I hated Russell's WW2 book, Thread of Grace -- it's the sense that she's enjoying the pain a little too much. Which is OK when you're writing about Jesuits being tortured by aliens, I guess, but a little less so when about the Shoah.

I liked much of A Thread of Grace, but did think it was cement truck levels of unnecessary to have the adolescent survivor of the partisan group be so damaged by her experiences that after her death in the twenty-first century, her adult children all conclude she was incapable of loving them, especially since at the time when I read the novel I had rather regular contact with a Holocaust survivor who was a mother and a grandmother and demonstrably loving of all generations of her family; I don't pretend that generational trauma isn't real, I know equally some people whose parents were survivors and terrible parents, but Russell's choice really felt like closing down any hope of resilience, which I never enjoy as either a narrative decision or a belief about survivorship of any kind.

it was cement truck levels of unnecessary to have the adolescent survivor of the partisan group be so damaged by her experiences that after her death in the twenty-first century, her adult children all conclude she was incapable of loving them...

I think that was probably part of the reason it felt to me like a book very much about hopelessness and destruction. Which is fair enough if that's what you want but wasn't what the book was presented as. Obviously it is the case that some survivors become terrible parents and perpetuate their trauma on their children, but not all of them -- like you I have seen both outcomes. Whereas I do feel that Russell purposefully chose the worst outcome for her characters, even the survivors, not because it served the narrative but because it was satisfying to her as an author. As a reader, I felt that she enjoyed the pain a little too much.

Whereas I do feel that Russell purposefully chose the worst outcome for her characters, even the survivors, not because it served the narrative but because it was satisfying to her as an author. As a reader, I felt that she enjoyed the pain a little too much.

It did not feel as obvious to me that she enjoyed it as opposed to merely believing it the most authentic and inevitable outcome, but either way I didn't like it.

(It's also part of the problem with her coin-flip strategy of character survival: if she really implemented it as described, then the element of random chance had doomed nearly her entire main cast by the end of the novel, meaning that assigning a bitter ending to one of the very few characters not to have canonically snuffed it in wartime—and the only one to be tracked by the narrative into the present day—concentrates the sense of futility differently than if more of the characters had lived to represent a wider array of post-war options. I agree with you that it undermines the stated sentiment of celebrating the Italian partisans and underground. I think it might have been fine to flip the coin for the first draft, but keeping it as a final authority over the fates of her characters is one of the reasons the novel feels so well, that happened shapeless to me.)

Edited 2023-10-24 05:46 (UTC)

Wow. I had heard vaguely that this book was dark, but also that it was good. One of those things seem to hold up!

Word.

Rachel, somewhere in here I saw you say you're interested in predator/prey alien societies--have you read A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys? Without being too spoilery, the alien species in there have come to coexistence from a previously fraught relationship (can't quite remember the details at the moment but I highly recommend the book!).

I have not! I've vaguely heard of it and thought it sounded interesting.

... And then I read the sequel because people said there was an interesting use of Judaism, and, well, okay, sorta? But also not worth it.

Edited 2023-10-23 17:45 (UTC)

The fact that no one on the entire planet Earth believed it was rape and that an expedition to another planet USED UP ALL THEIR FUEL without thinking about it were the two things that just made the entire thing impossible for me to take seriously.

Right??? Those were so ridiculous that I could not get past them. Also just randomly eating alien plants when they had plenty of their own food.

What was the use of Judaism in the sequel?

Assuming you are okay with MASSIVE SPOILERS for the sequel

Sofia is not dead! And gives birth to her & Emilio's son! who becomes some kind of savior or something, I don't remember. When humans meet the aliens again, the carnivores aren't eating the intelligent prey people because, they say, "it isn't kosher". Which as a reveal came across as very sweet, if you didn't mind the soap opera and white saviorism all around it.

His son?! They had sex?!

LOLOLOLOL, that is indeed a pretty good reveal.

Apparently!!!

OK, Wikipedia informs me I misremembered, and Sofia's son isn't Emilio's.

Holy cow (so to speak)! That is a hysterical reveal about cultural change in an alien society. I almost want to read the book, but I hate Russell's work enough to know it won't be worth it.

iirc

Sofia also goes full genocidal herself and Emilio gets to "what about the Holocaust?" her, which fully destroyed any good faith I was willing to extend the book.

…thank you i will never read this book. :| ~~ffs i can think of like twelve ways to make the whump HORRIFYINGLY BELIEVABLE and you wouldn’t even have to change the plot that hardly at all!!~~

~~Do tell.~~

Obviously I haven't read the book and now have no intention of doing so, but going on comments here and your description, with the explicit specific intention of preserving "the survivor gets blamed for everything that happened to him on a huge societal scale, in the worst ways for him possible, except this also becomes a plausible result of specific reasons, that are actually framed by the narrative":

---> space and alien contact are unavoidably political; involve the fucking Catholic Church and the Jesuits in that and you're not only squaring the inter-community Political, you're squaring the intra-community Political. There will be factions that actively want to interpret this expedition overall in the worst possible light both maliciously and simply out of "everything the Church does is bad"; there will be factions that want to find a scapegoat for the utter catastrophe of the mission that doesn't reflect either on the entire Jesuit Order or which does but doesn't reflect on the Church; there are going to be all kinds of factions that actively want to manipulate the information about this mission either via outright fabrication or through being morally sure that This (whatever This they come up with) Must Have Happened because that narrative is emotionally convenient for them.

It is indeed totally implausible that without external motive there would be a universal assumption of perverse decision rather than victimization, but look at one single major news-grabbing crisis/harm done to others that has Different Agendas to make use of it, and active interpretation of narratives and events to suit one's own either manipulative or emotional needs come fast and furious.

Fun wrinkles to this:
- it is assumed/put about he actually murdered the rest of the expedition on purpose out of sheer twisted fucked-up-ery and that is also why he did everything else to himself (particularly attractive to those who need to rehabilitate the rest of the expedition but don't want to start an inflammatory rage-fest against the aliens in question for whatever reason - and there are many potential ones! - because it all becomes His Fault)

- same assumption, but allows that maybe the things that happened to him subsequently were not his fault, but kinda don't care because He Obviously Deserved It

- same assumption but based on the idea that He Lost His Mind, and is still crazy and dangerous

- narrative that Actually The Expedition Did Something Horrible To The Aliens And So Deserved It

- narrative that the Expedition Deserved It Because Colonialism AND initially the survivor was into all of what happened to him and has only changed his tune b/c humans found him and now he's ashamed and trying to cover that up.

Etc etc. All of these can be going around at the same time; especially if there's active motivation in one quarter or another against letting Anger At Atrocity build up either at the aliens or on this expedition's behalf. This is even easier to achieve because it seems almost easily assumed that this KIND of information would be linked very heavily to someone's idea of national/terrestrial security and thus highly unlikely for the message to be passed on to the press BEFORE it was peered over by whatever political powers are controlling money and permissions for space expeditions.

These motivations don't necessarily have to be plot related: I can think of three in-Church feuds the Jesuits are quietly in that have been going for decades (possibly centuries) that could apply, and so many easy causes of just People In Conflict With The Church/with Missionaries in Space/etc. Just a lot of collateral damage. Which is almost worse (or at least can be framed as worse) because at least if there's a plot reason for things it's like, related - but when you're being ground up just because you're COLLATERAL to someone's agenda it's insult to injury.

***extra points if you DO still want to set it up that nobody but the Vatican (or even just a small contingent that happened to get a budget while nobody was looking) thought the initial expedition was worth it but in the subsequent decades things have changed and frankly a significant chunk of the earth is now belatedly horrified at the idea that the Catholic Christian Church is potentially the First Representative of Humanity to Aliens, worse that it's not even! qualified people! and in the latter case the Vatican is scrambling to frame that in a way that makes it malice/manipulation on the part of the backers and not incompetence on the part of the actual established power base.

----> Easily support this by having the survivor's trauma severely impair his ability to communicate, either by outright traumatic mutism (always a good option for this), or by making his verbal communication confusing and incoherent. Severe acute psychological trauma can, after all, seriously confuse a patient's ability to construct coherent narrative ways to describe what happens to theme. This means that you can make it either so that the initial contacts have no information on him other than he's In This State plus he's violent, but for whatever reason they also have some obligation to transport him back.

You don't have them explicitly frame this as murder or even have any INTERPRETATION of the information they send back to Earth, just: "we found him, we think he's this guy based on our information, we found him here and in this state, and this is what happened when we found him". It sounds like it's not EASY to communicate back and forth in real time, so.

For me this would be extra horrible on actual arrival because presumably he then LIVES on the ship with these people for twelve years, and even if initially they are very wary/basically hostile/untrained it's pretty difficult not to end up communicating and understanding SOMEWHAT, so if they're awake for the journey, by the end you end up with them ARRIVING to discover the horror of what their brief earlier message turned into in those 12 years.

Or if they do cryo you can skip this, but then you're delivering the survivor in his still incapacitated state, so again, doesn't help.

---> this is where you swing back to "other people will actually have agendas about how this expedition and its outcomes are framed, and some of them will be powerful, and will be moving to make sure that things stay the way they want them": obviously it SHOULD be possible for the survivor to be delivered to competent, ethical medical and psychiatric (and legal) practitioners who know about these things and will adequately treat him - but INSTEAD you have someone in politics, or someone in the Church (or both) essentially making sure he ends up with practitioners who will make sure the narrative the person in power wants gets supported, or at least something as close to the narrative they want as can be supported by now available evidence.

So maybe it's no longer to totally hold up the idea of him as Evil Plotting Pervert but you can frame him as Unstable, Scary Weakling whose experience of trauma in the regrettable cultural misunderstanding of First Contact then turned him into a violent, dangerous unstable threat who needs to spend the rest of his life in a psychiatric institution/In Pastoral Care of the Vatican/whatever you choose the motivation to be.

Maybe the expedition can no longer be themselves Actively Vilified but they CAN still be the authors of their own misfortunes due to culpable stupidity. Etc.

Bonus points that hitting this welcome will probably retraumatize the FUCK out of the survivor so that he decompensates rather badly. Assuming that he wasn't just stuck in some kind of long-term sleep for the space voyage, in which case he's just further acutely traumatized.

Extra fun effect on the survivor if on some level he KNOWS that there are actually good trauma medical and psychiatric practitioners, that such things exist, that honestly there COULD have been some expectation of Getting Home and finding Good Help and instead either being turned over to incompetents or subject to malicious use of the system to harm and hem him in, because then you can invoke the push-pull crazy-making tension of "but the People with Learning are telling me that X is true so maybe I AM wrong and X is true/what is real truth anymore?"

You can also do this on the religious level! You can do it SO WELL on the religious level, if it's Vatican politics that's aimed at him. For that matter you can do it pretty well if it's anti-Vatican forces that are driving the hateful narratives, because being a Catholic in crisis of faith and having the people around you be hostile to that is not actually necessarily better for sanity.

--->Now depending on how bleak you want the story to be, you either continue this indefinitely (leaving the survivor to stare bleakly at a wall somewhere) or you have it happen for a While and then something changes/someone intervenes/some amount of refuge is found and you pursue that as much as you care to, as the author.

NB: again, this is me specifically aiming to PRESERVE the "everyone blames the survivor for his own suffering" etc thing - I'm not saying this is how I would tell a first-contact-with-Jesuits story, I'm just saying that even if the extreme whump is what you want, or if you are in a position where These Are The Things You Know About This Story And They Won't Change (something I do get stuck with sometimes, with stories!), okay, this is how you actually use plausible pressures and events to get there without being so jarring. And it wouldn't require a LOT of changes or a lot of extra scenes - a lot of these pressures/etc could be sketched in with fairly brief interactions or narrative bits.

BUT it sounds like some of the big things that all of this requires that the author doesn't have is a genuine understanding of how the Catholic Church and the Vatican operate in the political pressures of the world, and how both those external and the internal pressures of Vatican politics THEMSELVES play, as well as WHY this kind of victim-blame narrative gets going (it's not just . . . out of the blue, it's because of the ways that it serves the needs of those telling the story, either explicitly or subconsciously, either politically, culturally or emotionally or all of the above) - as well as the ways that space-exploration and first-contact are never NOT going to be subject to global political and cultural dynamics and pressures and power-plays?

It's not that you CAN'T get "weird little underprepared and inappropriate group goes out to make First Contact and it goes to hell and then for various reasons things are Horrific for the survivor even after he gets back to Earth" if that's what you want to write/what the story insists it is? You just have to know what you have to alter about the way the world works, what dynamics and structures have to somehow be accounted for/be bypassed in order to allow that to happen and to have that outcome. Which isn't that HARD to do in this case, but . . . yeah.

Really the most absurd and totally-unable-to-be-fixed element here is the idea that a Jesuit would not be having COMPLEX and intense and extremely densely literate theological conversations to himself about all of this shit throughout, including, even if he DOESN'T ask the aliens about faith-issues, WHY he's not and what he's attempting to figure out, and also the entire complex history of the Order of Jesus in terms of exploration, missionary work, contact with other cultures, and both its legacy and its current perspectives on that complex and blood-filled legacy. Especially since as I glance at the Wiki plot summary, there are THREE OTHER JESUITS AND A JEWISH LINGUIST ABOARD.

It also seems like the author has no idea what it would look like when someone with his background (all the way thru seminary, years of missionary work, etc) has a crisis of faith - not that they CAN'T, but that this is going to be a super high-level theologian's crisis. This is a crisis of faith that will have citations, footnotes, and will already know the literature on what his intensely intellectual-academic order has to say about the exact kind of crisis of faith he is having, including the Problem of Evil and so on.

(That's not to say it's not well possible for someone with that background and knowledge to just hit the wall of "fuck this, none of this is satisfactory anymore, what the fuck" from horrific experiences - they can! they do! but it doesn't look like what seems to be there from the description of the plot above, which is very "moderately educated lay-person has First Confrontation with the Suffering of Humankind and finds faith Shaken.")

. . . he would also not be under the delusion that the team they have is adequate to the purpose they're being sent on, and I would frame that as part of what puts STRESS on his faith both in the church and in God beyond it, as this would be an example of the Church pushing underqualified/underprepared people off to do something very dangerous, which let's be real, is not at all out of character for them!

Those bits are unfixable - you just have to change them. But I could frame up the traumatic horror and whump without a lot of plot change, I think.

ETA: tho tbh coming back to this having been reminded that it was written in 1996, a fewwww of the things that are quite egregious about the implausibility become less so.

They still aren't GOOD, but they take her from "what planet are you FROM" to "you are uncritically replicating a superficial gestalt of the culture around you." Bc tbh from a 1996 perspective (as I was literally first becoming AWARE of the issues at that time), it's honestly a lot less implausible to imagine that someone would assume that public reaction to Emilio would totally side-line the issue of rape and assume that his existence in the brothel made him a perverted slut; that's . . . more or less how we superficially framed prison-rape via jokes and comedy and even revenge fantasy, to a large extent. Even if the very initial experience was an attack, there was a lot of subtext that having gone through that experience, you now were that perverted slut, and kind of a lot of underlying sense that you wouldn't've had that first thing happen to you if you were sufficiently pure and manly anyway.

Likewise, the idea that people would understand how trauma works and that people in these situations would be traumatized and so on, even at baseline, is less solid in a 1996 frame - like it's not that there WEREN'T people who did, and who weren't doing absolutely critical work on the topic, there were. But if you're just Some Writer extrapolating 2019 (oh so many years from now!) and then 2031 or whatever, and YOU don't really know shit about trauma except what you intuit from human experience, I can see how it would not be obvious to you that we would have to be better at identifying it and handling it as a global species, and with it as part of our policies and so on, by that point in time.

It still implies "someone did not do any EXTRA research beyond what she superficially knew about these topics", but it's just that, rather than "are you from Mars, do you not understand how the world works".

Like I said, this doesn't take these issues into the realm of it being actually good, or even a fully plausible extrapolation from a place of grounded research, which I would want to do before launching into this kind of story, but I can see why a normal surface-level understanding would lead to an author extrapolating in these ways if they didn't. Add some lovely prose, and yeah, I could also see audience reactions being what they were.

Edited 2023-10-24 19:41 (UTC)

Yes, that would all help a lot. Just add some motivations!

Another missed opportunity: the Vatican actually runs an IRL observatory, partly staffed by Jesuits, and has run conferences on extra-terrestrial life. If the Vatican decided to run a space mission, it could do a better job than this shower.

it has a number of the flaws common to science fiction written by writers who don't normally write it

*le sigh* And usually acclaimed as being somehow better than mainstream SF by reviewers who don't usually review it.

the elderly engineer (all sorts of engineer, he does everything from mechanical engineering to nanoparticles)

*Sigh*, engineering doesn't work like that. As anyone would have realised watching me try to bang a nail into a piece of wood yesterday. I'm tempted to say this is another flaw common to 'literary' writing.

Another missed opportunity: the Vatican actually runs an IRL observatory, partly staffed by Jesuits, and has run conferences on extra-terrestrial life.

Cool! I didn't know that.

I felt defensive of the Vatican's competence while reading it, which is not a feeling I have ever felt before.

Even I know engineering doesn't work like that, and I know nothing about engineering.

I felt defensive of the Vatican's competence while reading it, which is not a feeling I have ever felt before.

Hey, I'm Catholic, and it's not a feeling I'm familiar with either ;)

Another missed opportunity: the Vatican actually runs an IRL observatory, partly staffed by Jesuits, and has run conferences on extra-terrestrial life.

Brother Guy Consolmagno turned up at Boskone one of the years I attended and was a pretty neat person to have conversations about telescopes with.

Yeah, I can see how he would be.

To loop another layer of SFness into that - I was at one of the astronomy panels he was on (virtually) at Boskone in February 2021, and he told a charming story.

Namely that when he was appointed as head of the observatory, he reread Katherine Addison's Goblin Emperor as a guide to how he wanted to treat people, coming into a role where he knew a bit more than the protagonist there (he'd been working in the observatory for some years at that point) but being in charge of everyone was not something he'd entirely expected or trained for specifically.

(He is absolutely on the top of my "if he's at a con I'm on, prioritise his panels" list, personally: great stories, interesting science, and a lot of thoughtful approaches in general.)

Namely that when he was appointed as head of the observatory, he reread Katherine Addison's Goblin Emperor as a guide to how he wanted to treat people, coming into a role where he knew a bit more than the protagonist there (he'd been working in the observatory for some years at that point) but being in charge of everyone was not something he'd entirely expected or trained for specifically.

That is completely delightful and I hope many people have told Sarah Monette.

I am pretty sure that has been done. But yes, absolutely charming story.

That is absolutely lovely.

That's a great story, and yes, Goblin Emperor is a pretty good model for how to be a boss.

I met him and had lunch with him and my undergrad research advisor some 20 years ago. He is a delightful man. His book Brother Astronomer was my first exposure to that Jesuit way of approaching science as a way to know God. Not for me, but I needed exposure to that sort of thing as 20 year old atheist with a organized religion allergy.

that Jesuit way of approaching science as a way to know God. Not for me, but I needed exposure to that sort of thing as 20 year old atheist with a organized religion allergy.

That's really nice; I am glad he could be that kind of window for you.

I'm tempted to say this is another flaw common to 'literary' writing.

I am sorry to say it's endemic in superhero comics too.

True, but they can always plead techno-tinkering as a superpower!

I’ll say it again: everything about Iron Man makes sense if you assume Tony Stark is a Spark.

Sounds right to me!

This sounds like the least interesting thing to do with a Jesuit in space.

Bad brain, why did you immediately jump to making up verses for "What shall we do with a space-goin' Jesuit?"

Okay, this solidifies my resolve not to read this book. I am always ravenous for any books about religion in space, and I knew this one was very acclaimed. But

snickfic read it and had the same reaction as you and now reading your very thorough review...I think it would just piss me off. Why can't people write good books about religion in space???????

Got a link to

snickfic's review?

I feel like there must be good books about religion in space but I can't think of any offhand. I do really like this fanfic inspired by Tiptree's "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on this Cold Hillside, The Locust, which is about medieval Jesuits encountering sexy aliens. It's tagged "Alien Sex, Localized Apocalypses, Early Modern Xeno, Size Difference, Epistolary, 16th Century CE,Plague, and has one of my favorite comments of all time, "It feels like I found it in an anthology I am somehow not old enough to be reading."

I don't, unfortunately! It was years ago, though it left an impression in my mind. I tried to search for it but I couldn't get any results.

Ooooh, that sounds up my alley! Thank you!

I feel like there must be good books about religion in space but I can't think of any offhand.

Phyllis Gotlieb's science fiction frequently has religion in it, human as well as alien, but I am not sure that any of her novels specifically focus on it as opposed to taking it as a part of culture. (Some of her shorter fiction, yes: mostly Judaism. Her novella "Son of the Morning," later incorporated into her novel A Judgment of Dragons (1980), is one of the great pieces of Jewish science fiction, especially since to one of the characters it looks like the Yiddish fantastic.)

Edited 2023-10-24 03:38 (UTC)

Ooooh, thank you!

I do really like the Hyperion/Endymion ...quadology?? even though it definitely has quite a bit Of Its Time to it. It's not as clear in the first book, but the Religion In Space builds as one of the central themes. (The Vatican is one of the key powers in the post-Earth society. The author, Dan Simmons, is Jewish and has a lot of thoughts.)

(Any Dan Simmons book is very hard to summarise apart from "he has a lot of thoughts", tbh. But I find them really compelling despite some flaws.)

I like Lina Rather's nuns in space. But it's a shockingly underserved subgenre.

Thanks! I'll look into it!

Honestly, the only really good one I can think of is The Dazzle of Day, which is about Quakers in space. But I refuse to believe there isn't some good Jews in Space and Catholics in Space content out there.

I would also like to see Mormons in Space, Buddhists in Space, Syncretic Religions in Space, Mandaeans in Space, Zoroastrians in Space! THE AMISH IN SPACE!

There's George R.R. Martin's "The Way of Cross and Dragon," but I read it so long ago that I wouldn't be able to say whether it was good or not. (I also enjoyed The Sparrow at the time, so obviously past!me is not a reliable gauge of quality!) Oh! A Canticle for Leibowitz is of course a classic, though not in space.

Orson Scott Card wrote setting-changed Space!AU for the Book of Mormon, but that's not quite the same :) (and I wouldn't really recommend it to someone who doesn't know original canon :) )

Edited (english, I can do the thing) 2023-10-23 21:15 (UTC)

I like "The Way of Cross and Dragon." It's beautifully written and the heretical religion is extremely cool - unsurprising as its point is to be extremely cool, but lots of writers would just tell us it's cool without proving that it is. It slots in exactly as an entry in GRRM's recurrent theme of romantic stories and dreams vs reality, in this case the heretical religion vs the official one.

I've been wondering when someone was going to bring up Orson Scott Card. :)

Speaker of the Dead has, iirc, Brazilian Catholics in space? (or am I thinking of a different book?) and also culture clash based not on predator-prey but on "our species reproduces via horrible mutilation and murder and stuff you're just going to have to get used to, humans, and also wtf you DON'T do that?? what kind of perverts are you?"

It can be criticized in various respects, but speaking for myself, I couldn't put it down. I'm pretty sure I had only read Ender's Game at the time, and I'm not even sure you need that.

Right! I thought that aspect was handled very well. To be honest, I still really like that book.

Yeah, Speaker for the Dead still holds up imo. It's the one Card book I haven't jettisoned. I don't know how the dude who wrote that became...what he became.

Heh, I am in the situation of, because we share a religious background, understanding why he does/says many of the things he does, and having sympathy for him without agreeing with them...but then I'm in a very different situation than his, even though we have commonalities.

Ah, yeah, I get that. I'm no longer evangelical, but I still have an understanding of that world that most people will never have. It makes a difference!

<3

I worried about posting my above comment, because I didn't want to come across like I agreed with him at all, which I really don't -- but yes, that! You get it <3

Don't worry, I do indeed!

Nope, that's the right book! I forgot about the Brazilian Catholics! And it had a rather better integration of the mutilation and murder and such into the worldbuilding and plot than The Sparrow did :D

Heh, speaking of whump, I've noticed before that Card, especially in his early-to-mid career books, has been rather fond of torturing many of his male characters. (His female characters have tended to get off with severe emotional trauma rather than overt physical trauma.)

Gotta say I always really enjoyed that aspect of Card's books. I'm glad I read a bunch of them way before I knew anything about him personally.

I agree, Speaker for the Dead is kind of the good version of The Sparrow. Not that it doesn't have its own flaws, but the themes and SF content are way better integrated and the moral dilemmas regarding the aliens are more thought-provoking.

Speaker FOR the Dead, ugh, but you both obviously knew what I was talking about. ;)

Which is his Book of Mormon AU you wouldn't recommend without canon?

The Memory of Earth series.

I reread some of it recently and although his writing continues to be compelling, I don't think it's aged nearly as well as science fiction for a general population as Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead -- but if you consider it as Book of Mormon / LDS-theological-allegory fanfic, I think it is still great :) (The Holy Ghost is a spaceship computer! I love it.)

BTW, his Alvin Maker series is also Joseph Smith Fantasy America AU. I haven't reread those in a while but I remember the first several were good, and then it became very not-good as he leaned more into "hey let's have their family meet everyone in the world, including Napoleon!"

I am not a big fan of Martin's ASoIaF, but that sounds like it's worth checking out, so thank you for bringing it up!

I'm a rather bigger fan of his short stories than of ASoIaF!

Also Quakers in space but Joan Slonczewski's Still Forms on Foxfield and Judith Moffett's Pennterra are also worth reading.

+1 on the Rather books, they are very interesting nuns.

Edited 2023-10-24 03:05 (UTC)

I am SO into nuns and also find Quakers fascinating, so I will definitely check these out. Someday I'd like to read an essay on why there's more good Quaker scifi than other kinds....

I kind of hated Pennterra but it did make me keep reading.

I think Zohar Jacob's flash piece here might suit: https://smallwondersmag.com/pieces/on-the-bare-unwelcoming-shore/

Thank you!!! (Imagine if your name was Zohar! So cool!)

Ha! I quite enjoyed this when I read it, but it was along time ago and even then the “of course this mutilated guy with PTSD we found in a brothel is there voluntarily” never worked for me. I did not like the sequel at all, and although I liked A Thread of Grace, her decision to decide who lived and who died based on a coin flip did not help the book AT ALL.

I went to a terrible book panel where Russell was interviewed by a local author who knew even less about SF and space exploration than Russell - she spent quite a bit of time praising Russell’s invention of the SETI program (Russell did correct her!) and once off that spent most of the time going on about how sexy Emilio was.

A literal or metaphorical coin flip?

once off that spent most of the time going on about how sexy Emilio was.

Hahaha. The kangaroo aliens felt the same way!

A literal or metaphorical coin flip?

According to her afterword, literal. The problem is that as far as I can tell she did it having written her way to each relevant inflection point so as to allow herself to be surprised by the results, which means that the novel may accurately reproduce the unpredictability of life in the Italian theater of WWII, but it has kind of no dramatic shape. That said, I also like much of A Thread of Grace; it involves Jewish Italian partisans.

Wow. I kind of respect that while being glad that is not the standard way of writing novels.

Yes! It is so irritating and while I like a lot of the novel the ending is so unsatisfying for so many characters that I’m not sure if I’ll re-read it.

This book got an incredible amount of mainstream acclaim. Unsurprisingly, it has a number of the flaws common to science fiction written by writers who don't normally write it, and largely read by people who don't normally read it. It has genre tropes but not the underpinnings that make them make sense.

This novel came out while I was working at a non-sf bookstore and was my first exposure to the phenomenon of science fiction written by people who do not normally write it, compounded by the fact that I was accidentally the sff specialist at that bookstore because most of my coworkers did not read it. It was in fact a huge deal; we were selling copies off table displays. I remember genuinely liking the confusion of the two intelligent species, although in hindsight I am less impressed that the prey are all peaceful victims and the predators all violent rapists. I do not remember liking the sequel at all.

Though IIRC in the sequel

spoilers for the sequel

the prey starts a revolution with the help or some humans and a traitor predator and nearly wipes out the predator species, though at the end there are some survivors? The tables are rather turned though, and I recall that post revolution the remnants of the predator species also started to feel bad about eating the others but the former prey who eat plants wouldn't even let them hunt for other species via their troops, that confined the survivors and they were all starving slowly or something like that.

Though IIRC in the sequel

I found an interview with Russell from 1999 in which the sequel is discussed in detail; I definitely did not like it!

Um, wow:

"I started writing The Sparrow in 1992, which was the 500th anniversary of Columbus's landing in the New World. That year, there was a lot of historical revisionism going on, condemning the Europeans for their terrible sins and mistakes, as though they had set out from Spain intending to wreck Indian cultures and destroy whole populations. I thought, "Wait a minute here--those guys have been dead for 470 years! It's just not fair to hold them to standards of cultural sensitivity and appreciation for diversity that we only pay lip-service to at the end of the 20th century."

Oh, ew. Also, like all people who bandy around the term "historical revisionism", she clearly doesn't know as much history as she thinks.

I feel that Bartolomé de las Casas would have some things to say, yes.

I'm all for historical context and understanding people in the light of contemporary worldviews, but that's not a "get out of jail" free card.

(And doesn't mean we can't condemn actions as awful even if they were fully condoned by beliefs at the time.)

I never heard of him - thanks!

Russell was so close with the idea that modern people wouldn't do any better than Columbus, and then she decided the lesson to take from that was that Columbus was just fine really.

WTF!

"These core relationships are so strong and so consistently gratifying that I have always been comfortable in the presence of men--professionally, I've commonly worked with groups of men in science and engineering, for example. The friendship and teamwork I can offer isn't marred by the need to be manipulative or seductive. I don't have to score points or settle old grudges or bolster my self-image with sexual conquests, and I've been rewarded for having a basic ease and naturalness, a directness with men."

WTF!

I can hope that in twenty years she got better about the internalized misogyny.

This confirms my Little Life Theory of Literature (with the disclaimer that I didn't read LL, understand that some people find value in it that's valid, etc): the lit critics are so starved for kinky/iddy/plotty/sf stories and have so little understanding of their own need that when a book that's otherwise clumsily or overbearingly retreads the kinky/iddy/plotty/sff genre beats is written by a lit author, they mistake their own strong emotional reaction for the book's literary value, and it gets passed on.

I am positive that is exactly what was going on. If you're starved for whump without even knowing it, of course you'll love the whump book.

Oh but this is well said!

This is well put, and explains a lot.

copies this down

I'd buy this theory!

Dude, I think you're onto something!

Yes, that explains SO MUCH.

This comment has been haunting me for days. It explains so much. So much!

Oh, I read this when it came out! I was young enough (just out of college) that I didn't have the critical apparatus to articulate anything about it besides "wow that was a LOT of torture," and I'm sure the whump was a selling point to me at the time :)

THEY'RE ALL PRIESTS.

I laughed out loud at this. I'm gonna have to find more opportunities to use this line, like HOOKS FOR HANDS.

Hey, sometimes you just really want "character is raped and tortured and everyone blames him for it."

And, heh, this was in fact a couple of years before I was introduced to X-Files fandom and (after that) HP fandom and was able to get as much whump as I wanted :D

I felt like I was reading a Bucky Barnes fic circa 2018.

Fucking yikes. 😬

I started this, but never finished, according to the bookmark in my copy. I guess I was lucky... and you have released me from keeping it! Off to the library booksale it goes.

Ooooo, this book gets me so tangled up in knots -- it has a lot of things I really enjoy (including apparently Jesuit priest whump, go figure) but then the actual treatment of in-universe responses to the expedition once they're out of Rakhat, both in wider society and within the Catholic Church itself, is absolutely baffling. I can buy all kinds of horrific misunderstandings, miscommunications, misrepresentations, etc. of traumatic experiences taking place in a literally-alien cultural context, but somehow just... not these ones. It feels like a fanfic AU of some other work where things like the handwavey approach to SF/science in general can be chalked up to the author's wheelhouse lying elsewhere. (Also like. The novel itself touches on this to some degree but not only is theodicy/the problem of evil a pretty damn big area of theology in general, atrocities perpetrated by and against Catholic clergy are a pretty big part of the history of the Catholic Church in general and the Society of Jesus specifically! Which I'd wager is part of the novel's inspiration, with the Early Modern Jesuits' queasy track record for cross-cultural contact with previously predominantly non-Christian cultures, but it should be possible to show the Catholic administration back on Earth having partisan beefs around the expedition itself/Sandoz as a figure without acting like this is the first time anything remotely like this has ever happened, ever.) Anyway, I obviously ended up here because you recced my own weird alien sex fanfiction so I am probably exactly the target market for this novel, but I have zero doubt there's room for a much better treatment of these same themes (like the fascination with first-contact narratives) and their relevance specifically in SF that is like... 20% less whumpy. At least.

I also like alien culture clashes but... not like this.

You're right, Jesuits are not unfamiliar with missionaries doing horrible things and suffering horrible things! It's like no one has ever read any history OR theology.

Like there's honestly a very interesting, weighty, complex novel to write about a Jesuit/the Society of Jesus interacting with first contact and space stuff and so on!

This was apparently not that book.

I remember that thing. Yet another Lymond whumpfest with the serial numbers filed off, to be replaced by a religion she didn't understand, and a world that made no sense, except of course to set up the whump.

several classic novels about Jesuits in space.
THERE'S MORE THAN ONE OF THESE?!

Yes! The other is A Case of Conscience by James Blish.

https://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/tag/genre:+space+jesuits

Oh shit yo, it's A Little Life in space!

...is it bad that I kind of want to read it? Like it sounds very crosses-the-line-twice.

Please please please read and review it.

I'm not sure I hate myself that much.

(Maybe in December when I've hit my Goodreads goal.)

It will be my Hanukkah present.

LOL. You've earned it.

I read this years ago and recall it being whumpy but don't remember it as having this many implausible plot holes....

From memory-its a long time since I read itArthur CClarke wrote a short story about a Jesuit in space: the Star. It won sci fi awards

I've been trying to remember that title this whole conversation. That story was so gloriously meanspirited.

I think I read somewhere that Arthur C Clarke was quite a spritual bloke who wanted to believe but who had had some bad experiences with religion so maybe he was taking revenge here.

A lot of what feels inexplicable about this book hinges on the fact that she wrote this in the run up to 1992 and the 500th anniversary of Columbus. She's said openly that she thinks Columbus gets a bad rap and we wouldn't do any better if we had it to do over. So a lot of the stuff - breathing the air, eating the food etc - is mimicking what Columbus et al did.

That doesn't explain why Emilio ends up as he does, in the brothel. That whole part of the story was just torturous, for everyone, characters and readers, on every level.

She's said openly that she thinks Columbus gets a bad rap and we wouldn't do any better if we had it to do over.

The second part of that doesn't follow the first.

So a lot of the stuff - breathing the air, eating the food etc - is mimicking what Columbus et al did.

That makes no sense. Modern people have modern knowledge. They aren't going to do things that Columbus only did specifically because he lived in a time before certain specific discoveries. Modern people might make similar mistakes, but not in the sense of acting like they don't know about advances in chemistry and toxicology.

Oh, 100%, it still doesn't make it a good book. But I think it makes her logic (? for want of a better word) clearer, even if it's not a logic to which I subscribe.

True! It makes her thinking more clear, but the result even more ridiculous.

... you know, though, the level of critical thinking (or lack thereof) that is required to be a Columbus-apologist is actually consistent with what she's done with the stupid-ball in various bits of the plot.

(People TRAVELLING WITH COLUMBUS thought Columbus was awful and also not that smart. THE PRIEST travelling with him did. FFS. /unnecessary grumbling.)

Oh HI! I have been wanting for some years now a good reliable historical reference for "everything wrong with Columbus" (like opinions about the diameter of the earth), so that I can confidently believe what I've read on the internet about him being a total idiot as well as a bad person. And here you are, a font of historical knowledge about the period, talking about Columbus. Would you happen to have such a reference for me?

Honestly his own journals and letters contain some of the most damning stuff to my eyes (pace that I have to read them in translation, not being fluent in 15th century Spanish) - he writes to the crown promising them as many Taino slaves as they like, describes blithely kidnapping Taino men he comes across initially, and while some of the worst stuff you'll see go around is a bit off*, when you're already at "enslaved over a thousand people and sent them back to Spain and half of them died" after delightedly noting that 50 armed men could totes conquer the whole area, etc, that's not saying much.

Occasionally proponents of his will attempt to point out that he expresses worry! and concern! for the Taino in the face of the Carib abduction/etc but to be honest the descriptions supposedly verbatim from him are appallingly dehumanizing and he mostly seems delighted that they're weaponless and appeasingly welcome and will be Xtianized easily; when they destroyed the Spanish colony his reprisals were brutal.

It can be hard to tell how much of either Bobadilla (who was his enemy) or de la Casas (who, while he loathed Spanish colonization broadly was pretty apologist for Columbus himself) to accept, but even de la Casas describes the kidnappings, while trying to paint them in the best light, and it's highly unlikely that Bobadilla had the clout to make up his accusations wholesale, so there's that.

Bergreen's book is a decent source - there are a few places where I side-eye his interpretation of the evidence presented, and I'm much less interested in Columbus as a person than he is, but he also doesn't actually obscure any of the shit Columbus either did or allowed his men to do, so.

*for instance, while he does describe the fact that slavers on Hispaniola were seeking out girls of 9 and 10 for sexual use in his letter to one of the queen's ladies in waiting, he does not at any point describe participating in it and at best appears to briefly lament his limited ability to deal with scoundrels/bad men as governor; there's no indication he participated in it, and he may have been theoretically opposed to it, but doesn't seem to have made much effort to do anything about it.

Perfect, thanks! I assume Bergreen talks about the diameter of the earth thing (assuming my internet sources are correct about that)? And did Columbus falsify his log entries to explain to his crew why they hadn't hit land yet?

WOW.

Thank you for reading this so I don't have to!

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The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell

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