After Downward to the Earth
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
Silverberg wrecked you with that atonement pilgrimage through Belzagor's alien mysticism? Russell's The Sparrow doubles down: Jesuit missionaries follow alien song to first contact, only to watch good intentions corrode into moral catastrophe. Same haunted prose, same spiritual dread, same refusal to let humanity off the hookâbut this time the reckoning cuts through faith itself.