That’s when I decided to write a story that put modern, sophisticated, resourceful, well-educated, and well-meaning people in the same position as those early explorers and missionaries-a position of radical ignorance. I wanted to show how very difficult first contact would be, even with the benefit of hindsight. It seemed unfair to me for people living at the end of the twentieth century to hold those explorers and missionaries to standards of sophistication and tolerance that we hardly manage even today. There was a great deal of historical revisionism going on as we examined the mistakes made by Europeans when they first encountered foreign cultures in the Americas and elsewhere. Mary Doria Russell: The idea came to me in the summer of 1992 as we were celebrating the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World. How did you end up writing a speculative novel? Random House Reader’s Circle: Until The Sparrow you had only written serious scientific articles and technical manuals.
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