Children of God

Q: The Sparrow received lavish praise, won numerous awards, and is still selling steadily and well. How much pressure does such success generate for you as a writer?

MDR: A ton. A ton of pressure! Now, I put most of the pressure on myself, and did so long before there was any hope that The Sparrow would ever be published. But I admit that I was terrified of getting reviews that started out, "What a disappointment after such a promising debut…" So the reaction to Children of God, particularly from readers, has been a great relief. Personally, I like The Sparrow better than the sequel, but that’s evidently a minority view. I get a lot of mail, and about 80 percent of the people who write liked the second book better, as did a startling number of critics. In some ways, that’s scary because I don’t know what I did differently that made most people like the sequel more. Maybe it’s the sense of closure—The Sparrow left you hanging. Children of God has a more peaceful ending.

Q: What’s the toughest thing about writing a sequel?

MDR: I thought of Children of God as the second half of one big book. So the hard part was harmonizing the plots, letting the characters change but in ways that were consistent with who they were in The Sparrow.

Q: Novelists frequently describe how their characters take on a life of their own, moving the story line in entirely unexpected directions. Were there any similar surprises for you as you wrote Children of God?

MDR: Well, Sean Fein kind of walked into my head and started kicking butt. He was a real surprise to me, and he turned out to be just what Emilio needed. Shetri Laaks was great fun—he showed up late in the book, but he had such a strong individual voice, and he kept making me laugh. But I’d have to say that the most striking example of characters taking over was in The Sparrow. I practically made Sofia Mendes for Emilio—I was just throwing them together and I had this whole scene in my mind where Sofia would go to Emilio and say, "Serve God. Love me!" And I had a big dramatic confrontation pla

Q: What do you think will be the most surprising to readers of this book?

MDR: I hope that they’ll be startled by how wrong they were about Supaari when they finished reading The Sparrow. I admit it: that was a set-up. I gave readers an opportunity to make the same mistakes about Supaari that people on Earth made about Emilio Sandoz when he first came back. Everything you knew about Supaari indicated that he was a decent, honorable man who was doing his best to cope with this wholly unprecedented situation—first contact with aliens. Then he gives Emilio to the Reshtar, and you think, "That scum-sucking social climber! That miserable, no good—" But you’re just as wrong about Supaari as Joha

Q: Do you consider Children of God a darker story than The Sparrow?

MDR: Yes—it’s a long dark tu

Q: In Children of God Sandoz is kidnapped and dragged to Rakhat against his will. And yet, at the end of the story, he makes his peace with God and with his past experiences on Rakhat. Is one of the lessons here "the end justifies the means"?

MDR: No! A crime is a crime! The fact that the victim ultimately survives the experience and redeems it somehow does not reflect glory on the criminals for providing the victim with an opportunity to grow! Guiliani and the Pope and Da

Q: Did you use any real cultures as the basis of the civilization on Rakhat?

MDR: In part, I had Romanov Russia in mind. A while ago, there was an exhibition of Faberge eggs at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and they were exquisite—just stu

So, you can see the point here, I hope—the Runa revolution unquestionably ends an abusive and exploitative relationship with the Jana’ata, but at the cost of terrible suffering and of the brutalization of the Runa as well. And it’s unclear what will replace that high culture. Even so, I meant to imply that the Runa are doing just fine, thank you. Here, I had in mind the invasion of North America by European settlers. That was unquestionably a catastrophe for the native peoples of this continent, but at the same time, it was the best damned thing that ever happened to an awful lot of immigrants from around the world. The analogy is to the fall of the Jana’ata and their replacement by the Runa—this is a catastrophe for the Jana’ata, but at the very same time, it’s the best thing that ever happened to the Runa. And therein lies the tragedy.

Q: Children of God uses parallel narratives to tell its story—that of Mendes and of Sandoz—and also jumps backward and forward in time. As a writer, what’s the hardest thing about moving between these different times and narrative lines?

MDR: Trying to keep the reader oriented, and to make the jumps informative, not a