The Sparrow
Jesuits mount a mission to make first contact with an alien civilization. It goes horribly wrong. Russell's 1996 debut is a novel about faith, beauty, and suffering that earns its devastating final act without flinching.
The crew’s field procedure is reckless past believing, a team that “stupidly starts sampling everything,” skipping quarantine, behaving as trained scientists would not, the “dumbest characters in all of science fiction literature” to the angriest reviews. The propulsion and logistics do not hold up for technically minded readers. The ensemble’s constant joking and self-satisfaction grates, “revolting, self-congratulatory, aren’t-we-so-clever-and-cute.” The middle drags through a hundred-plus pages of mounting dread as the structure repeats its foreshadowing. And a contingent finds the eventual explanation deflating against that buildup: “it’s thin, it’s cheap, it’s manipulative.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
