Arkady Martine first came to prominence with her Teixcalaan duology of SF novels, published between 2019 and 2021. Both books – A Memory Called Empire (2019) and A Desolation Called Peace (2021) were nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel.
Since then, relatively little has appeared, which has led to both a high expectation of any future work and a concern whether those books were a lightning strike, never to be repeated.
Now we have this 118-page novella, first published in the US by Subterranean Press in 2023 and now for the first time in the UK.
From the publisher: “All of Basit Deniau’s houses were haunted. Rose House, his final architectural triumph built in the remote Mojave desert, was perhaps the most.
A house embedded with an artificial intelligence is a common thing. But a house that is an artificial intelligence, infused in every crevice and corner with a thinking creature that is not human? That is something else altogether. That is Rose House.
When Detective Maritza Smith gets a call from Rose House, she’s shocked to learn that there is a dead body behind its sealed-up door. Everybody in town knows it’s haunted. But Basit died more than a year ago, and everybody also knows that only his former protege, Dr. Selene Gisil, is permitted inside. But Selene wasn’t in the country when Rose House called in the death. Who is the dead body? How did they get in? And who–or what–killed them?
The answers lie within the labyrinthine halls of Rose House. But even if Martiza can get inside, there is no guarantee she will ever be able to leave …”
So, what we have here is the science-fictional equivalent of a locked-room mystery story. With echoes of Ray Bradbury and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, this near-future novella examines the currently hot topic of AI to determine what it could, should and can do in a future society. Along the way it also examines the importance of art and architecture in society and the importance of a sense of place.
Rose/House highlights all that is good in a novella – longer than a short story, shorter than a novel, the best novellas are given enough space to provide more than outline details without being burdened with extraneous details. (For that reason, I have been told by writers that they are often the most difficult to write.)
In Rose/House the language is precise and tight, with every sentence counting. The structure in six chapters is also exquisite, building to an effective and rather creepy climax. Arkady has created something which is literate without being verbose, knowledgeable without being overly clever, thoughtful without being too introspective. Its relative shortness is a strength, which for me emphasised and amplified the narrative’s impact.
Being a mystery story, it is difficult to review without giving away important details. All I will say is that the ending felt appropriate and that the story was entirely logical in its denouement.
Overall, Rose/House is, to summarise an old saying, ‘small, yet perfectly formed’. I can see crime readers accepting this, even though it is science-fictional, rather like Asimov’s Black Widowers stories. I can also see why Rose/House was a Hugo finalist for Best Novella in the 2024 Hugo Awards, for it is clear that although Arkady’s output so far is limited, she has more strings to her bow than just her award-winning novels. In fact, based on the strength of this, I think that she will be an increasingly notable influence upon the genre in the future. Whatever she writes next will be of great interest. More, please!
© 2025 Mark Yon
Hardback | Tor Books
ROSE/HOUSE by Arkady Martine
March 2025 | 118 pages
ISBN: 978 1035 065 65 3
Review copy courtesy of the publisher, Tor Books
