Rose/House

A taut, uncanny sci-fi novella from Arkady Martine, Hugo Award-winning author of A Memory Called Empire.

‘I’m a piece of architecture, Detective. How should I know how humans are like to die?’

Basit Deniau’s houses were haunted to begin with.

A house embedded with an artificial intelligence is a common thing: a house that is an artificial intelligence, infused in every load-bearing beam and fine marble tile with a thinking creature that is not human? That is something else altogether. But now Deniau’s been dead a year, and Rose House is locked up tight, as commanded by the architect’s will.

Dr. Selene Gisil, a former protégé, is the sole person permitted to come into Rose House once a year. Now, there is a dead person in Rose House. It is not Basit Deniau, and it is not Dr. Gisil. It is someone else. But Rose House won’t communicate any further.

No one can get inside Rose House, except Dr. Gisil. Dr. Gisil was not in North America when Rose House called in the death. But someone did. And someone died there.

And someone may be there still.

‘An exquisitely creepy exploration of the boundaries of life, death, the real and the artificial‘ – Adrian Tchaikovsky, Hugo Award-winning author of the Children of Time series