What is Reddit's opinion of The Sparrow: A Novel (The Sparrow Series)?

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I spent most of the weekend reading The Sparrow and Children of God, two amazing SF first-contact novels by Mary Doria Russell. They were written in the 90s and definitely have that feel, but I'm old enough to be nostalgic for that. Really good exploration of miscommunications and the predicament of having to make decisions without sufficient information. Both books deal with loneliness, both romantic loneliness and the solitary feeling when no one can truly understand your experiences.

Welcome :)

Can't legally link the full book, but I'm sure your library has (or can get) a copy. I believe the book was The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell.

The story you talked about sounds pretty interesting. Sometimes I'm tempted to read OSC's fiction that people observe(/complain) is just thinly veiled Mormon cosmology, because it sounds interesting, but I don't think I can stomach reading any of his books anymore now that I know a bit more about him as a person. Kind of sad.

The Sparrow. Despite knowing full well that pretty much everyone dies at the end (it's not a spoiler if it's in the Amazon review!), I let myself get attached to all the main characters and was still absolutely blindsided and devastated by their individual deaths. It's been six months since I read it, and I still can't get it out of my head.

Any of you read The Sparrow? That's where I first heard of the Arecibo telescope. It remains one of my favorite scifi novels.

Late to the party, but an adaptation of The Sparrow or Sector General (tagline: "ER in space") might be worthwhile.

Does the name "Trappist" have anything to do with the science fiction novel "The Sparrow"? https://www.amazon.com/Sparrow-Novel-Ballantine-Readers-Circle/dp/0449912558

Ah sorry, missed your other comment. Actually I was thinking first a common ancestor, followed by co-evolution. But that's still a stretch; I might buy it more readily if there were just two, that focused on each other (ala The Sparrow)

But really, there are too many species for that to be plausible, and you're right, with that complex a trait and that many species, there ought to have been more radiation on traits and forms, which there doesn't appear to be. Everyone in Zootopia thinks and feels the same under the fur, so to speak. Well, unless the whole intelligence/emotional thing turns out to be a highly-conserved gene-complex that shows a significant disadvantage in any other configuration, and so has passed around and passed down relatively unchanged across all lineages.

1) Do we have any hints or guestimates as to how long Zootpians took to go from earliest pre-sapient ancestor to current modern tech levels? I have absolutely no feel for when various mammalian species emerged, relative to each other or to modern humans (other than domesticated species and breeds must be human-contemporary, obviously, but we really didn't see any of those in the movie, so that's moot)

2) Even if you do assume the longer time period, from all indications, our pre-human ancestors were pretty stable for long periods of time 100s of 1000s of years, tech & development wise, and early modern humans were in the hunter-gatherer stage for 10s of 1000s of years before they invented agriculture and cities; also pretty stable. Development, either in evolution or social/tech, is anything but smooth or inevitable.

So depending on how you wanted to spin it, I might believe that it was only chance events that punctuated those kinds of equilibria, and as such they could have continued for arbitrarily longer. Although, yes, an order of magnitude longer does become more of a stretch.

So yes, as you've said, the best, if least satisfying, conclusions are either "narrative convenience" or "engineered species/society"

Ssecret cabal of lizard-men (so that's what happened to the dinosaurs) ? Time-travelers from a future Zootopia trying to insure their own future existence? Ancient aliens? Medling gene-modding humans? Lunar moon-bats? Disney-eque fairies? Who knows? ;)

The Sparrow and its sequel Children of God are exactly what you're looking for.

If you're into Sci-fi type books, you should check out The Sparrow. Easily one of my favorites that draws on philosophy, religion, linguistics, space travel, and more.

There was a follow-up called "Children of God" which I'd recommend if you like the first one.

Well, there's The Sparrow