Rose/House by Arkady Martine

Published by Subterranean Press on March 30, 2023

Rose/House is a science fiction horror story. Fortunately, it’s not the common version of science fiction horror that imagines alien lizard people laying eggs in humans or mad scientists releasing zombie viruses. The horror in this story is a haunted house — haunted by an Artificial Intelligence with a twisted sense of purpose.

The architect Basit Deniau is dead. His remains, compressed into the form of a diamond, are archived with all his architectural plans in Rose House, a building he designed. He also created the AI that controls and guards Rose House. The AI is inseparable from the house, a thinking, non-human creature “infused in every load-bearing beam and fine marble tile.”

Basit has been dead for a year and the house has been sealed since his death. The only person allowed entrance is Deniau’s former student, Dr. Selene Gisel. She is allowed to visit for seven days each year, to inspect Deniau’s drawings and notes, admire his art collection, although the terms of Deniau’s Will do not allow her to remove anything or take pictures. Envious architects and groupies would love to have similar or greater access. Selene regards her special status as a curse.

The AI has a duty to report any death on the premises. It reports a death to the China Lake police but won’t open the door so they can identify the corpse. Detective Maritza Smith summons Gisil to let her into the house. It takes a bit of shallow trickery to get Maritza inside with Gisil. The house plays along with the trickery to suit its own ends, a fact that Maritza realizes too late.

Maritza’s partner, Detective Oliver Torres, doesn’t want to enter a haunted house and doesn’t try to accompany Gisel. He investigates on his own and returns when he learns that another architect has a plan to enter Rose House for a purpose that might be nefarious or benign, depending on your point of view. Torres is accompanied on his return visit by Alanna Ott, who might or might not be a journalist. While Torres is gone, Maritza has spooky adventures inside the house with Selene and the corpse, whose mouth she finds stuffed with fresh rose petals.

Rose/House tells a creative story. At least, the concept of a haunted AI house that is worshipped by architectural groupies is creative. Having established that background, Arkady Martine seemed to search for a plot that would do it justice. Martine came up with a standard story of a character who runs around in fear as the house threatens her while her partner investigates leads that add little to the plot. The explanation for the dead guy with the rose-filled mouth and the subplot involving the character who wants to break into the house is muddled. As a novella-length work, Rose/House supplies the reader with sufficient creepiness to earn a recommendation, but the story lacks the kind of characterization or meaningful threats that provide the chill a successful horror story should induce.

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A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine

Published by Tor Books on March 2, 2021

Science fiction novels that emphasize diplomacy over war are less common than military science fiction, but they aren’t rare. C.J. Cherryh and Keith Laumer once dominated the field, but a new generation of writers has made diplomacy a strong theme in their work. Richard Baker’s Breaker of Empire series tends to give equal weight to fighting and negotiating, while Arkady Martine’s Tiexcalaan series tips that balance decidedly in favor of exploring political relationships. The series’ second entry, A Desolation Called Peace, moves the focus from the threat of war among humans to the fact of war with aliens whose behavior seems particularly ruthless. Why the aliens are attacking is difficult for humans to understand because, whenever the aliens make sounds that might be an attempt at communication, humans feel the urge to vomit.

As we learned in Arkady Martine’s excellent A Memory Called Empire, Mahit Dzmare is an ambassador to Tiexcalaan from Lsel Station. Mahit has been implanted with an imago that carries the memories of her predecessor. By the end of the first novel, Mahit has a second imago, the first having been sabotaged. Now she is up to date on the memories her predecessor formed before his death. Some of those memories reveal that her predecessor didn’t behave exactly as an ambassador should, or at least not as Lsel Station expected. Now Mahit is back on Lsel and is worried that the Councilor of Heritage will learn of the second implant and arrange for her to die on the operating table when it is disconnected from her brain.

While Mahit ponders her fate, Three Seagrass, a bureaucrat from Tiexcalaan whose job includes diplomacy, travels to Lsel on her way to the fleet flagship, where she has been tasked with establishing communications with aliens who have wiped out a Tiexcalaan colony. The aliens travel in ships that seem to appear from nowhere and ooze a substance that disintegrates opposing ships, which fleet pilots find particularly creepy. Their anxiety is magnified by a new technology that lets them communicate with other without a time lag, a technology that even the emperor doesn’t know about.

Three Seagrass decides to bring Mahit on her diplomatic mission because Mahit is good with languages, communication, and diplomacy. Besides, Three Seagrass kissed Mahit in the previous novel and would like to do it again, even if Mahit is regarded as a barbarian by polite society on Tiexcalaan. Who says barbarians can’t be sexy?

The problem with establishing communication with aliens is always interesting. Mahit and Three Seagrass approach the challenge in logical ways (using mime and drawings while trying to make sense of the vomit-inducing sounds), but their diplomacy often takes a back seat to other political issues that drive the story. Once is a conflict between Nine Hibiscus, who is prosecuting the war for the Emperor as the fleet captain, and the commander of one of the legions, Sixteen Moonrise, who is determined to take more aggressive action than Nine Hibiscus is willing to authorize.

Another conflict is unfolding on Tiexcalaan between the current emperor and Eight Antidote, a 90% clone of the former emperor who will one day inherit the title. At the moment he’s only eleven so he still has some growing to do, but he’s an exceptionally bright and mature kid. Eight Antidote is spying for the emperor and he isn’t happy with the emperor’s response to some of the information he’s acquired. He’s particularly unhappy about a plan to annihilate an alien world on the theory that boy, that’ll teach ‘em. Warmongers are just as troublesome in the future as they have always been.

The story moves in ways that are complex and fascinating. Martine makes it easy to suspend disbelief as she imagines aliens who are hostile only because they don’t understand humans any more than humans understand them. The story’s ending is satisfying while opening the door to the next chapter of the series.

Martine writes with a keen understanding of human nature, no doubt acquired during her alternate gig as an historian. She gives her characters full personalities. She builds tension as her characters take dangerous steps to avoid the dangers of war. And she writes with a sophisticated prose style of literary quality. More than that I can’t ask.

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A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

Published by Tor Books on March 26, 2019

Notable for its focus on the diplomatic and political interaction of different cultures, A Memory Called Empire reminds me of the work of C.J. Cherryh. The story explores a crisis within a human empire of the far future and the role that an ambassador from a small and relatively autonomous mining station plays in defusing it.

Arkady Martine is the penname of historian AnnaLinden Weller. An appreciation of the history of empires clearly informs the novel.

Teixcalaan, homeworld of the Empire, has demanded that Lsel Station provide a new ambassador without explaining what became of the last one. The former ambassador last downloaded his memories 15 years ago, so his successor, Mahit Dzmare, is going to Teixcalaan hardwired with an imago holding very dated memories of her predecessor (an imago being a memory storage device that, when implanted into another person’s brain, causes the memories of both to integrate).

The Teixcalaanli place a high value on poetry. Martine portrays Teixcalaanli culture through the lens of its art, and particularly the intersection of its poetry and politics. Just as national politics on Earth can be understood by analyzing political rhetoric, politics on Teixcalaan can be understood by analyzing political poetry — a more difficult task, given poetry’s reliance on allusion rather than directness (not that any political rhetoric can be taken at face value).

Lsel is a mining station. Its Council has a couple of problems. One, its ships are being lost at a jumpgate. Maybe there’s a new empire in town. Two, the old empire is expanding to a sector of space that lies beyond Lsel. The annexation force will likely sweep up Lsel Station as it expands, swallowing the republic as part of the conquest. Lsel will eventually ask Mahit to help it tackle both issues.

Mahit does not know about the war plan or the alien threat when she arrives on Teixcalaan, but before long she has a couple of other problems. One is that she is being held hostage during the prelude to an insurrection, although in a polite way. The other is that her imago has gone silent, so she does not have the benefit of the former ambassador’s memories. The former ambassador may have been shocked into catatonia when Mahit learned why Teixcalaan requested a new ambassador. There may also be a more nefarious explanation for her imago’s sudden failure.

A Memory Called Empire is not an action novel, but it generates excitement with political intrigue. The aging Emperor’s hold on the Empire is threatened, leaving Mahit caught in the middle of a growing schism that may end her life just as it ended her predecessor’s. The plot plays out to a satisfying resolution that completes the novel while setting the stage for the next book in the series.

Martine’s world-building is remarkable. The Teixcalaan culture, a mixture of bureaucratic formality and aesthetic appreciation, is unveiled in intricate detail. There’s even a glossary at the end to help readers keep track of words and place names, although I only discovered it after reading the last chapter.

Mahit is smart and likeable, as are the sympathetic Teixcalaani characters who assist her in her mission. Key characters struggle with internal conflicts that emphasize their human connection despite their very different cultural backgrounds. All of this adds up to a strong start to a series that is likely to be a valued addition to the science fiction genre.

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