Rose/House

Overview: A thought provoking, beautiful, haunting and disturbing story from one of the most skilled writers of today.

More detailed thoughts: Arkady Martine has not published much fiction, however her debut Texicalaan Series has impressed me as possibly the highest quality, most thought provoking, moving, and beautifully written fiction of this century so far. That is very high praise, though looking at a list of awards for those books shows that I'm not alone in being impressed.

Of course I was a little nervous trying this book. It was the first non-Texicalaan book that I'd read of hers and instead of being based in a wholly imagined society, it was based in China Lake USA. I knew it would be different - but was I going to be disappointed. Were the Texicalaan books a fluke?

This story, which centres around a sealed AI managed house in the desert containing a mysterious death, is very different to the Texicalaan books. In many ways it is the opposite. The Texicalaan stories were a riot of the senses - of colours, tastes, smells, sounds and textures and there were so many different people with such varied personalities.

When I think of this book I think of the sound of wind-blown sand.

This book is quiet, it is slow, there is little action. There is a lot of reflection, questioning. The text itself is so cleverly written - both in the words themselves, but also in the use of layout and punctuation - that things do not need to be said. The story and the investigation progresses, but the questions that the reader is invited to ask of themselves and the world grows.

By the end I felt like I could scarcely breathe.

This is one of those books that is an experience. I'm not sure that a review can do it justice. It is profoundly different to the Texicalaan books, but like them you really have to read them to appreciate what make them special. It is the experience and the questions that experience raises that make these works of art.

Delicious. Novella length with a short story's worth of plot, there is a glorious blend of literary sci-fi and a tingle of horror and detective noir. It's more languid and atmospheric than solidly creepy or spooky, but it had me invested quickly. I think I wanted more resolution, more answers, but I can see how that wasn't the author's intent. I'm stil on the search for non-evil-seeming robots/AI, but if they're going to be a negative depiction, I appreciate when they're possibly sarcastic and ominous in their curiousity, possibly, but not certifiably homicidal. A good aura of mystery remains. I also love the framing of the house as a haunt, the idea of AI built into a house being a new form of haunted house, and how that extrapolates into the threat of a whole haunted city. For all that the plot felt a little truncated, I got a good feel for the characters in a relatively short space. Representation in books still being a point of contention, I continue to find it satisfying when a story is written by a female author with majority female characters. Will definitely be looking up Martine's backlist.