Substantive: The Sparrow

Earlier this week, I got a rare chance to sit down and chat with another connoisseur of science fiction, my mother! We took this chance to talk about some of the finer points of Lem's His Master's Voice, and came to a mutual conclusion about American science fiction: things don't go nearly bad enough in first contact situations. "Of all the science fiction I've read, people seem to think first contact will go well. Trust me, things will go much worse," my mother said. The next day, I started reading The Sparrow, and realized I was about to read the story of first contact gone wrong.

After finishing The Sparrow, it's tempting to focus on the religious themes of the novel. Many stand out, in particular Emilio's role as a Christ figure, and Sophia's role as a feminine incarnation of God (thanks to Tuesday movie night for that find). The novel itself presents many faces, the religious face being one of many. But, I think the religious topic will be exhausted in class, so I'll steer clear for now. I want to highlight the aliens in The Sparrow.

Much like my mother said, first contact goes far too well in far too many situations. Star Trekkian visions of the future, as pleasingly utopian as they are, reflect poorly on reality. Case and point: after watching the ST:TNG episode "Who Watches the Watchers", it's painfully obvious that alien society will be nothing like the "proto-Vulcan" society featured in the episode. Star Trek suffers severely from human projection - a lack of cultural imagination and emotion, and we get aliens who are essentially humans.

Russell openly mocks this kind of assumption, when Anne comments that, "In Star Trek, everyone speaks English!" But even Russell suffers severely from human projections on alien culture. She designs a two cultures who are essentially bipedal apes with a penchant for living in communities, a painfully human construct. Russell brings the aliens "foreignness" to a sufficient point, at least to a point where there is a continual unease among the human party. The foreignness also serves to cause the chain reaction of tragic events which serves as the impetus for the book's climax. In the long run, though, one could simply replace "Runa" with slave and "Jana'ata" with master, and still accomplish an effective plot (which may paint The Sparrow as more of a philosophical drama than science fiction).

Lem assures us in His Master's Voice that alien life will be more foreign than we are literally capable of imaging. Russell, perhaps unknowingly, captured the greatest dangers of what Lem calls "the Rorschach test", subjecting her protagonist to the depths of human horrors for assuming the aliens were like us, for defending what we call human rights for what are clearly non-humans. It's clear that Russell's account suffers from a high degree of near-sightedness, but its message is monumental enough to disregard her flagrant human biases. Instead of the warnings Lem's scientists give us, Russell shows us. Russell, in a reflection on human history of foreign interaction, plants a sign in the sky that says "Abandon all hope ye who enter here".