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When the Sparrow Falls

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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

In the future, AI are everywhere - over half the human race lives online. But in the Caspian Republic, the last true human beings have made their stand; and now the repressive, one-party state is locked in perpetual cold war with the outside world.

Security Agent Nikolai South is given a seemingly mundane task; escorting a dead journalist's widow while she visits the Caspian Republic to identify her husband's remains. But Paulo Xirau was AI; and as Nikolai and Lily delve deeper into the circumstances surrounding Paulo's death, South must choose between his loyalty to his country and his conscience.

© Neil Sharpson 2021 (P) Penguin Audio and Rebellion Publishing 2021

 Espionage Hard Science Fiction Science Fiction Spies & Politics Thriller & Suspense Fiction
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A book I thoroughly enjoyed listening to. Well read and written it is, I’d imagine, the sort of book John Le’Carre might have produced if he’d decided to turn his hand to SF. The author conjures the grit and despair of a totalitarian, Eastern European state whilst breathing real life into the main characters. Shot through with little moments of humour to leaven the mix, brutality and inhumanity are not left on the shelf, it’s a book which I shan’t forget in a hurry.

Wonderful

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a really well written book and a brilliant concept well executed best book I have read this year

a great book

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Step into an Eastern Bloc regime on the borders of a future Caspian Sea state. The novel's vision of humanity's future is that we will all load ourselves up onto servers and live our lives in virtual worlds ordered by AIs.
It may be your idea of a nightmare, but those are the lucky ones, for the final outpost of non-digital humanity is the barely functioning Caspian Republic. The state takes its politics from the current Soviet Union, so the story line is reminiscent of China Miéville's typically imaginative The City and The City, where a cop investigating a double suicide gets dragged into the seethe of state politics.
Author Neil Sharpson has adapted his own play, The Caspian Sea, into a novel. It's largely an Orwellian exploration of how authoritarian regimes function. This regime starts to come apart at the seams when the protagonist, agent Nicolai South, is given the mission of escorting an AI (disguised in a human cloned body) around the state.
It is well-written but if you want to dip into dystopian futures there are plenty of better examples out there. Apart from Miéville, Philip K. Dick and Orwell, Hugh Howey's Wool Trilogy is more original and delivers protagonists you care about more.

Politics and AI collide in a dystopian future

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