Ethical Encounters of the Third Kind: Aliens, Jews, and the Dilemmas of First Contact in the Work of Mary Doria Russell and Ruthanna Emrys

The worlds of Ruthanna Emrys’ 2022 cli-fi novel, A Half-Built Garden, and Mary Doria Russell’s Sparrow duology are in some ways radically different. But in each of these first-encounter stories the author incorporates religion, particularly Judaism, to enrich world-building and frame the ethical decision-making processes of their characters. Another commonality is that the aliens in each consist of two symbiotic species, which adds to the complexity of deciphering their ethical systems and their responses to environmental and social changes. 

In this presentation I will compare the ways each author poses ethical dilemmas for her protagonists and then incorporates Judaism into the characters’ attempts to negotiate the problems of radical Otherness represented by literal alien societies. I conclude that the differences in the ways the authors deploy Judaism in their novels reflect a parallel change in the way Americans understand “religion.” In the case of Russell’s work, written in the late 1990s, beliefs and texts are central to the way a Jewish character understands her religion as shaping her ethical commitments; in contrast, Emrys highlights a kind of Judaism that fosters a sense of personal and communal identity created through social relationships, narratives, and rituals, which informs the ethics of her characters. 

The two authors place ethical dilemmas posed by the alien cultures’ history and social assumptions at the center of their works. For Russell, the question revolves around the morality of exporting Biblical ideas of justice (as interpreted by her Jewish and Jesuit characters) to an alien context that revolves around a repugnantly exploitive and unjust society, a society whose central relationship between the two species is “beyond the pale” of what Jews and Jesuits (and most humans) find moral. In the end, her characters move well beyond ideas into actions that precipitate planetary-scale changes in both society and nature. For Emrys, the question is how to proceed in the face of planetary degradation that threatens the existence of human and other earthly life: stay and try to fix ourselves and the planet, or leave and join a symbiotic relationship with our new alien friends who have the technology and experience of living in artificial environments that they see as “safe” compared to the terrifying unpredictability and complexity of a planet. These aliens see themselves as saviors, in a process that works as a reiteration of their own history in which one species left its planet, joined the other, and together they escaped the planets that incubated them to live more securely in a symbiotic relationship off planet. Russell and Emrys present very different dilemmas, but in exploring them, each author incorporates how religion, and in particular Judaism, provides a framework for humans faced with previously unimaginable situations that involve ethical problems with consequences for an entire planet. 

Emrys places religion at the center of the plot. The main character is Jewish, raised in a kibbutz, keeping kosher and living with her partner and co-parents who were found through a shadchan, or matchmaker. The style of Judaism depicted in the text seems like a near-future descendent of Jewish Renewal in which rituals are malleable but keeping kosher dietary laws and not participating in idolatry are important, too. The character ascribes her fight to preserve the option to stay and keep working on saving the planet partly to her Jewish ethics and to the Jewish history of exile, a point she makes when she asks the aliens what freedom means to them during a Passover Seder. 

In Russell’s books, the aliens, rather than having a benign symbiosis, developed as prey and predator, each evolving sentience, but maintaining the relationship in which one species dominates the other, essentially keeping them as both livestock and a menial class of people. This social structure obviously presents ethical dilemmas for the human characters in the books, who land on the planet near the prey species and are welcomed with gentle, muted, curiosity and kindness. Once they meet the dominant, carnivorous, species they realize that they have misunderstood the situation radically and are faced with the classic sci-fi dilemma of whether or not to interfere or take sides, and if so how to do it. 

In the second book of the duology, two humans are stranded on the alien planet after the other members of the mission are killed or return to Earth. The mission had been sponsored by the Jesuit brotherhood, and half of the humans on the mission were Jesuits. But the survivor is a Sephardic Jewish woman, and the other human is her autistic son, born on the planet and raised by his mother with the herbivorous species. She teaches him stories and songs from Judaism, including the story of Exodus which becomes mapped onto the alien society and with encouragement from the mother inspires the prey species to overthrow their carnivorous counterparts, and in the process blend prophetic themes of Judaism into their own narratives and cosmic interpretation of their society and future. 

These two contrasting first-contact stories are unusual in their appreciation of how religion is part of the human process of making decisions based on morality or ethical judgments, and particularly in their incorporation of Judaism through women’s lives and identities. They illustrate a trend of science fiction moving away from the rigid assumption that “science” and “religion” are oppositional or mutually exclusive in the lives of intelligent beings by allowing their characters to be both scientifically minded and religiously knowledgeable and committed. In addition, Emrys novel deepens the depiction of the role of religion in a person’s life encompassing not just philosophical matters of beliefs and ethics, but deeply personal practices and connections of community and identity in a way that reflects the importance of religion to many American Jews, and others across religions, including many who identify as “nones.”