Rose/House by Arkady Martine

Once upon a time, I used to give authors 900 pages before I decided whether I was done with them, probably forever. That, ofc, was before I became a professional book critic and found myself inundated with more books than I have time for. In the before times, I might have extended that courtesy towards Arkady Martine. I really enjoyed the worldbuilding and cultural themes of her debut novel, A Memory Called Empire, but my God the writing. As memories (heh) of her fictional empire fade, I’m mostly left with the feeling of how deeply irritating her writing style was, with its overuse of italics and em dashes. And that’s even before thinking about the incredibly pedestrian mystery element of that novel.

So when I saw that she had a sci-fi noir nominated in the category of Best Novella for the 2024 Hugos, I girded my loins before diving in. I had no doubt that her strengths would remain strengths, but I worried that, without the rigor of an editor working over a debut, her faults would only grow harder to ignore.

Fortunately for me, the writing wasn’t even that bad here. There were a lot fewer italics than in AMCE, for a start, and while there were several pretentious paragraph breakages, it was nothing I couldn’t overcome with a grimace and an eye roll. The sci-fi wasn’t bad either, even if I did feel that this novella felt like an excuse for a recent monomania for architecture. And I get it, I love good construction, too. I enjoyed reading a lot of the philosophy of building design included in this novella, and even tho I absolutely think that the bedroom over a chasm is a wildly impractical construct that appeals only to certain types of people — and not necessarily the ones who share the protagonist’s point of view on it — I mostly agreed with Dr Selene Gisil on the utility of her chosen field.

But I also felt like the book fails from the very first conceit of having Selene tied to Rose House to begin with. Here’s the deal: years ago, Selene denounced her famous mentor, architect Basit Deniau, and moved half the world away from him to open her own practice. Basit was renowned for designing and constructing buildings infused with Artificial Intelligence, the most famous of which is Rose House, out in the Mojave Desert. When he died, he willed the house and its contents, which include pretty much his entire repository of knowledge, to Selene. She views the bequest as an anvil, as a twisted way to keep her entangled with him even in death.

So, why, I wondered, did she just not give the place up?

There’s no reason given for Selene to not just walk away from the damn place. There’s no reason given for a lot of what Selene does. In fact, there’s no reason given for what a lot of the characters here do. It’s extremely confusing to have all these random people wander in and out of frame, with only vague but sinister reasons for being there at all.

The exceptions, ofc, are the two cops working on the case of the dead body in Rose House. They’re alerted to its presence by the resident AI, who is legally obligated to do so. She, however, won’t let them in without Selene, who’s off in her Turkiye base. The cops summon Selene to the desert, there’s some sophistry involved in getting one of the cops on the property, the other cop tries to figure out what’s going on while stationed off-site, and… ugh, I just didn’t care. It was like reading Piranesi, only worse. It felt like Ms Martine was showing me all these neat, spooky scenes but declining to give any sort of explanation for them. Why the rose petals? Why the shadow? Why the hard drive? Why in the name of therapy did Selene give a good goddamn about this stupid house and the former owner whom she claimed to hate?

Apart from feeling like a clumsy stab at noir, the whole atmosphere was Gothic tragedy for its own sake, with little in the way of reasonable motives for the most baffling bits. The only people I understood were the cops and the housebreakers. Everyone else was a filmy wisp of emotion who would be lucky to achieve the intellectual solidity of a guest character on an episode of Scooby Doo. Annoying.

Rose//House by Arkady Martine was published March 18 2023 by Subterranean Press and is available from all good booksellers, including