Mal12345
Permabanned
- Joined
- Apr 19, 2011
- Messages
- 14,532
- MBTI Type
- IxTP
- Enneagram
- 5w4
- Instinctual Variant
- sx/sp
Here's what our culture has come down to.
From Wikipedia: "The Sparrow (1996) is the first novel by author Mary Doria Russell. It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, James Tiptree, Jr. Award, Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis and the British Science Fiction Association Award."
Let's get those awesome awards lined up in a more reader-friendly way.
That book won the:
1. Arthur C. Clarke Award
2. Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis, and
3. the British Science Fiction Association Award.
Three awards; not bad for an author's first novel, right?
I've read the book, and I can tell you quite objectively that it is ridiculous and disgusting, as if it were designed to win an award for worst novel of the year.
I'm not saying that it is written in a bungling or juvenile fashion. Without a doubt, this Mary Doria Russell penned this turd of a book with an attitude of complete sincerity.
Here's how the plot goes. In the year 2019, Earth (via SETI) has received its first known alien broadcast. It sounds like a song in which an alien can be heard singing. Someone traces the source of the music (somehow) back to a particular star system in our galaxy.
That sounds like a pretty awesome premise for science fiction fans, except for the fact that the book consists of many, many laborious-to-read everyday conversations about the weather and what-not as Mary Doria Russell takes her reader, not into a mysterious, out-of-this world fictional landscape but into a mundanely boring one of hyper-realism which does nothing to further the plot and only goes to indicate that the future will be just as boring and mundane as the present.
For some reason the Society of Jesuits wants to be the first group of astronauts to travel to the alien planet to root out the source of the music. Along with them goes the poor, unfortunate Jesuit priest Emilio Sandoz. That's right. It wasn't NASA (this novel occurs in the year 2019, so I'm sure NASA will still exist in 2019) or the European Space Agency. It's the Society of Jesuits.
The Society of Jesuits, along with Emilio, hop on a starship made from an asteroid (and I'm sure starships made from asteroids are very common in 2019 because, you know, it's set a long, long 23 years after the book was written) and travel to the planet Rakhat so they can have a religious sing-along with aliens around a campfire. Nothing happens on the journey to Rakhat, it is as boring as most any space venture in reality. Thankfully it doesn't happen in real time. But the only occurrence of "significance" was when one of the Jesuits, who was beginning to get horny after two months in space, asked quietly if it was okay to masturbate. He was given the A-OK to begin masturbation sequence as long as no sperm blobs fly away in the near null-gravity environment and splatter the electronic circuitry.
Inhabitable planets are generally pretty big relative to us, and so our Jesuit astronauts mistakenly land among a tribe of low tech-worthy pygmy aliens who pretty obviously could not have produced a radio broadcast. If I recall, the landing craft was damaged so they couldn't simply try landing somewhere else on the planet. But they are a friendly tribe of pygmy aliens and therefore adopted the survivors of the crash as their own, teaching them their ways and their language. The Jesuits did them a return favor and taught them agricultural methods.
This latter act angered the tall, high tech-worthy aliens on the planet who slaughtered and enslaved the pygmy aliens. Emilio, who is shorter than the average human, was mistaken for one of the pygmies (I guess), and was captured and enslaved. He was in fact kept as a sex slave among with some alien children, one of them being held captive with Emilio. There are no juicy sex details describing alien-on-alien homosexual coitus. The "child sex" allegory is instead taken to a rather bizarre level: to make Emilio as physically dependent as a small child would be, the tall civilized aliens chopped away the skin between his fingers clear down to the wrists, giving him freakishly long fingers and useless hands.
From the viewpoint of a more idealistic novel, Emilio should have done something wrong to deserve this fate. But he did nothing wrong - except, I think, for the 'wrong' of being a Catholic, part of a group who have been known to have some child molesters in their midst. For some odd reason, Mary Russell seems to have chosen this Emilio character to join the fate of helpless, priest-molested children, except suffering a far worse fate. In the end, Emilio somehow (with his useless hands) murders the alien child he is being held captive with. The reason for his horrific act is never explained in the novel. Perhaps it was designed to portray the manner in which innocence turns to evil at the hands of child-molesting priests, or in this case, of aliens who have a fetish for some really kinky stuff.
In the long run, it turns out that the alien music transmission picked up by SETI merely described some depraved sex acts.
On a scale of one to ten, I give the award-winning novel The Sparrow, written by fledgling author Mary Doria Russell, a negative 1.
From Wikipedia: "The Sparrow (1996) is the first novel by author Mary Doria Russell. It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, James Tiptree, Jr. Award, Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis and the British Science Fiction Association Award."
Let's get those awesome awards lined up in a more reader-friendly way.
That book won the:
1. Arthur C. Clarke Award
2. Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis, and
3. the British Science Fiction Association Award.
Three awards; not bad for an author's first novel, right?
I've read the book, and I can tell you quite objectively that it is ridiculous and disgusting, as if it were designed to win an award for worst novel of the year.
I'm not saying that it is written in a bungling or juvenile fashion. Without a doubt, this Mary Doria Russell penned this turd of a book with an attitude of complete sincerity.
Here's how the plot goes. In the year 2019, Earth (via SETI) has received its first known alien broadcast. It sounds like a song in which an alien can be heard singing. Someone traces the source of the music (somehow) back to a particular star system in our galaxy.
That sounds like a pretty awesome premise for science fiction fans, except for the fact that the book consists of many, many laborious-to-read everyday conversations about the weather and what-not as Mary Doria Russell takes her reader, not into a mysterious, out-of-this world fictional landscape but into a mundanely boring one of hyper-realism which does nothing to further the plot and only goes to indicate that the future will be just as boring and mundane as the present.
For some reason the Society of Jesuits wants to be the first group of astronauts to travel to the alien planet to root out the source of the music. Along with them goes the poor, unfortunate Jesuit priest Emilio Sandoz. That's right. It wasn't NASA (this novel occurs in the year 2019, so I'm sure NASA will still exist in 2019) or the European Space Agency. It's the Society of Jesuits.
The Society of Jesuits, along with Emilio, hop on a starship made from an asteroid (and I'm sure starships made from asteroids are very common in 2019 because, you know, it's set a long, long 23 years after the book was written) and travel to the planet Rakhat so they can have a religious sing-along with aliens around a campfire. Nothing happens on the journey to Rakhat, it is as boring as most any space venture in reality. Thankfully it doesn't happen in real time. But the only occurrence of "significance" was when one of the Jesuits, who was beginning to get horny after two months in space, asked quietly if it was okay to masturbate. He was given the A-OK to begin masturbation sequence as long as no sperm blobs fly away in the near null-gravity environment and splatter the electronic circuitry.
Inhabitable planets are generally pretty big relative to us, and so our Jesuit astronauts mistakenly land among a tribe of low tech-worthy pygmy aliens who pretty obviously could not have produced a radio broadcast. If I recall, the landing craft was damaged so they couldn't simply try landing somewhere else on the planet. But they are a friendly tribe of pygmy aliens and therefore adopted the survivors of the crash as their own, teaching them their ways and their language. The Jesuits did them a return favor and taught them agricultural methods.
This latter act angered the tall, high tech-worthy aliens on the planet who slaughtered and enslaved the pygmy aliens. Emilio, who is shorter than the average human, was mistaken for one of the pygmies (I guess), and was captured and enslaved. He was in fact kept as a sex slave among with some alien children, one of them being held captive with Emilio. There are no juicy sex details describing alien-on-alien homosexual coitus. The "child sex" allegory is instead taken to a rather bizarre level: to make Emilio as physically dependent as a small child would be, the tall civilized aliens chopped away the skin between his fingers clear down to the wrists, giving him freakishly long fingers and useless hands.
From the viewpoint of a more idealistic novel, Emilio should have done something wrong to deserve this fate. But he did nothing wrong - except, I think, for the 'wrong' of being a Catholic, part of a group who have been known to have some child molesters in their midst. For some odd reason, Mary Russell seems to have chosen this Emilio character to join the fate of helpless, priest-molested children, except suffering a far worse fate. In the end, Emilio somehow (with his useless hands) murders the alien child he is being held captive with. The reason for his horrific act is never explained in the novel. Perhaps it was designed to portray the manner in which innocence turns to evil at the hands of child-molesting priests, or in this case, of aliens who have a fetish for some really kinky stuff.
In the long run, it turns out that the alien music transmission picked up by SETI merely described some depraved sex acts.
On a scale of one to ten, I give the award-winning novel The Sparrow, written by fledgling author Mary Doria Russell, a negative 1.
