The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russel
You could read The Sparrow purely as an entertaining and disturbing Sci-Fi story that is so intricately woven that you almost believe the planet Rakhat, and its inhabitants, the friendly Runa and the menacing Jana’ata, are as real as we are.
You could do that, but you’d be missing a whole lot. The novel works on several levels. It works on a very intimate character-driven level, and deals with issues of love, desire, friendship, family, temptation, loyalty, and accountability expressed through eight individuals (four scientists and four highly accomplished Jesuit priests) who are sent on a mission to Rakhat to gather data about a newly discovered planet and its inhabitants.
The Lessons of History
The novel also revisits the historical problem of a more technically advanced civilization’s encounter with a technically inferior indigenous civilization and the difficulties that presents. When strangers encounter one another, things can go really bad. The consequences of the newcomers’ acts, even those performed with the best intentions, can lead to cataclysmic disaster and tragedy.
The Inescapable Question
Then there is the inescapable question about the existence of God, which permeates the story and is crucial to the plot development as experienced primarily through the tormented linguist, Father Emilio Sandoz. It is through Sandoz that we most devastatingly experience the beauty and horror of existence, and it’s through him that we find ourselves asking the toughest questions about ourselves and this baffling and often maddening universe we inhabit.