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Rose/House
Arkady Martine's Rose/ House takes preoccupations that readers of her novel A Memory Called Empire will be familiar with--a living place, the impression that a dead man leaves behind him, the seductions of intellectual fascination, the way an idea you love can cut you open--and refracts them through a different genre. Memory Called Empire and its sequel A Desolation Called Peace were adventure stories: there's a protagonist setting forth to learn more about the world, a beautiful woman, nobility engaged in elaborate plots, startling self-sacrifice, and a stack of similar motifs you might have met anywhere between Cherryh's Foreigner series and The Three Musketeers. Meanwhile, Rose/ House is a ghost story--a science fiction ghost story, with climate change and artificial intelligence and an architectural marvel in the Mojave desert all held up to the prism.
Rose/ House isn't coy about its genre. We're told early on that, "Yeah, Maritza grew up here, she knows like anyone else that Rose House is a haunt, and was glad when it was shut up inside with itself for good." The word "haunt" persists and multiplies, occasionally as the adjective commonly applied to houses, more often as that stark noun. But there are references to other genres too--casual references to carjackings for water rations, a detective who stubbornly investigates an inexplicable corpse--and I was inclined at first to read the book as a mystery. That's not the core. The core is the house itself: intelligent, inhuman, and beautifully, terrifyingly interested.
(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC.)
Rose/ House isn't coy about its genre. We're told early on that, "Yeah, Maritza grew up here, she knows like anyone else that Rose House is a haunt, and was glad when it was shut up inside with itself for good." The word "haunt" persists and multiplies, occasionally as the adjective commonly applied to houses, more often as that stark noun. But there are references to other genres too--casual references to carjackings for water rations, a detective who stubbornly investigates an inexplicable corpse--and I was inclined at first to read the book as a mystery. That's not the core. The core is the house itself: intelligent, inhuman, and beautifully, terrifyingly interested.
(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC.)
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