Fiction Reviews
Rose/House
(2023/2025) Arkady Martine, Tor, £16.99, hrdbk, i +117pp, ISBN 978-1-035-06565-3
Now, I keep on telling people that the machines are taking over the world, but nobody ever listens!
So, now onto the novella Rose/House…
In the 22nd century, there was once a great architect – Basit Deniau – who constructed haunted houses. And the greatest of them all was Rose House, lying remote in the Mojave desert, near the tiny settlement of China Lake: a house embedded with an artificial intelligence infused into its very fabric.
And then Basit Deniau died!
According to Deniau's will, his body was compressed under high pressure to become a diamond, a polished gem that was placed in the heart of Rose House, with its artificial intelligence providing a never-ending vigil.
Time passes. Basit Deniau's dead body lies in the form of a diamond, within Rose House, but now it is not the only dead body there…
Rose House is sealed. Nobody can enter. Nobody can enter, that is, save Basit Deniau's former student protegé, Dr. Selene Gisil who, under the terms of Deniau's will, has access for just one week a year to study and take notes, but not to photograph, the great architect's archives that also lie within.
The, one night, detective Maritza Smith, of the China Lake precinct, receives a call from the Rose House artificial intelligence to say that a person has died in that house. This call was a legal requirement for artificial intelligences' duty of care to humans and had to be made within 24 hours of a death being discovered. Maritza Smith quickly checks out her only likely suspect, Selene Gisil, as she is the only person with authorised access to the building. But Selene Gisil has an alibi: she was in Turkey across the window of time of the death. So what we have is a 'locked room murder mystery' except that instead of a locked room we have a secure house.
And so Selene Gisil returns to China Lake to help the police and check out the house. However, Rose House will not let anyone else in even though the police need to check out the scene of the incident…
From the above publication details, you can see from the book's page count that it is a novella. Now, I quite like novellas as while they are larger than short stories they are not so long as for good novellas to have every sentence pull its weight. Here, Arkady Martine demonstrates a certain flare with her wordsmithing: she writes convincingly and packs a lot into her character-developing point of views internal dialogue. This is a short book that warrants careful reading and because each paragraph counts, it is worth paying attention: an early on unexplained slip of time, as well as a simple mathematics, is revealing.
The other thing to note is that had this been set in Britain, then this story would likely have a gothic riff: the house AI is frequently referred to as a 'haunt'. As it stands what we do get is a slice of modern Americana with a small, remote settlement with just one of each of a common community's facilities, which include the aforesaid understaffed police precinct, a single, automated (well, it is the 22nd century) hotel, and the obligatory diner. There is even a large, 'old' (presumably abandoned?) navel base in the mix.
Also, being set in the Mojave desert, and it being the 22nd century, we get hints of climate change. This should not come as a surprise to those who know of Arkady Martine's background. Though she is not a climate scientist, she does work on climate adaptation policy and we get a couple of references to the crime of water hold-ups that seem to regularly occupy the local precinct. Indeed, the concept of climate migration and refugees does crop up towards the novella's end. (Don't worry this is not relevant to the plot; it is not a spoiler.)
Being a Brit, I don't know as much about the USA as Arkady's home turf readership do, and so I did not know whether the novella's setting was made up or real? As it turns out China Lake does actually exist and is in the Mojave desert to the south east of the infamous Death Valley. I was also aware that the Nevada Desert, just a couple of hundred miles to the north, is considered a reasonable (or at least as reasonable as we can get) Earth analogue environment for putative Martian life, but you are side-tracking me again…
Google maps street view reveals China Lake to be less desert-like than I imagined. There are a few, isolated palm trees and some shrubby vegetation: I wasn't expecting that! But I could envisage the even hotter China Lake that Arkady Martine describes. And yes, there is a real-life naval base there today: apparently it is the US's largest naval base by land area.
The SFnal heart of this novella is, of course, the house that is an artificial intelligence (AI). Given the huge explosion in AI the past half-decade, with it now powering internet searches, becoming voice interfaces with technology, the creator of deep fake videos, among much, much else, it is more than an appropriate that SF authors turn their attention to this nascent technology. Of course, AI is not a new trope, William Gibson popularised the whole digital tech' thing with a string of novels and stories, not least with Neuromancer (1984). And before then we had D. F. Jones' Colossus (1966) that became the hardly-seen-these-days film The Forbin Project (1969) (trailer here). Earlier still we had the Isaac Asimov 'Robot' stories of the 1940s (collected in I Robot (1950)) that gave us the 'Three Laws of Robotics' and the subversions and side-effects thereof (including an attempt to coddle humanity under the robots' strict, but for-our-best-interests, tyranny). Iconically, of course, there was the decidedly deadly AI HAL in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and the Kubrick film (50th anniversary trailer here). HAL was clearly in part 'hallucinating' due to conflicting programming, and today, with actual AI, we can see that this is a real thing. (A friend who works in the AI sector, using the new online AI tech', recently ran a vanity AI search on 'who is the biological scientist Jonathan Cowie?' for me. Its results were in part funny in what it churned out and part horrific in equal measure, such were the accuracies, inaccuracies and near-misses… This is something you can try out for yourself, just be warned.)
What we have with Arkady Martine's Rose House AI is AI with attitude and this is something very much worth exploring.
An AI principally depends on two things: its programming and training. Both these can be skewed and skewed deliberately. For example, how should your autonomous, self-driving car react to the trolley problem: should it swerve onto a pavement to avoid a pedestrian illegally crossing but possibly risk pedestrians, or not? Such research has been conducted asking nearly 40 million such probing questions of people in ten languages and across over 200 countries. The primary research shows that people's responses vary by culture: there is no one 'correct' way to programme and train AIs. Therefore, with regards to science fiction (and especially as in the real world we are approaching artificial general intelligence), AI tales can be a mirror against, or a prism through, which our own human morals and ethical stances can be explored, and if that does not make AI stories a fertile area for investigation by SF writers then I don't know what does.
I liked Rose/House a lot, and I now see why it was short-listed for the 2024 Hugo for Best Novella. Which brings me on to this 2025 edition. This is the first time that Rose/House has been published this side of the Pond. It had been previously published by Subterranean Press in the States in 2023. So I can't but help wonder that had it had a simultaneous British publication whether it would have fared better in the Hugos? (Especially as the 2024 Worldcon was held in Glascal, Calhab.) Alas, we will never know but, to our Brit Cit followers, you yourselves now have the chance to check it out.
Jonathan Cowie
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