WHEN THE SPARROW FALLS, a debut SF novel with

WHEN THE SPARROW FALLS
NEIL SHARPSON
Tor Books
$26.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.1* of five

The Publisher Says: Life in the Caspian Republic has taught Agent Nikolai South two rules. Trust No One. And work just hard enough not to make enemies.

Here, in the last sanctuary for the dying embers of the human race in a world run by artificial intelligence, if you stray from the path - your life is forfeit. But when a Party propagandist is killed - and is discovered as a "machine" - he's given a new mission: chaperone the widow, Lily, who has arrived to claim her husband's remains.

But when South sees that she, the first "machine" ever allowed into the country, bears an uncanny resemblance to his late wife, he's thrown into a maelstrom of betrayal, murder, and conspiracy that may bring down the Republic for good.

WHEN THE SPARROW FALLS illuminates authoritarianism, complicity, and identity in the digital age, in a page turning, darkly-funny, frightening and touching story that recalls Philip K. Dick, John le Carré and Kurt Vonnegut in equal measure.

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.