Emilio sees the gathering of these folks as divine, as the right team to go to the planet, on the other side of Alpha Centauri, in private while the United Nations debates endlessly on what to do.Īfter a while it became hard to ignore how, against odds, the dice kept coming up in favor of the mission. When a young friend of Sandoz, Jimmy, hears the alien singing while working at the Acerbo dish, and the first people he calls are Sandoz, his friends Anne and George (she a doctor, he an engineer, both friends of Sandoz and pulled to San Juan by him) and Sofia Mendes, an indentured servant/savant whose specialty is AI programming (she had already developed a linguistic program by questioning Sandoz, and was doing the same with Jimmy and his ET Searches).

The discovery of the alien race (through transmissions of their singing) and the mission to visit them, told in flashbacks, seems pre-ordained, particularly to Sandoz, a survivor from the rough part of San Juan, Puerto Rico, who went on to become a Jesuit priest. Originally the inspiration and the spiritual leader of the mission, he is blamed, and basically put on inquisition, for the heinous crimes he is thought to have committed. The second theme is the strongest, and centers on Jesuit priest Emilio Sandoz, who sees the hand of God in the “coincidences” leading up to the mission, and the first part of the mission itself…but has lost his faith by the time of his return.Įmilio Sandoz is the only survivor from a Jesuit sponsored trip to the planet of Rekhat.

This is a unique angle in the sci-fi “meet the new aliens” genre.

The answer to the first question is unique: without consulting any other Earth organization, the Jesuits launch a mission, just as they have launched missions to remote and unknown places at different times in their history. I just can’t swallow that kind of theological candy.” In other words, if God is responsible for the good times, is He responsible for the bad?īoth of these themes thread through the novel, told in flashbacks and first hand narative. From Anne, in the story: “What sticks in my throat is that God gets the credit but never the blame.Are humans the only species in the Universe? And if we find another species, how do we approach them?.Originally published in 1997, The Sparrow combines some of mankind’s most basic questions into an interesting story:

The sparrow mary