{"id":1286,"date":"1997-12-16T16:36:03","date_gmt":"1997-12-16T16:36:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/?p=1286"},"modified":"2012-04-25T16:36:27","modified_gmt":"2012-04-25T16:36:27","slug":"the-sparrow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/?p=1286","title":{"rendered":"The Sparrow"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><em>The Sparrow<\/em> by Mary Doria             Russell<\/h3>\n<p>Attendees: A. T. Campbell III, Fred Duarte, Mona             Gamboa, Elaine Powell, Carrie Richerson, Jeff Rupley,             Willie Siros, Lori Wolf<\/p>\n<p>We had a huge group for the discussion of <em>The             Sparrow<\/em>, a first science fiction novel about a             group of Catholic missionaries who establish First             Contact between humans and aliens. The story deals with             grown-up topics like Ethics and Morals and Religion.             The book is structured in a flashback style, and we             found both the events in the &#8220;present&#8221; and &#8220;past&#8221; so             fascinating that the book was hard to put down. The             characters of the missionaries are well-drawn and             distinctive, and we grew to care about them. The alien             society seemed believably structured. The culture             clashes that grew from the First Contact situation             developed logically, and tragically, without any             characters (alien or human) being villains. Several of             us liked the book enough to have already read it             multiple times. This was one of the best SF novels we             had read in several years. We were awed that a first             novel could be so good, and we&#8217;re eagerly awaiting Ms.             Russell&#8217;s next book.<\/p>\n<p><em>&#8212; A. T. Campbell, III<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell Attendees: A. T. Campbell III, Fred Duarte, Mona Gamboa, Elaine Powell, Carrie Richerson, Jeff Rupley, Willie Siros, Lori Wolf We had a huge group for the discussion of The Sparrow, a first science fiction novel about a group of Catholic missionaries who establish First Contact between humans and aliens. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1286"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1286\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1287,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1286\/revisions\/1287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}