Noninterference is a 1988 Harry Turtledove compilation novel from an earlier short story series by him. The Science Fiction Thriller follows the consequences of an explorer violating an Alien Non-Interference Clause and giving a benevolent ruler a vaccine to save her from a fever. Many generations later, a new survey time finds out that the injection actually made the new ruler immortal. Sinister bureaucrats will do anything to cover-up and avoid losing face in a scandal, leading to murder after murder in a doomed effort to hide the truth.
Tropes:
- Alien Non-Interference Clause: The Survey Service forbids any intervening with alien cultures and employees who violate it are fired or worse. This attitude is portrayed as one of inflexible paternalism, but there are several accurate arguments that David Ware violating the clause could have had horrible side effects if he had accidentally given the key to immortality to a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing rather than a genuine Reasonable Authority Figure.
- Conveniently Unverifiable Cover Story: SOP for the Survey Service when they want to insert clandestine ground level observers into very-near-humanoid populations below a certain transportation or communication capacity is to have them show up near the edge of a major settled area claiming to be travelling merchants from some inconvenient distance off the local maps. It normally works well, aside from the time someone who recalled the last set of oddly colored strangers with the same story was in a position to have them brought in for proper questioning.
- Crime After Crime: The Survey Services leaders repeatedly and illegally suppress a report regarding the effects of one of their former employees violating the Alien Non-Interference Clause. Then, their enforcer is surprised by a man with a copy of the report while trying to steal it, and kills him. This makes the Survey Service a lot more desperate to cover up that unplanned murder, leading to many more premeditated murders of people who know the truth, one of which kills three hundred bystanders to make the deaths of the true targets stand out less.
- Distant Prologue: The first section is set over a thousand years before the rest of the novel.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Queen Sabium is introduced as a patient and humble woman who greatly rewards any common citizens who come up with inventions or ideas to improve the kingdom. After she accidentally becomes immortal and is mistaken for a goddess, she remains humble and seeks to earn the gift she received by running a religion of innovation and tolerance. She also stops her guards from killing a man just because he tried to kill her, but then tells them that they can execute the man to punish his successful murder of one of her loyal servants.
- Revealing Cover-Up: Rather a Justified Trope as the Survey Service's SOP for discreetly inserting observers into very-near-humanoid populations lacking a rather advanced level of transportation/communication is normally quite effective... when there is not a resident god-queen who clearly recalls how those who gave her immortality had the same story and gave her priesthood standing orders to flag such for closer questioning and bring them to her if there are enough anomalies.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Intrepid Reporter Van Shui Pong stops helping Stavros and Andrea investigate the Survey Service and their crimes after the villains murder over three hundred people and he realizes that they will be willing to use that same ruthlessness against him.
- Serendipitous Survival: Magda only survives an attempt to kill her in with a sabotaged starship because she decides not to board it at the last minute in order to avoid a stalker.
