Product Description

The story of Emilio Sandoz, the charismatic Jesuit priest who led the well-intentioned but catastrophic mission to the distant planet of Rakhat. Emilio is forced to return against his will to continue his quest for the meaning, if any, of God's plan.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #237837 in Books
• Published on: 1999-02-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 509 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Mary Doria Russell's first novel, the award-winning The Sparrow, proved that any stock sf theme can be renewed by hard thought and good writing. The first human expedition to the alien world of Rakhat ends in complex disaster; the only known survivor, the Jesuit linguist Emilio Sandoz, is brought back raped, mutilated and an emotional wreck--only by telling his story of complex cultural misunderstandings does he even gradually regain his sanity, if not his faith. Rakhat is a world with two intelligent species, not one--and the gifted biologists and musicians whose radio messages attracted Earth's attention not only enslave, but eat, the likable efficient peasants that humans first contacted. Sandoz is shanghaied back, by a coalition of the Church and the Mafia, only to find the situation even more complicated--he was not, after all, the only survivor. Sophie, infuriated by massacres, has started a revolution - and when prey determine to be rid of their predators, revolution becomes genocide. This is a powerful novel of religion, politics and bad choices--it is a sequel which intelligently undercuts and revises assumptions its predecessor imposed on us; like its predecessor, it is one of the key sf novels of the 90s. --Roz Kaveney

From the Back Cover
'Not for the Society. Not for Holy Mother Church. Nevertheless, for yourself and for God, you must go back,' Gelasius III told Emilio Sandoz with a terrifying joyful certainty. 'God is waiting for you, in the ruins...'

The sole survivor of the original catastrophic mission to the planet Rakhat, Father Emilio Sandoz has barely begun to recover from his horrific physical and psychological wounds when he is summoned by the Vatican to take part in a second expedition to Alpha Centauri. With his objections and his fears summarily ignored, it seems Sandoz is powerless to escape his past or the future.

Against his will, he returns to Rakhat to be confronted by a world writhing in the agonizing throes of revolutionary change. And as ghosts from his past rise up to haunt him, opening old scars, Emilio finds himself struggling to make sense of a moral universe whose boundaries now reach beyond our solar system - and whose future lies with children born amongst the stars.

Strikingly original, richly plotted, replete with memorable characters and bursting with humanity and humour, Children of God continues the remarkable journey to a distant planet and to the centre of the human soul that began with The Sparrow and confirms Mary Doria Russell as one of the most innovative, entertaining and philosophically provocative novelists writing today.

About the Author
Mary Doria Russell
Mary Doria Russell is a former anatomist and lives in Cleveland, Ohio, with her husband and their son. She has studied six languages, trained as a paleoanthropologist and is the author of scientific papers ranging from bone biology to cannibalism, Mary Doria Russell's first novel, The Sparrow, won the 1996 James Tiptree Award, the 1998 BSFA Award and the 1998 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Dr Russell has also won the Cleveland Arts Council Prize for Literature and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer of Science Fiction. Her second novel, Children of God, is the sequel to The Sparrow.

Customer Reviews

The Sparrow has landed...
The book `Children of God' is the sequel to Mary Doria Russell's award winning first novel, `The Sparrow'. In this we take up once again with Father Emilio Sandoz, the only survivor of a doomed expedition to a nearby planet, set in the not-to-distant future. (Please see reviews of `The Sparrow' for a little more detail about that.)
Most of the characters from the first novel have died (in this novel we discover how a few of the missing people from the first expedition met their fates), and due to the effects of near-light-speed travel, many decades have passed on earth while Father Emilio is still relatively young.

There are political crises on earth, including a crisis in the church, and there seems to be an urgent need for yet another expedition to Rakhat. In the interim, there have been several attempted journeys, all of which have failed. The church hierarchy decides that the only 'successful' trip was that of Father Emilio, and thus decides (largely without his consent) to send him off again.

At the same time, Rakhat has undergone a dramatic change, brought about in part by the arrival of the strangers, but also due to the political schemings of members of the dominant race, the Jana'ata. The Runa, always larger in population, begin to realise their oppressive situation, aided by renegade Jana'ata, and a civil war breaks loose. Into this situation the human expedition re-enters the scene on Rakhat.

This story completes many of the unfinished details from `The Sparrow'. By filling in the blanks while also carrying the narrative forward, Russell's rather dark picture of the nature of God in the universe (as enacted by the creatures on earth and elsewhere) becomes a little lighter, a little more just, a little less doomed. There is, however, no answer to the personal injustices, to Father Emilio's abuse both at the hands of the Jana'ata and the Jesuit order.

Russell's development of the characters, both human and alien, deepens and broadens in this second novel; her imaginative history of the alien cultures is quite stunning, and her treatment of the strengths and weakness in human character insightful.

Read `The Sparrow' and `Children of God' back-to-back if at all possible.

The Means to Effect Change
After reading just two of Ms. Russell's books, I'm a confirmed fan, and hope she writes many more. This book is a direct sequel to The Sparrow, and while there is some explanatory material about the events in The Sparrow in this book, I'm afraid someone who hasn't read the earlier book will feel a little lost, and will definitely not be able to appreciate the full power of this book.

Once more I found myself irresistibly drawn to Ms. Russell's full-bodied characters. Emilio Sandoz, the Jesuit priest who has been through a myriad number of events that would test anyone's faith, in this book begins to find a way to believe that life is still worth living, that he can still be of benefit to the people around him. Sophia Mendez, the quiet, withdrawn, abused, and highly intellectual lady finds a reason to return to the faith of her parents when she finds herself marooned on Rakhat, surrounded by enslaved Runa. New characters of Giardano Bruno and his bodyguard Nico prove that Russell can portray many kinds of people in a very believable manner.

Perhaps the reason these characters are so fascinating is that each of them has their own outlook on life, their own problems, their own ways of coping with life's vagaries. When placed within the Runa/ Jana'Ata society, each person's attempts to influence that society becomes magnified, each action leading to consequences both foreseen and totally unexpected. Which brings to the fore the focus of this book, which is much more about cross-cultural relations and impacts than religion, though the original questions of The Sparrow are not slighted here. Within the events that humans arrival on Rakhat have provoked, there is a deep delving into the ethics of the 'the end justifies the means', played on a canvas where a species survival is the end stake.

There are some areas where I was not quite as pleased. The characterization of the aliens was just a little too human, even though such characterization does much to highlight the fact that the ethical problems of this book apply just as equally here on Earth. In some ways, the cultural parallels between the Jana'Ata and the American Indians were just a little too obvious. And once again, the story is not told in a totally linear fashion, with occasional flash-forwards to various later periods that then fill in the back-story of the history of the world after the main events of the book. While this type of structure worked very well in The Sparrow, here I thought it led to a little disjointedness to the story continuity and too much a lessening of suspense. Once again, there are some aspects of the portrayed science here that do not ring true. These are all minor quibbles, not seriously hurting the engrossing wholeness, the feeling of not only that this is how it could be, but the why of seemingly random and sometimes-cruel events.

There are very few works that approach these two books in terms of thematic depth and both intellectual and emotional reader involvement. Nominated for the 1999 Hugo Award, this book fully deserved that honor.

--- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)

fantstic second part to the story
more affecting. more exciting. more story - these sparrow books are just brilliant.

buy them now. share them with friends