A strange, claustrophobic little novella that teeters on the edge of horror without ever truly taking the plunge. I was thrilling with anticipation for this release after falling in love with Martine's Teixcalaan duology, and echoes of my enjoyment are present in the ecofuturist society and neo-noir flavor of the plot. However, the ambitious, stylized approach to the narrative and the confusing plot left me feeling off-kilter and unsatisfied. There are times when the prose veers into the dreamy and insubstantial, to the point where I had to go back and read certain sections again to understand what was going on. The whole story is permeated by a slithering feeling of discomfort and anxiety - I think another reviewer pointed this out but finishing the story left me feeling much the same as did leaving the theatre after <i>Ex Machina</i>.Fans of narrative ambiguity and thematic saturation will find a lot to sink their teeth into, but I found that the approach frustrated me more than it rewarded me. Far too much was left unresolved, and while I'm all for open endings I feel like the reader has to be given enough ammunition to create something believable for themselves. Overall, too much reliance on building vibes and leaning into the concept and not enough attention to character or plot culminated in a bit of a letdown.

Very good. Great premise and solid execution here. Martine writes well of course, and this is smart and interesting. Recommended.

Thanks very much for the free ARC for review!!

I get this feeling, sometimes, when reading works by Tamsyn Muir: a slow spiralling panic of realization where my after gliding over several dense sentences, my brain cries: "Oh crap, we're not smart enough for this".

This novella by Arkady Martine produced this exact reaction. I haven't yet read other work by Martine - this one's my maiden voyage - but I'm eager to do so after "Rose/House", a strange, dreamy, hallucinogenic tale that borrows equally from Ray Bradbury as it does Shirley Jackson as it does Space Odyssey 2001: what to do with a potentially malevolent AI?

There's been a murder, you see, but the crime scene is locked behind the doors of an architecturally important home guarded by the Rose House AI. This novella discusses the intricacies of the crime as well as the horror of being trapped (and toyed with) by something much smarter than you.

Kind of like me reading this very book! How meta.

I enjoyed it. The prose verged on the purple at times, but when it landed, it landed beautifully. Fans of fever daydream horror will find a lot to chew over in this book. I'm curious now to read Martine's other work!

A new Arkady Martine book? Yes! Yes! Yes!

I loved loved loved A Memory Called Empire when it came out. It was stunning and wonderful and I didn’t want it to end. It was everything I wanted in a space opera - politics and romance and space stations and aliens beyond the edge of known space. It brought back all of those good Babylon 5 feels. And A Desolation Called Peace was a fantastic follow up that I also loved to pieces. So I was beyond overjoyed when I got an eARC from Subterranean Press and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Rose/House did not disappoint. Unlike her earlier work, this book was not space opera. Instead it is a near future sf world with a smart house’s AI haunting a deceased architect’s masterpiece. The characters were perfectly drawn in just a few pages, yet they continued to reveal more depth and nuance as the story progressed. I could not put this down. One of the best things I read all year.

Arkady Martine's Rose/House is a technologically advanced twist on the locked room murder mystery, but is more interested in the ways humans think of themselves and present themselves to others.

In the near, resource scarce future, deceased architect Basit Deniau's former home and archive, Rose House, is located in the deserts of China Lake. The house's climate controls, day to day maintenance and most importantly access are controlled by an AI that shares the name of the building. Dr. Gisil, Deniau's appointed legal administrator and former protege, is able to visit the house for seven days each year. She had already left the house and returned home when local police are notified that there is a dead body in the home.

Despite a heavy case load, the two local police become obsessed with the case and become embroiled in a mind game with the house AI and numerous strangers new to town.

A curious blend of genres, that plays to the strengths of science fiction. Here Martine shows some potential futures of technologies and that humans will always gamble with their future for the chance of success.

I absolutely loved the Teixcalaan duology by Arkady Martine, so I was thrilled to see another book from her coming out.

In this book, an architect Basit Deniau leaves his most ambitious project, a house embedded with an AI so advanced that the house seems to be alive, to his protégé Selene Gisil after his death. She is called by detective Maritza Smith to come investigate a dead body inside of the house, which is strange, as Gisil is the only person who is supposed to be allowed in the house.

I would best describe ROSE/HOUSE as a "technological gothic". It uses the theme of a "living house" that occurs again and again in gothic literature (think the anthropomorphic descriptions in THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE: "Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.") but using technology to create the haunting.

This book is only 128 pages and wastes no words, so it keeps you on your toes for the entire story.

It is definitely extremely different than A MEMORY CALLED EMPIRE or A DESOLATION CALLED PEACE, so I do not suggest going into it expecting the same type of highly political space opera. What ROSE/HOUSE does have in common with the others, though, is a futuristic world with a novel exploration of technological possibilities.

I highly recommend this!! I have already pre-ordered a physical copy.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the gifted ARC.

I enjoyed this book by Arkady Marine, and it was my first time reading her. I enjoyed the mystery/SF aspects of this book. Enjoyed the characters, pacing, and story. Will need to read more from Arkady Marine. #RoseHouse #NetGalley

A locked house murder, a sentient house, a determined detective....altogether add up to an excellent story by Martine.
Rose House is the final creation of renowned architect, Deniau, and left in the resentful care of Selene Gisil, the only one the Rose House will allow inside. At least until a dead body is reported inside Rose House itself.
Detective Smith received the call reporting the death, and is determined to do her best to figure not only how someone, or possibly someones, got into Rose House and wound up dead.
Beautifully written, a little creepy and wonderfully done.

Unsurprisingly, if your AI run architecture is starting to ask the cops philosophical questions about the definition of identity and personhood, just run and get your gun, it's super haunted. Fantastic, twisting path of a novella that I ended up burning through in the space of two nights. Pick this up when it comes out from Subterranean; their book quality is always super high, and it's worth paying for the physical edition (like my partner did for this, sorry I got this early honey!).

I love Arkady Martine and I figured I'd read anything she lent her talents to. Sadly, it seems like that's just not true. I'm just no longer the kind of reader who finds the perspective of cops-even sci-fi cops-even remotely compelling, even more so when they are threatening and lying and doing all sorts of unethical things just because they can, with the justification that they're just 'doing their job'. A DNF at around 20%.

Thank you, Subterranean Press, for allowing me to read Rose/House early.

Such an intrguing novella Rose/House was. Fascinating from start to finish.

A locked room mystery - or in this case a locked mansion. Rose/House is an AI infused mansion created by a radical architect, now deceased, his heart compressed to a diamond and exhibited on a plinth within. It is empty, haunted by its AI. Only one person may enter, Selene Gisel, the architect’s archivist, and then only for one week a year. And yet. Local police detective Martinez Smith receives a call from the house, from the AI, reporting a body, dead 24 hrs. It is not Selene. Who then, why, and how?

Martine presents a creepy house, a creepy AI, and an interesting mystery. Selene is properly odd, Martinez properly earnest. There is some really lovely writing: <blockquote><i>A room is a sort of narrative. The passage in and out of a room, the constraints of action within it. What is moved and what is left alone. The composition of the shape of a person superimposed against the frame of the built environment. Once, clever men—mostly men—dreamed that the frame within which people dwelled might prescribe their behavior. Their ways of loving, their ways of working. Their interdependence or solitude. All purpose-built, all shaped. Those men tended to be wrong. They did not consider the superposition of frame. A room is a sort of narrative when an intelligence moves through it, makes use of it or is constrained by it. Otherwise it is in abeyance. And an intelligence has its own designs. The street makes its own uses for things: this is something Maritza knows, though she doesn’t know she knows it. Selene Gisil, too, and she even has the phrase, some forgotten quotation that floats to the top of her mind at inopportune moments. Rose House? Rose House knows it very well.</blockquote></i>These elements were all the story needed to be mysterious and complete. Limiting the impact of the story - Martine includes a pointless parallel narrative that repeatedly interrupts the creepy vibe. 100% of this narrative should have been removed to keep the focus on the house and those within.

I liked ambiguous the ending. It leaves some key questions unanswered <spolier>: 1) What possessed Selene to fill the corpse with flowers? 2) What was on the thumb drive she gave to Martinez 3) What will Martinez do with it? My theories:<spoiler>

1) Stuffing the corpse with flowers was I think either: a) The artist in now insane Gisel coming out vs the architect she failed at being. Suggesting this - at the end the book tells us she is to exhibit an art not architecture installation in Doha; or b) Rose/House has “programmed" Gisel to be like itself via inhaled nanodrones that swan through the house and is exhibiting its artistic side modeled on its father - the corpse becoming flowers at a grave site at the foot of basit's memorial. Evidence: Recall the hallucinations and memory gaps of Martinez who also inhaled the nano drones but only for one day in the house vs many days for Selene. Recall also Selene ran from the house on her last visit over the impact the house was having on her.

2) Martinez speculates that the drive is code to replicate Rose/House. If so why would Martinez keep it vs destroy it? She hates the house. Gisel has no interest in replicating the house. Rose/House itself is prideful. It values being unique and a a curiosity like a Basit who created it. It killed to preserve its uniqueness. It has no interest in “multiplicity.” Replication? I think not. Better: Gisel gave Martinez the means to free her (Gisel) from the house because she can't bring herself to do it herself. Its a kill code that shuts Rose down and might free her.

3) What will Martinez do? I suspect nothing. She fears letting Rose loose on the world so will never examine the drive that could destroy it.</spoiler>

Overall <i>Rose/House</i> reminds me of Alex Garland’s excellent <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0470752/"><i>Ex Machina</i></a>. Similar setting (a unique isolated house) and plot with Rose/House AI replacing Ava. Basit/Gisel are an anlalogs to the Nathan character, geniuses haunted by their creation - Ava/the Rose AI. Martinez is Caleb, the outsider tasked with examining the AI to see what it knows. The key difference is Ava wanted out into the world, Rose/House does not. <i>Rose/House</i> is also reminiscent of <a href= "https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50202953-piranesi?"><i>Piranesi</i></a>, a labyrinthine closed world with no doors and a mythical atmosphere.

Bottomline: Interesting. Entertaining. 3.5 stars (deducting 1.5 for the unnecessary narrative), rounded up to 4. On my buy, borrow, skip scale: A solid borrow. Martine remains an author to follow.

Thanks to Netgalley for the review copy.

This story left me in a bit of a perplexed daze. Intriguing, atmospheric and yet frustratingly smudged at the edges, just to the point where I feel that if I just squint and think hard enough I’d “get” it — except for I don’t quite do. It’s just too opaquely dreamlike for hard logic.

A bit of a migraine aura of a novella, to borrow the in-story comparison.

“She was alone. Alone except for the dead, and the haunt, and whoever else was still inside the house. Which wasn’t very alone at all.”

It’s a combination of architects and AI that’s infused with creepiness and subtle sense of wrongness that does make me think of one of those half-awake dreams that strain logic and reason and perhaps exactly because of that are fascinatingly atmospheric. The AI-haunted Rose House, with diamond remains of its deceased owner inside, as a crime scene makes for a weirdly unsettling narrative. The kind of narrative that makes me feel half-awake and half-dreaming. It actually made me flash back to the strange atmosphere of Piranesi in a way - the haunted labyrinthine strangeness, although otherwise those stories are not similar at all.

There are loose ends and logic breakdowns and characters that didn’t need page time. And yet to me it all paled compared to the atmosphere. Or maybe it’s the nanodrones effect.

3.5 stars, rounding up.


——————

Thanks to NetGalley and Subterranean Press for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Koontz's <i>Demon Seed</i> meets Jackson's <i>Haunting of Hill House</i> in this innovative, lyrically written, blend of sci-fi and noir.

<i>Why I picked it up</i>: Looking for recommendations after finishing <i>Recursion</i> and <i>Road Kill</i>, I ran across Words in Time's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1h9HGiPVBs">Top 5 Most Anticipated Sci-Fi Books of 2022</a>. Added this and some others to my wish list.

<i>Why I finished it</a>: I've been a fan of "fantasy noir" since before Jim Butcher began writing the Dresden books, but it's the echoes of Hill House that kept me interested in this one. I was particularly taken with the interplay between Detective Maritza Smith and the Rose House AI, relying on a compromise where Maritza assumes a role that defines her as other than human so the AI will interact with her.

<i>I'd give it to</i>: It's a tough book to recommend, actually. The language is artful, and while I liked the self-consciously noir setting (particularly Detective Torres' interactions with the maybe-reporter) and the exploration of identity and the self that both Maritza and Selene grapple with, this mash-up of genres may not be to everyone's taste.

Rose/House was haunting. Rose House was haunted.

Although the murder mystery in Arkady Martine's upcoming novella is intriguing, I was more drawn in by the powerful descriptions of the sand-scoured vaults of Rose House and its slanted views on the world, both literally and figuratively. Outside, the heat of the desert holds Detective Maritza Smith "like a cupped and squeezing hand," but inside Rose House she becomes someone else entirely.

This story is told through multiple perspectives, and each of them have their own viewpoint on the world. Each of those viewpoints have dead space where things can slip through. Martine's prose makes it easy to distinguish those different viewpoints even as they change or become changed, and the narrative never overstays its welcome in anyone's mind except the reader's.

Rose/House is just as beautiful as House of Leaves was horrific, but only slightly less disturbing--a House of Petals, maybe. Recommended for those interested in architects, archivists, and artificial intelligence. If you can find a way inside the labyrinth of this story, it may never fully leave you.

I think that the setting and a lot of the details about the atmosphere were so interesting and futuristic, however the plot line was so disjointed and rushed that I felt that this novella became a jumble of ideas that were just thrown together, but didn't mesh into something cohesive. I loved the idea of the AI House and the inheritance and felt that there is something really there that could be so interesting. It really felt like the author was constrained by making something shorter, however did not get it fully fleshed out. Thanks for the ARC, NetGalley.

In the ill defined future, Basit Deniau, a world famous architect, dies in Rose House, his last and most famous creation. No one but his designated archivist is allowed into Rose House, governed by its AI system, and where Deniau’s body remains, compressed into a diamond.

With this as the background, detective Maritza Smith receives a phone call from Rose House itself to report a dead body that has been there for 24 hours. The archivist, Selene Gisil, wasn’t present when the body was discovered and can account for her movements. What follows is an incredibly well written variation of the locked room mystery, but in Rose/House there isn’t a neat solution. Loose ends are left hanging. But this didn’t bother me. The sheer excellence of the writing just blew me away, and the hints as to the futuristic backdrop didn’t distract me from the core of the story. I just loved Rose/House.

My thanks to the publisher and to Netgalley for providing an ARC of the book.

A twisty, deftly constructed mystery that constructs a cohesive future world without being distracted by over-explaining anything that's happening. The characters at the heart of the novel (the house, two police officers, and the archivist) all come to life in this story. The mystery itself is satisfying and Martine trusts her readers to connect the emotional dots. Not a single wasted word in this gem of a novella.

I’ve been waiting to see what Arkady Martine would write after her Hugo-award-winning Teixcalaan space opera duology, and now we have something. While Martine has said she will be writing more in the Teixcalaan universe, this new novella is completely separate. It is an engagingly told locked house murder mystery set on a recognizable 22nd century Earth. Well, actually, that locked house is not exactly the classic mystery genre trope. Rose House is an artificial intelligence created by its famous architect Basit Deniau to house his posthumous crystalized remains, having granted one week of access per year to his ex-protegee Selene Gisil, and no one else.

Maritza Smith is the disillusioned detective with the China Lake Police Precinct who takes the call from the Rose House AI, meeting its minimum mandatory legal obligation to report a dead body within (other than Deniau’s). Her partner detective is Oliver Torres, who doesn’t see the point of actively investigating, since there is no living complainant. But Smith contacts and requests the aid of her prime suspect Selene Gisil, to enter the Rose House. And so, the investigation begins.

The AI is a wily creature of logic, and the Detective Smith must resist her instinct to anthropomorphize it. The tension is enhanced by the ploy taken by Smith and Gisil, to gain admission to Rose House by Smith, beyond its obligation to Gisil. Further characters appear with motivations which are not as they first present. And circumstance and motivations that led to the murder turn out to be speculative, but within conceptual frameworks familiar to science fiction readers of cyberpunk. I rate this is a highly successful entry into the genre, demonstrating that Arkady Martine’s presence will be felt beyond Teixcalaan. I’m looking forward to her future work.

I read an advance Digital Review Copy of Rose/House in an ebook format, which I received from Subterranean Press through netgalley.com in exchange for an honest review on social media platforms and on my book review blog. This new title is scheduled for release on 31 March 2023. @SubPress

First off, I am not intelligent enough for this book.

And second off, this book made me come to the realization that I am not a big fan of neo-noir science fiction, either in novel or novella format. Come to think of it, I'm not a huge fan of neo-noir or noir in general.