Literature / When The Sparrow Falls

Every sparrow shall be caught...

"The job itself is quite easy. But it's the kind of job that, a few months down the line, if things go badly, could end with you standing in a darkened room, in front of a row of men whose faces you cannot see, being asked questions to which there are no right answers..."

— Augusta Niemann, When the Sparrow Falls

The debut novel of Irish writer Neil Sharpson (better known around these parts as Unshaved Mouse).

It's 2210, and most of the world has come under the benevolent (?) rule of three super-intelligent AI known as "The Triumvirate". Most human beings live wholly or partially online, digitising their consciousnesses and co-existing with intelligent AI. The line between human and machine has blurred to nothing. But, in the Caspian Republic, a repressive one party state on the banks of the Caspian Sea, the last human holdouts have retreated to form their own nation free of all forms of Artificial Intelligence. As the Republic resorts to ever more brutal methods to keep their people in line, the outside world reacts with embargoes and sanctions and now Caspian is on the brink of famine.

Paulo Xirau was one of the most fervent and vitriolic spokesmen for the regime, but when he dies in a barfight he is discovered to have been "machine", an AI in a cloned human body. Security Agent Nikolai South is given the unglamorous and potentially dangerous task of escorting Xirau's widow during her visit to Caspian to identify her husband, and discovers to his shock and horror that the cloned body she is wearing is identical to his wife, who died decades ago.

Caught between his superiors and the rabid and fanatical Party Security agency, South has to uncover the truth about Xirau's presence in Caspian, and in doing so will learn secrets that will shake the Caspian Republic to its very foundations.

A very purposeful attempt to mesh a mid-century Cold War Thriller aesthetic with head-trippy cyberpunk (Sharpson has called it "Le Carrépunk)

One of The Times' Ten Best Science Fiction Novels of 2021.

Tropes featured include:

• Adaptation Expansion: Began life as a stage play titled "The Caspian Sea".
• Alas, Poor Villain: Laddi Chernov. He failed upward to a position of great power and wealth in Party Security after accidentally shooting an Azerbaijani man who just happened to be the biggest contranner in the country. But only after he was brutally tortured, which may have left him permanently traumatised.
  ...Chernov was Par Sec. That was reason enough to pity him, as well as hate him.
• The Alcoholic: Sally Coe succumbs to this for a time when she's separated from Gussie. Also, Sebastien Bellov.
• The Alleged Car: For Lily Xirau, every car in the Caspian Republic is one of these. Humans driving cars? That's just dangerous!
• Ambiguous Situation: Contranning. Is it (as most people in the Machine World believe) a way by which a human intelligence can be perfectly translated into data while remaining the same person? Or is it, as the ruling party of Caspian claims, a way for the Triumvirate to quietly eradicate humanity by killing human beings and replacing them with near perfect digital fakes?
• Artificial Human: AI can wear biological clonesuits to interact with the physical world.
• Badass Bureaucrat: South and Grier specifically, but pretty much all of Sta Sec. As Par Sec learn to their cost when they try to force their way into Sta Sec HQ.
• Badass Decay: Zigzagged with Sally Coe. She goes from being the most feared and dangerous agent in Sta Sec, to a drunken depressed mess, to...the most feared and dangerous agent in Sta Sec.
• Beneath the Mask: Nikolai South has spent most of his career doing the absolute bare minimum to survive in his role, because he only survived the last purge of Sta Sec by being too unimportant to purge. While most of his colleagues believe him to be completely mediocre, he's actually an extremely capable detective and could be phenomenal in his job if he wanted to be.
• Bilingual Bonus: Caspian is both English and Russian speaking, and plenty of Russian words have entered the vocabulary of Caspian English.
• Bittersweet Ending: Hoo boy. The Republic has fallen, and Caspian is enjoying a new age of liberation and prosperity. But Nikolai South had to spend twenty six years in brutal imprisonment and is now a barely lucid husk of a man. To add insult to injury, our narrator wasn't even the real South, but a duplicate who was made by Sally Coe and who then went and lived a long and happy life with Lily while the original rotted in jail.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: Sta Sec is not a nice organisation by any stretch, but compared to Par Sec?
  ...Hey, at least we're not The Bastards, eh?
• Blueand Orange Morality: AI in this universe have a very strict taboo on duplication. No AI that is currently active can be copied to create another active AI (creating a dormant "backup" in the event of your death is allowed, however). To take away another AI's unique status by creating a duplicate is considered to be one of the most egregious of all possible crimes, and the duplicate will be erased (killed) without hesitation.
  LILY XIRAU: I'm me. And no one else gets to be.
• …But He Sounds Handsome: Niemann's report to the Prime Minister on Yozhik describes them as the most brilliant and devious contranner that Sta Sec has ever faced. Guess who Yozhik turns out to be?
• The Chessmaster: Niemann, no question. But that's nothing compared to Xirau who, it's implied, has been this to THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME
• Code Name: "Yozhik", which means "hedgehog".
• Cunning Linguist: Downplayed. South speaks some Russian, which makes him useful in investigations in Old Baku, but by his own admission he's hardly fluent. He was more more confident in the language when he was a young man.
• Drives Like Crazy: Lily thinks this of all human beings.
• Enemy Civil War: State Security (Sta Sec) and Party Security (Par Sec) do NOT like each other, and their rivalry has often resulted in violence and even death.
• Foreshadowing: South's first investigation in the book is of two twin sisters who have been contranned. Their lifeless bodies are described as one having her eyes open, and one having her eyes closed foreshadowing the two Nikolais at the end of the book.
• Gaia's Lament: Averted. The Triumvirate have managed to reverse much of the devastation humanity has wrought on Earth's environment.
• Happily Married: Averted with Nikolai and Olesya, who started out loving each other very much but had a difficult and tempestuous marriage that ended in tragedy. Ditto Lily and Paulo Xirau. Invoked with Gussie and Sally and with Lily and Nicky 2.
• The Hero Dies:: Our narrator is not actually the original Nikolai South but his duplicate who has all his memories and wrote the story from his perspective after his death to finally "give him a voice".
• Heroic BSoD: South has a panic attack and collapses after Sally Coe reminds him of a state sanctioned mass killing they were both complicit in.
• Honey Trap: Upon meeting Lily, South suspects the Machine Powers are attempting a particularly cruel variation of this against him.
• Hypercompetent Sidekick: Sally Coe is this to Augusta Niemann.
• I'd Tell You, but Then I'd Have to Kill You: Averted. Sally Coe DOES tell Nikolai the gruesome truth of the massacre of '84, and very quickly reminds him that she will absolutely kill him if he breathes a word of it to anyone.
  “I didn’t know,” I whispered.
  “Well of course you didn’t,” she said. “It’s a big fucking state secret."
• In-Series Nickname: Sta Sec, and its founder Simon Emanuel Dascalu, were both known as "The Old Man". Par Sec is commonly referred to simply as "The Bastards".
• It's Personal: Sally Coe's final disposing of Samuel Papalazerou Junior definitely comes across as this.
• Let Me Get This Straight...: South's first meeting with Niemann involves introducing a lot of the concepts that will be important to the story going forward and so employs this trope. Justified somewhat, as South always plays dumber than he is around his superiors, and is genuinely in shock with the discovery that Xirau was secretly AI.
• Manly Tears: South weeps when remembering the massacre at Kobustan, but can't admit it openly to Lily.
  “I was awake,” she said. “I heard crying.”
  “Well, it couldn’t have been me. I’ve been lying on the floor,which is perfectly normal, as I explained.”
  “It must have been someone else.” She nodded.
  “Must have been.”
  “I wish I could help them. They sounded like they were in real pain.”
  “I’m sure they would be very grateful to hear that. And I’m sure they would very much like to confide in you. But I am equally sure that they cannot.”
• The Mole: Chernov believes that Yozhik may be in Sta Sec. She's actually RUNNING Sta Sec. Wernham is a Par Sec mole, spying on Sta Sec, which South deduces with very little difficulty.

* Mole in Charge: Niemann.

• Posthumous Character: Olesya South. Zahara Fareed Kader. Nikolai South
• Psychopathic Manchild: Laddi Chernov.
  He looked like if you searched him you’d find a gun and a length of wire.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Nadia Evershan appears in person for precisely one scene. We later learn that she proved to be one of the most significant figures in the eventual overthrow of the Caspian government.
• State Sec: Despite the name, Sta Sec is less this and more plain old Secret Police. PAR SEC, on the other hand, is this this to a T.
• Unreliable Narrator: Nikolai South. His account is mostly truthful but with one major lie of omission. He is not the Nikolai South who experienced these events, but an AI duplicate who retained all his memories.