2.3: The Sparrow vs. The Star (Minisode)

Spectology: The Science Fiction Book Club Podcast

A short episode to tide you over this week! We discuss Arther C. Clarke's The Star (pdf), comparing and constrating it to The Sparrow. Full spoilers for both the story (it's only 4 pages, you should read it!) and The Sparrow.

This is a relatively clean episode that's mostly about how and why people lose their faith and whether science fiction generally does a good job at handling this question.

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In addition, we realized that our links to related works aren't showing up in all podcatchers. Here are the links from the last episode, if you're looking for more recommendations that (we think) are better than The Sparrow

- Monolingual Fieldwork by Daniel Everett (a linguist learns Hmong)
- Do Elephants Have Souls? by Caitrin Keiper for the New Atlantis
- Alien intelligence: the extraordinary minds of octopuses and other cephalopods by Elle Hunt
- The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber
- 1491 and 1493 by Charles Mann

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As always, we'd love to hear from you! Tweet us at @spectologypod, submit the episode at r/printSF, or email us at [e-mail] with your thoughts about the book.

Many thanks to Dubby J and Noah Bradley for doing our music and art.