Genre: speculative fiction, science fiction, postmodern mystery

All of renowned Architect’s Basit Deniau’s houses are haunted. But his final design, Rose House, is the best, and also the most haunted. A couple hundred years into the future, most architecture has Artificial Intelligence integrations, and Rose House is no exception…other than that its AI seems to have evolved into making intelligent decisions. Maritza Smith of the China Lake police precinct gets a call on the tipline from the house itself about a dead body on its premises. Maritza opens an investigation, but discovers she cannot access the house without Dr. Selene Gisil, Deniau’s protege.

Rose/House is an interesting novella. For just over a hundred pages, it has a lot going on: there is a murder of course, and the mysteriousness of the house as the basic plot. But this is focused more on ideas than plot. It’s an unsettling approach, and yet I think it works well. There is critique on the concept of narrative, on the limits (or lack of limits) on AI, and on the limits of personal agency. As someone who has worked in architecture for over thirteen years, I appreciated some of the subtexts that felt like design vs Design and architecture vs Architecture (or the practical versus the highbrow). I’ll be recommending this novella to all of my colleagues, for sure!

I couldn’t have picked a better group to read this - the three of us all loved Martine’s space opera duology, and while this could not be more different from Martine’s more typical narratives, we read widely enough to have an in depth discussion on what Martine may be trying to do with this. I’ll actually be really interested to hear more from Arkady Martine to see how close we were while discussing the limits of motive and narrative.

Don’t discount the page length on this one - I found myself needing to reread parts of it to try to understand it. I’d strongly recommend this one to those who like their science fiction to edge more towards speculative and that makes you think after reading. Rose/House isn’t a new favorite, but I’ll be thinking about it for a while and certainly plan to reread it.