One Sentence Summary: When the victim of a killing is discovered to be a "machine" in the last sanctuary for humans, Agent Nikolai South is tasked with escorting his widow, but something greater seems to be a play, and it may have to do with this machine who bears an uncanny resemblance to his late wife.

Overall

When the Sparrow Falls is the kind of dystopian novel I've been searching for. I love that I could clearly figure out how the world went from here to there. At times, the Caspian Republic felt like a post-war country, but there was a sci-fi edge to it with AI running the world outside of the Republic. The characters were all playing complicated games and had secrets hiding up their sleeves like a deck of cards, all of them maneuvering South around the board like a chess piece, no matter how he tried to outwit them. When the Sparrow Falls is an incredible dystopian novel with fear in the air and change on the horizon.

Extended Thoughts

When AI arose and the reins of government handed over to the Triumvirate, a trio of AI from three different continents, the Caspian Republic was formed to be the last home for humans and humankind. AI are not allowed and one has never set foot inside its borders. Until now.

After his unfortunate death, famed journalist Paulo Xirau is discovered to have been a machine. Around the same time, Agent Nikolai South and his partner are called in to investigate the deaths of twin sisters. They discover it's a case of consciousness transfers (contran), in which the women's consciousnesses were transferred out of their bodies in order to put them into AI bodies, which is illegal in the Republic. But, before he can investigate further, South is called on for a special task: escort the deceased AI's widow to identify his remains.

But the widow, Lily, bears an uncanny resemblance to South's late wife. Even though she is machine, he begins to see her in a different light, one that will have him caught in many webs as the Republic is on the brink of incredible change.

For years, I've called myself a fan of dystopian fiction, but hadn't ever actually found one I loved. In their own ways, they all failed to convince me of their dystopian nature. When the Sparrow Falls is the first to give me everything I didn't know I needed all of my dystopian reads to have. I loved that I could clearly figure out how our world became South's world. Of course, there were some things I had to assume, but it was like following breadcrumbs, and then the world just exploded in my mind.

The world building is fantastic. The history is all laid out, not in a linear manner, but in bits and pieces that are still easy to follow and put together. The world makes complete sense to me, and even feels plausible as a possible future. There were some things that did feel a little far-fetched, but I loved how impressive the Caspian Republic was. There was so much depth to it that it made me feel like I was there, following South around.

As great as the world building is, though, there isn't exactly much else to the book. There is some mystery, but it's not nearly as front and center as I expected considering the curious fact that Lily appears identical to his late wife. South's job is to escort Lily, not try to figure out who contranned the sisters, but there are a lot of moving pieces around him and he and Lily seemed to be somewhere in the middle. This isn't so much the reader looking over his shoulder, peering in to see how he's sorting things out. It's more of we're in his head, seeing history from his eyes, and putting together a timeline and information about all these moving pieces to figure out the next step. While the mystery is deftly and softly tied into the story, I felt it was more about the detailing of history and South putting together pieces from his past to figure things out in the present. Otherwise, he spends an awful lot of time talking to people and sitting around while Lily works on identifying her husband's remains, which is itself a fascinating point.

But I still really enjoyed reading this. I was surprised by just how easily and quickly I flew through it. The world was so immersive, the history so fascinating, that I couldn't wait to pick it up again. It's quite incredible that all the plots, machinations, and uncovering of plots and secret identities happened in a very compressed amount of time. In a way, it seems fast-paced, but there's so much thinking and retelling of the past that it kind of messed with my sense of how time progressed in the book.

The only thing that really bothered me was most of the last 10 chapters. It got weird. Of course, the book required a good ending and couldn't really end earlier than those last several chapters, but I wish it had been smoother. Instead, it was a bit jarring and kind of knocked me out of the story. Still, it did provide a good end for all the characters.

The characters were all remarkable. Many of them did blend together and I had a difficult time remember who was in which Party (which also confused me a lot), but the main characters were absolutely fascinating. The higher ups have their own orders and chess games going on and absolutely played their public and private roles to perfection. Lily felt like such a nice breath of fresh air despite being a machine. Being in a human body is completely new to her and she's stuck with the duality of being human and AI. I both loved and hated South. As the narrator, the reader comes to know him very well. He's a good worker, just going along under the radar, but there's a lot of depth to him, a lot from his past that explains just about everything about him. But it very often felt like the story was spiraling out of control around him and he was just caught up in it for the ride. He was overshadowed by the world and the story, which felt weird considering the reader gets the story through his eyes.

Still, When the Sparrow Falls is the most impressive dystopian novel I've had the pleasure to read. I loved everything about the world and was quite pleasantly surprised by just how in-depth the characters were. They all had their histories and motivations and it all helped push the story forward. It did feel like everything just suddenly decided to come to a head with Lily's arrival, but I suppose everything needs a catalyst and she was convenient. Overall, though, a delightful dystopian read with tons to offer a reader.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a review copy. All opinions expressed are my own. ( )

http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2022/03/review-of-when-sparrow-falls-by-neil.ht... ( )

This is one of the three best books I have read in 2021. The world is divided between the vast majority of people who eagerly upload themselves to live exalted lives in cyborg bodies supported by the digital cloud, and a small minority who reject this new AI tech. Elsewhere in the world you can make this decision yourself, but in the Caspian Republic (located roughly where Azerbaijan is today) uploading is banned and anyone involved in the illicit trade is severely punished. Then the unimaginable happens, Paulo Xirao, a prominent figure in the anti-AI movement, is murdered and found out to be a machine. Agent Nikolai South, a law officer who chases upload criminals, is put on the case and then detailed to watch over Xirao's wife Lily, who has been given permission to come into the Republic to identify her husband's remains. Lily, who is an AI, looks exactly like South's late wife.

Complex, dark and powerful, this book compares favorably with the better cold war spy thrillers. If you are widely read in SF, you will see parallels there too. The Caspian Republic is fighting a rear-guard action against the will of the people and, like the Eastern European dictatorships of the 1990s, must resort to brutality to hang on.

This really is a must read book. I can't imagine that it will not be nominated for major awards.

I received a review copy of "When the Sparrow Falls" by Neil Sharpson from Tor through NetGalley.com. ( )

The Caspian state was intended to provide an AI free life for those who established it, but that's about the only freedom its residents have left, while AIs rule the rest of the world and and others can upload themselves - or download themselves into clones, but not copy themselves. Somehow Sharpson manages to provide enough action and interest to keep the complete nastiness of his created state within a world from utterly oppressing the reader as it does its citizens, with deft feats of characterization and intrigue. ( )

I RECEIVED MY DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

Nominally, the currency of the Caspian Republic is the moneta, but in truth the coin of the nation was fear. Whoever could inspire fear was rich, whoever lived in fear was poor.
–and–
For a writer's work to be circulated amongst the upper levels of the party was usually the precursor to them coming down with a rather permanent case of writer's block, but not this time. {He} was offered a position in The Truth (then viewed as a rather out of touch and elitist organ), and asked to bring his rough, authentic, working-class voice to the paper's readers, who were left with nothing to do but wonder what they had done to deserve it.

You know already where you are. You'd be stupid or frankly insentient if you didn't recognize the various totalitarian régimes of our present century. Here's what you don't know in the first few chapters of this extraordinarily exciting tale: You will not be leaving the Caspian Republic until events have reached their logical limits. Until then, settle in and surrender your schedule and your other plans.

I would love to spoil the bejabbers out of this read. It is almost painful not to. I want someone to kvell over the ending with; I want someone to be full of the rat's-nest of emotions with me...and not one soul I know can be!

I understand the feelings expressed at the ending of the book so very much better now.

When you send your request in to the bookery of your choice for this story, I think you should know that the author's purpose in writing it was to rob you of any sense of actual control over your life and the world around you. But it will, in fact, be okay. I can't tell you why but let's just say Epicurus's famous formulation of the Problem of Evil:

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”

Well-trodden tracks lead through this thicket. The response from the god-addled is, "She has Her Reasons, which Reason knoweth not," or something similar to that. In fact the story contains that very argument, put in the mouth of a deeply important figure. (It is only resolvable for the goddists by their huffy assumption that you, o skeptic, are nowhere near as smart as you think you are; and for the bare-faced atheists by using the same argument in reverse.) But what if there *is* a solution....

It was the face beneath mine on the beach when she had been pulled from the ocean and my breath had not been enough.

What, indeed.

Spending a day immersed in the Caspian Republic is a pleasure I'm deeply glad to inform you is exactly what this rather somber, for me at least, holiday required. I needed morally complex characters, ones whose simplest expressions of self are free of embarrassing innocence and unmarred by mawkish candor. I needed to be with my fellow hideously betrayed and painfully reassembled, then betrayed again...and again...and again...bitter, disappointed, unable to imagine what trust would even look like, romantics. They teem in the totalitarian terrors of the Caspian Republic. I needed to feel that my brain's energy was fully and unremittingly drawn down to understand the convolutions of the story's moral landscape.

"Everyone's soul is unique...{a}nd just as your body is built with the protein and calcium and iron you consume every day, your soul is built with words. The words you read, and the words you hear. The soul consumes words, and then it expresses itself through them in a way that is unique to that soul."

Success!

Love will always fuck you up; and the ways in which love fucks you up are truly epic in this story. Thee and me, fellow QUILTBAGgers, are presented on these pages as people of complexity and subtlety. There's really no sex of any sort; it's alluded to and it's very much part of the proceedings, but nobody gets down to business. In exchange, lesbians' love is utterly unremarkable. Men's love is less present; but it does come, when it shows up, as a moment of bathos and facetious secretiveness ("...what did he do?" Your husband, unless I completely misread the subtext, isn't particularly respectful from a cishet man no matter that it's amusingly phrased). Oh well...can't really expect otherwise, given the two men involved. There was absolutely no way on Earth I'd've picked those guys out as my fellows, gotta hand that to Author Sharpson!

So half-a-star gone for the three w-bombs dropped on my innocent, unsuspecting head; another half-star for being sniggeringly dismissive of the only gay male couple in the entire book.

But leaving the read, the ending, well...that has to put some luster back on the read...it's a delight, if a marred and flawed delight, of a read. It gives a reader a rare treat: Reading about grown people, the adult end of the room, is a rapturous and infrequently encountered pleasure in the YA-heavy lists of SF/F publishers. A novel of ideas, one that examines the cracks and the broken places in Love and Trust, one that asks you to spend more than just the usual amount of energy on the read deserves a warm and delighted welcome, louder and stronger for the fact that it's the first...hopefully in a long line.

But seriously. No more w-verbing. It's gross. ( )