Books like The Sparrow
In 2019 an astronomer picks up music broadcast from a planet near Alpha Centauri, and the Jesuits quietly send a mission. Decades later the only survivor, the linguist and priest Emilio Sandoz, is brought back to Rome to explain what happened.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Sparrow
A Case of Conscience
Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, a Jesuit biologist on a commission to the planet Lithia, finds an alien race living in perfect reason and goodness without any God, and decides it must be the Devil's work.
Ender's Game
A gifted child is recruited to a military academy in space, where he must train to fight an alien invasion that may already be lost.
Solaris
Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, arrives at the research station hovering over the ocean planet Solaris to find one of its three scientists dead, the other two barely holding together, and people walking its corridors who should not be there.
Dawn
Lilith Iyapo wakes in a cell centuries after a nuclear war wrecked the Earth, to learn she has been kept alive by the Oankali, aliens who want to restore the planet and to trade genes with what is left of humanity.
The Telling
An observer on a distant world discovers that the planet's authoritarian government has banned storytelling itself, and the act of reading becomes resistance.
The Mote in God's Eye
In 3017, a thousand years after humanity spread to the stars, a probe arrives from the Mote, a star nobody has ever visited, and the Second Empire of Man sends the battlecruiser MacArthur to meet whoever sent it.
Embassytown
Avice Benner Cho grew up in Embassytown, a human outpost on Arieka, whose Hosts speak a language that cannot lie and can be addressed only by paired human Ambassadors. Back home after years away, she sees a new Ambassador arrive whom the Hosts respond to as never before.
Parable of the Sower
As civilisation collapses from climate change and inequality, a young woman with a dangerous gift of empathy leads survivors north towards a new beginning.
Contact
Ellie Arroway, a radio astronomer, picks up a signal from the star Vega that turns out to carry the plans for a machine, and the world has to decide whether to build it and who should go.
A Memory Called Empire
A young ambassador from a small colony arrives at the heart of a vast empire, where memory is currency and identity is a political weapon.
Midnight Robber
Tan-Tan grows up on Toussaint, a Caribbean-settled planet watched over by an all-seeing AI, until her father commits a crime and flees with her through the dimension veil to New Half-Way Tree, a prison planet where exiles live among the native douen.
The Three-Body Problem
During the Cultural Revolution, astrophysicist Ye Wenjie answers a signal from space, and decades later nanomaterials researcher Wang Miao, investigating a wave of scientists' suicides, is drawn into a strange virtual-reality game and the secret behind it.