Teaser

Rose House is its creators final project. A completely sealed building with an inbuilt artificial intelligence and a door that only opens for one person. So how can it possibly be the site of a murder . . ?

Review

Like a lot of people, I was a huge fan of Arkady Martine’s Teixcalaan duology. So much so that they mark one of few times when I and the venerable Hugo Awards have been on the same page when it comes to best novel of the year. The only real issue I have with Martine is that she’s not more prolific. Since Teixcalaan won back-to-back humans, her only SF publication has been Rose/House, and that was originally limited to a very price special edition. Thankfully, it received a wider release last year, and a copy found its way to me on Christmas morning.

To get the obvious question out of the way: No, I don’t think this is on the same level as A Memory Called Empire. Nor is trying to be. This is a deeply perplexing novella, although I suspect a great deal of my confusion comes from my self-diagnosis of lambing brain. Seriously kids, get to bed on time.

Rose/House (I’m not entirely sure why that slash exists in the title, because the house’s AI is named without it throughout the novel – is a locked room mystery. There’s a dead body in a place where by all rights there shouldn’t have been one. But it’s also one with an obvious solution. It’s in the near future, and I dare say there is no version of this book in which the house is not involved in the killing. So maybe it’s not a murder mystery. Maybe it’s more of a break-in mystery. Because even if the killer is obvious, the victim is an unknown, and shouldn’t even be there.

This ends up being largely academic, because the investigation only takes up a third of the book. The rest is comprised of tangents. We are mercifully spared of any long diatribes about the rights and nature of AI identify. Instead we get an extended backstory of the house’s creator and its current caretaker. This leads us down the deep, deep rabbit hole of architecture. And look, I’m someone who loves trivia. Who doesn’t want to learn cool facts? I even appreciate a nice-looking building (and have a soft spot for brutalism), but there is a lot, and I mean a lot, of architecture in the book. And none of it’s really relevant to the plot. Some of it doesn’t even seem to inform the characters. It’s just stuff that Martine wants to tell us. In a novel, this would be fine, but I prefer my novellas to be a little tighter. Especially when they’re framed a s a murder mystery.

The odd things is though, that it didn’t bother me as much as I expected. I am not a prose guy. I’ll take a shaky writer telling a good yarn over a talented wordsmith repeating haggard tropes any day of the week, but Martine’s writing is very easy on the eye. It sounds stupid, but her sentences are nice to read. I had a good time reading this book, for all my quibbles with its contents.

I don’t think I’d recommend Rose/House to someone who wasn’t already a fan of Martine’s work. Her two novels are leaps and bounds ahead of this, but it was a nice way to pass the time. And if you like architecture, this might just be the perfect book for you.

Book Stats

• A Standalone Novella
• Published in 2023
• 118 Pages