OFFICIAL AUTHOR BIO: Arkady Martine is a speculative fiction writer and, as Dr. AnnaLinden Weller, a historian of the Byzantine Empire and a city planner. Under both names she writes about border politics, narrative and rhetoric, risk communication, and the edges of the world.

She is currently a policy advisor for the New Mexico Energy, Minerals, and Natural Resources Department, where she works on climate change mitigation, energy grid modernization, and resiliency planning. Her debut novel, A Memory Called Empire, won the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novel, and its sequel, A Desolation Called Peace, won the 2022 Hugo Award in the same category. Arkady grew up in New York City, and after some time in Turkey, Canada, Sweden, and Baltimore, lives in New Mexico with her wife, the author Vivian Shaw.

FORMAT/INFO: Rose/House was published by Subterranean Press on March 30th, 2023. It is 128 pages. It is told in third person from multiple POVs. It is available in ebook format. 

OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: Ever since the death of famed architect Basit Deniau, Rose House has been sealed to the public. Deniau's will decreed that only his protégé Dr. Selene Gisil could have access to the house, an order that has been enforced by the AI that is built into every wall and beam and tile of the building. It has been months since Dr. Gisil has visited Rose House, and yet one day, the police contact her to inform her that the AI of Rose House has reported a dead body on the premises. Only with Dr. Gisil's help can Detective Maritza Smith hope to investigate who managed to break into the house - and more importantly, who killed them.

Rose/House is an interesting premise that doesn't have nearly enough runway to deliver. I desperately wish this novella had been twice as long, because all the right pieces are there: a locked house mystery, an atmospheric and creepy AI, a detective trying to navigate its interaction with that AI to get the pieces she needs to solve the crime. Unfortunately, the novella is so overstuffed with plot elements that the dreamlike prose renders the story more muddled than haunting.

There were parts of this book I really liked. The author manages to deftly paint a picture of the state of the world a few hundred years in the future, describing certain automated services, an increase in water theft as the primary source of crime, and other little details that immediately gives you a sense of place. The detective's interaction with the AI itself is clever, first in how the detective convinces the AI of a loophole that gains her access to Rose House, and then in how the detective reads between the lines of what the AI is or isn't saying, or what things interest the AI to discuss. It reminded me a little bit of Alex Garland's movie Ex Machina, where a human and an AI have several conversations together, where the human is trying to feel out the rules for how the AI processes information.

But even those good moments feel rushed when there's another detective outside the house discovering new details about who could have been involved in the murder, a third party who is also trying to gain access to the house, and Dr. Gisil is processing some very complicated feelings about her relationship with the architect Deniau. Add on top of that some very flowery prose, and I struggled at times to tell where the book was going, what the end point or goal was.

CONCLUSION: Rose/House has a lot of promise, but for me at least, the pieces didn't come together into a cohesive whole. This felt like a book that needed more time to simply "sit" with the atmosphere, to let the strange, ghost-like AI unnerve you and get under your skin.  Instead, it felt like a rushed dream that didn't make its intentions clear.