★★★☆☆ Rose/House, by Arkady Martine
Feels more like a prolog than a complete story
Rose/House
Arkady Martine
Feels more like a prolog than a complete story
Roger Zelazny began his career by writing about thirty stories, which he sent to all the Science Fiction magazines, for which purpose he had made a comprehensive list. In this way he collected 150 rejections and no acceptances. He then did a very Zelazny thing -- he sat down with all his stories, read them, and thought. He tried to figure out what the problem was. He decided that he was explaining too much -- that he would be insulted if an author told him so much, rather than letting him figure it out. So he stopped doing that, and immediately his stories began to sell.
I don't know if Arkady Martine did anything like this, but she has clearly learned the same lesson. One of the things I love about Martine is this: she assumes I am intelligent -- that she doesn't need to tell me everything -- I'll figure it out for myself and enjoy doing so.
In the case of Rose/House, however, she may have overestimated my abilities. Having finished it, I still don't quite understand what happened. However, I feel deeply weirded out by the story, which is something I enjoy.
Rose/House is a haunted house murder mystery. The ghost that haunts the house, however, is an artificial intelligence with mostly opaque objectives. Rose House is the final work of famous architect Basit Deniau. His body, compressed to a fist-size diamond, is inside. Rose House calls the local China Lake police station to report the presence of a dead body (another one) on its premises, as an AI is legally required to do. Detective Maritza Smith takes the call and the case. Smith and her partner Oliver Torres are at the moment the entire China Lake police department, so they investigate, and they also involve Deniau's former student Selene Gisil in the investigation. I *think* that the mystery is solved in the end, but this is one of the areas where I may just not be smart enough to fully understand.
I was a little surprised to learn that China Lake is a real town in the Mojave Desert (Southern California). Well, it's an unincorporated community, so not legally a town. But it's a real place.
We are left with a huge dangling loose end. I hope we eventually get a sequel.