Contemporary Authors

• Rosewater - ovember 15, 2016 Apex Book Company, https://www.amazon.com/Rosewater-Tade-Thompson/dp/1937009297/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
• AfroSFv2 - December 1, 2015 StoryTime, https://www.amazon.com/AfroSFv2-Tade-Thompson/dp/9198291319/ref=la_B00KU8RQFO_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1498019639&sr=1-5
• Bicycle Girl: a short story (Soles Series of Stories Book 8) Kindle Edition - June 5, 2014 Upper Rubber Boot Books, https://www.amazon.com/Bicycle-Girl-short-story-Stories-ebook/dp/B00KSRERFE/ref=la_B00KU8RQFO_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1498019639&sr=1-7
• Making Wolf - September 21, 2015 Rosarium Publishing, https://www.amazon.com/Making-Wolf-Tade-Thompson/dp/149560747X/ref=la_B00KU8RQFO_1_11?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1498019639&sr=1-11

• Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/Tade-Thompson/e/B00KU8RQFO

  Tade Thompson lives and works in the south of England. His background is in medicine, psychiatry and anthropology. His first novel MAKING WOLF won the Golden Tentacle Award at The Kitshies. His most recent works are the short story THE APOLOGISTS in Interzone #266, DECOMMISSIONED in the NewCon Press anthology 'Crises and Conflicts', and the novel ROSEWATER from Apex Books.

• Interfictions Online - http://interfictions.com/an-interview-with-tade-thompson/

  NONFICTION
  An Interview with Tade Thompson
  SOFIA SAMATAR
  SS: You seem busy, Tade! Your debut Making Wolf won the 2016 Kitschies Golden Tentacle Award; Rosewater is out this fall; your novella GNAW is coming in December. How do you find, or make, the time?

  TT: When you make sleep optional there are so many opportunities that open up.

  I’m half-kidding. It’s true that I don’t sleep a lot. Six hours seems to be enough for me. While I don’t advocate this for everyone, I’m one of those people who write every day. Most of it is twee nonsense, but some of it can be salvaged in the rewrite. I also have a strict “work first, play later” relationship with television, modern society’s big time sink. I never watch scheduled programming. I watch on my own terms. I’ve done so since 2001.

  I’m also quite organised. My dayjob is time-consuming and requires a lot of study to keep a sharp edge. I have no choice but to use my time wisely.

  There’s a Nigerian saying that encapsulates all this: Naija no dey carry last!

  SS: What was the seed that brought Rosewater to life? What was the idea that sparked the story, and when did you realize it was going to be a full-fledged novel?

  TT: For this answer, we should go back to 2004. I wrote a story called “The McMahon Institute for Unquiet Minds” which was ultimately published in Ideomancer Vol. 4, # 3 (2005). I wrote the story about the aftermath of an invasion, although it was not understood. It was about survival in London after civilization had collapsed. I kept thinking about that world, and I kept asking myself “why?”

  If we take as a given that aliens exist, why would they visit us? What do they want? What makes the energy and personnel expenditure of interstellar travel worth it? How would they do it? I felt that the standard invasion trope of a big-ass mothership announcing arrival and shooting everything to dust didn’t make sense except perhaps from a colonialist perspective. Once I decided to dispense with sturm und drang, the rest of the mechanics of the invasion became clear. It was an iterative process, but one that I enjoyed.

  Over the years, almost as a literary exercise, I kept elaborating on the reasons for whatever happened, and the effects on society. I wrote other stories in that world while I was working out the intricacies. “Slip Road” was one (published in Expanded Horizons, 2009), and “Bicycle Girl” was another.

  I wrote two novel-length histories of how the world ended up the way it did, but I suppose I did not have a reason to write Rosewater until I had a strong protagonist. Kaaro, my morally-challenged protagonist, dropped into my head one afternoon, almost with a full life history. Setting it in Nigeria was a no-brainer. Being a former colony gives a country a better perspective on alien conquest.

  SS: Tell us a bit more about Kaaro. How is he morally challenged?

  TT: Kaaro is a thief, a coward, and a hedonist, at least in the early part of his life.

  Rosewater is an interwoven narrative showing two parts of Kaaro’s life, youth and middle age.

  The alien invasion has left him with some abilities which, in his younger days, he uses for personal gain, despite the fact that he comes from a relatively privileged background. The money he steals is wasted on drink, drugs, escorts, and general dissipation. By middle age, he is jaded, working for the government, and disinterested in heroics.

  I tried to contrast the different times of his life, and to show how Kaaro the younger became Kaaro the older. I treated them as different people, different characters in the book.

  Whether it works or not remains to be seen.

  SS: There seems to be a lot of play with old and new here—the old Kaaro of the present, and the young Kaaro of the past. I’m interested in how the dynamics of old and new relate to your alien invasion. On the one hand, you say you don’t want an old, colonialist invasion story; on the other hand, Nigeria seems a perfect setting precisely because it’s a former colony. Can you say more about how your alien invasion does and does not relate to colonialism and standard science fiction tropes? How are you invoking the past, and how are you searching for something new?

  TT: Excellent question.

  Some of these uncertainties will be resolved by reading the book, and it may be disingenuous to explain too much here. For example, there is a relationship with ectoplasm and Victorian psychics. Classic alien invasion stories have big, set-piece motherships or smaller spaceships, and overt physical violence with which they plan to subdue the local population (in other words, just like the colonialist powers, and I am aware of the simplification). The invasion in Rosewater has more in common with neocolonialism. It’s invisible, it’s insidious, but it’s no less harmful. There is complicity. The old and new Kaaro reflect the old Nigerian colony and the neocolonialism that we experience now.

  Most alien invasion narratives assume the aliens are more advanced than we are. To my mind, if they were more advanced, especially in their thinking, they would find a more subtle way of taking over. It would be a matter of steering rather than dominating with mind-blowing weaponry which has an annoying knack of stimulating rebellion. Unlike many invasion narratives this is not a war story, or a post-apocalyptic, post-invasion survivalist plot. That’s not to say war is not coming to the world of Rosewater. Just not in this book.

  That’s also not to say this is not a violent book. “You guys always bring me the very best violence” is my favourite quote from Serenity. There is violence in life. Fiction should reflect that.

  My hope would be that different readers would be able to pick up different things. If you want to read an interesting science fiction book, there’s that. If you want to pick up matters to do with geopolitical context, there’s that. If you want to look at gender politics, there’s that. Fun for all the family.

  SS: Tell me about your relationship with the African blue butterfly, charaxes smaragdalis.

  TT: It’s my Rosewater totem. Once I committed to writing the novel, I had a dream or reverie where a gigantic blue butterfly settled on my forehead. It stayed long enough for me to get a good impression of its wing pattern. I woke, sketched it, and checked what it was in Google Images. I found charaxes and decided to take the experience as mystical (which is probably my subconscious telling me, “I will guide you through this. Here’s a colourful butterfly to distract you from the work”). I found out that these butterflies have a predilection for rotting matter and animal faeces, which suited the themes of Rosewater. Before this, I had no interest in butterflies. Although I often draw insects, I had never drawn a butterfly prior to that day. It’s just one of those things.

  SS: You’ve said that your stories are “about people, with incidental science,” which really resonates with me. I wonder what you think of the argument that writers who make their science incidental instead of central are not writing real science fiction, and perhaps even weakening the genre. Thoughts?

  TT: The idea of “real” science fiction is elitist bullshit. There are those who think science fiction is one thing, a narrow and, frankly, unconsidered view. There are two elements at the core of a science fiction tale: at least one science and entities interacting/intersection with that science (usually, but not always humans. Even when inhuman, they are human-proxies). The amount of “science” or “human” in the science fiction story is a spectrum.

  If you want pure science, crack open a textbook or buy a journal. Fiction is about people. To foreground people as opposed to science does not weaken the genre, it opens it up. Insisting on one incarnation of a phenomenon is antiscientific. Science observes phenomena and incorporates new manifestations into the corpus. “Real” science fiction reminds me of certain academics who are ossified in their little knowledge fiefdoms. The human factor is messy. The human factor cannot be quantified with P-values and Confidence Intervals. This horrifies some readers and writers, but I love it. There is nothing wrong with foregrounding science, but there is room in genre for every flavour. More variety leads to more fans. That can’t be a bad thing.

  SS: You write short fiction as well as longer works. Can you talk about the differences between those forms? I always feel that each story demands its own particular form, but I wonder what those demands are for other writers. Are there any elements, any characteristics of a story idea that make you think “this is a short story” or “this is a novel”?

  TT: This sounds like a question for Kelly Link or George Saunders.

  I guess short fiction is a sprint and a novel is a marathon. Both require the development of different kinds of discipline, even though they are styles of competitive running.

  A single idea cannot sustain a novel (or, at least not a good novel). The writer must corral a multitude of ideas, impressions, half-truths, all of which may need to generate more. The best novels have novelty, by which I mean new information as you proceed page after page. It could be insight into the character, or plot unfolding, but there will be new elements as you go along.

  A short story can be written around a single idea, or even a fragment of an idea. That said, masters of the form like Link can compress a large number of ideas into a short narrative. I just don’t think a short story can perform the kind of character exploration that long-form fiction does. Space is at a premium, which doesn’t lend itself to languid psychic meandering. Short fiction is hard, and it’s a form I continue to learn and learn about.

  When I’m struck by an idea for a story the first thing I do is interrogate it. What I’m trying to determine is what kind of legs the idea has. No legs? Discard or keep aside to be cross-bred with others. If, on examination, the idea blooms into other ideas which themselves bloom…it’s likely to be a book.

  SS: Can we talk about the African Speculative Fiction Society and the newly launched Nommo Awards?! This is an exciting moment for African SFF, and it’s a discussion that’s been building for a while. What do you have to say about how the ASFS came to be, and what are your hopes for the organization?

  TT: This discussion has been going on for a long time, with surges triggered by the fallacy that there are no fans or writers of sci-fi/fantasy on the continent. I’m pretty much of the opinion that if you aren’t invited to the table, build your own. I don’t like talking; I like doing. Okay, I do like talking, but I like talk that leads to action. Any other kind bores me to tears.

  We applied that Project Management question to the situation: what are the obstacles to achieving this? Once we had listed those out, we systematically worked our way through each one. When I say it like this, it sounds like an easy, civilised process with cookies and milk. In fact it was emotive, with over 3500 messages exchanged, and hackles rising and falling. The simplest of things, we found, were not simple at all. What is an African? Who gets to be called an African? Who is eligible? People who have spent time shedding their African identity might reconsider when money is involved. How do we deal with privilege? Where should the ASFS be incorporated? How do we securely store personal data? Do we go Hugo-style or Nebula-style?

  There are some foreign actors who believe sci-fi should be a tool for driving development in African nations. I do not subscribe to that view. SFF is its own thing, although development is a welcome side-effect. It is also not the case that SFF is exclusively about the future. It is about the present, and it is about reclaiming narratives of the past, something urgently needed in African and Diaspora literature (cases in point: Everfair by Nisi Shawl and Azanian Bridges by Nick Wood). Such narrow-minded futuristic gazes lead to the erroneous conflation of African SFF with Afrofuturism.

  None of this was easy, but we got through it, or are still going through with it. We have funding for a few years thanks to the Ilube Family. The inaugural awards will be 2017 and we’re looking forward to it. There are already strong contenders.

  The goal is to promote equality and parity of esteem in SFF. With awards to look forward to, and a prize of a meaningful amount, we hope to encourage excellence and at the same time, highlight talent from the continent. There will be an associated journal for the purpose of reviews and essays. There is an explosion of comics and graphic art sweeping across the African speculative fiction scene right now, and it shows no signs of slowing.

  The sooner Africa is considered just another continent better. I’m tired of the “oh, look, science fiction from Africa” response, which has a whiff of exoticism. Laing and Fagunwa were published decades ago. Why is this still a thing?

  So, we will honour the best African work and our Dogon hermaphorditic mermaid guiding spirit (nommo) will watch over us.

  A lot needs to be done by way of getting the French, Arabic and indigenous language work into the mix, but this is why it’s such a massive undertaking.

  SS: Absolutely—the field is dizzyingly large, which makes the project both daunting and thrilling. I’m eager to see where it goes.

  I want to ask you about what you’ve been reading lately. What’s something you’ve read recently that you’d like to recommend? What are you excited about?

  TT: In no particular order:

  Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur. It’s a book of poetry with a massive dose of honesty in a writer so young.

  Animal Money by Michael Cisco. This is a masterwork of surrealism. More people need to read this guy.

  To Shape the Dark is a science fiction anthology edited by Athena Andreadis which contains amazing work.

  Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett is visceral, absurdist, excellent.

  I tend to read a lot of works simultaneously. Currently, I’m reading From the Ruins of Empire by Pankaj Mishra and Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton (which my wife bought me to get me to shut up about the musical).

  SS: Finally, what’s next for you? What are you working on?

  TT: Let’s see, working on the edits for the African edition of Making Wolf, which is interesting because a book for a non-Western audience comes across as patronizing when you explain local customs. I’m learning a lot. We expect this to be out by the end of September, with new cover art and everything. I’m doing the revisions for a sci-fi horror novella called The Murders of Molly Southbourne, the first draft of which dominated my spring and summer. I’m writing a short story called “The Dairo Protocols” for Milton Davis’ Dark Universe. This is the first time I’ve ever played in someone else’s sandbox and I’m enjoying it immensely.

  I’m writing a new novel in the Rosewater world. Not exactly a sequel, but some of the old characters have walk-on parts. I expect this to take 18 months to final submission draft. I have no title yet, and the placeholder title would give a fundamental plot point away.

  SS: So in other words—not slowing down. At all. Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions!

  tade-8Tade Thompson lives and works in the south of England. His background is in medicine, psychiatry and anthropology. His first novel Making Wolf won the Golden Tentacle Award at The Kitshies. His most recent works are the short story “The Apologists” in Interzone #266, “Decommissioned” in the NewCon Press anthology Crises and Conflicts, and the novel Rosewater from Apex Books.

• Short Story Day Africa - http://shortstorydayafrica.org/news/idont-like-linearity-i-find-it-boring-an-interview-with-tade-thompson

  "I Don’t Like Linearity – I Find It Boring." Nick Wood Interviews Tade Thompson.
  February 8, 2017

  "I have known Tade Thompson for some years now and we co-wrote ‘The Last Pantheon’ in AfroSF 2 (December 2015). Our collaboration on that novella was exciting and often surprising, working with whatever the other threw up into the air – or onto the paper. I prefer face-to-face contact as it feels more alive and spontaneous. In keeping with this, we thus met for the interview in front of the British Library in Bloomsbury, London." - Nick Wood

  NICK: Going back to the beginning, when and why did you start writing?

  TADE: Ever since I picked up a pencil. I wasn’t interested in reading when I was a child. I saw a Fantastic Four comic and asked my mother to read it to me. She said I had to learn to read. So I learned to read, but then I started drawing my own comics, telling original stories. My teacher in primary school used to give us large, blank sheets of paper. She would draw a line across the middle and ask us to draw a picture on the top and write a story below. That just set me off.

  I used to draw 3-4 comics a week on pink and green typing sheets and make carbon copies I could sell to my mates. I did this throughout primary and secondary school, with my biggest piece being a James Bond, DR. NO comic adaptation.

  I wrote one novel when I was 15, a spy novel which was essentially a James Bond/The Saint pastiche. I had one copy and a guy called Mark borrowed and never returned it.

  In university around 1995 I wrote a short story called 'The Sneeze', for the college magazine.

  From 1999 I started writing regularly on a PC and around 2000 wrote the obligatory first ‘trunked’ novel, around 150K in length. I learnt a lot from this and from 2001 my aim was to be published. My first sale was in 2002/2003 to a small zine for a contributor’s copy or token per-word payment then in 2004/2005, my first semi-pro sale to Ideomancer, ‘The McMahon Institute for Unquiet Minds’.

  NICK: And WHY do you write?

  TADE: I have a lot to say. Writing teaches you different ways of thinking and expressing things. I once quit writing fiction for a year, and I filled volumes and volumes of journals. It’s just a thing that is in me.

  NICK: For people who don't know you or your work, how would you characterize both yourself and what you write?

  TADE: I’m a complicated man. I have a lot of rage at the portrayal of my people. Often, when I encounter Africans in narrative I see red. I have no patience with ignorant portrayals and do not spare misrepresentations.

  Miles Davis had a term for some other black musicians, such as Louis Armstrong: ‘Smilers’. Always smiling, in order to be ‘the non-threatening Negro’, to avoid being described as the ‘angry black man’. I can understand why this was done, but it’s not me. I’ll say and write whatever I want.

  I’ve studied science and history and it is important to have an accurate portrayal of things that are not well known, for example that there were rebellions during colonial times, and that the role of women was a lot bigger than is generally known (e.g. Maria Nkoje). There is so much ignorance, which is why it is important to keep repeating honest and accurate portrayals, to try and create public consciousness.

  I guess I write to entertain, if anyone is entertained by what I write.

  NICK: You've clearly read very widely and well beyond genre, so why SF in particular?

  TADE: I love SF because you can bend reality and change history.

  I enjoy speculative fiction in its broadest sense – weird, fantasy, hard SF etc. I love the freedom in changing history and facts to suit the narrative. Like thought experiments you’re unable to run in mimetic fiction. Anything can happen – and that makes it so interesting.

  NICK: Have you - or do you - write outside genre - if so, how would you characterize this?

  TADE: I write anything, both fiction and non-fiction. I have written crime and memoir, and I am writing general fiction, but nothing I want to share yet. This is because I read everything except perhaps romance or cod-Medieval high fantasy. I did read over a hundred Mills and Boon novels in my teenage years, so I think I’ve sampled the genre enough.

  NICK: You've published a couple of books as well as several novellas and a good clutch of short stories - where would you suggest a reader NEW to your work begin?

  TADE: Rosewater – I’m satisfied with this, as well as ‘The Apologists’ in Interzone #266 for short fiction. My other novel Making Wolf, although you should have a strong stomach for that one. My novella The Murders of Molly Southbourne is due out from TOR in October 2017.

  NICK: Your first novel Making Wolf won a Golden Tentacle Kitschie Award (for Best Debut Novel) and is an exciting genre-bending crime noir, but is sadly looking for a new home. Any advice you'd give others off the back of this difficult experience?

  TADE: It’s not looking for a new home. I’m working with Lola Shoneyin (who runs Ake Festival, and wrote The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives) on a Nigerian edition. I’m not yet looking around for other publishers. My advice? Always do your due diligence. Speak to people who’ve published with the press you’re exploring – preferably by phone if possible.

  People are often afraid to talk if hooked up with problem presses, in case it impacts negatively on their career. If you can’t sell something, keep it in the trunk – and at some point, when you sell something else, someone will ask, ‘what else you got?’

  NICK: Rosewater - your latest novel with Apex, is a complex and brilliantly original alien invasion story - what was the spark and fuel for this story?

  TADE: My interest in alien invasion scenarios. So many invasions are thinly disguised colonial metaphors. These are less interesting for me – a repeating fetish of dominating so-called lesser cultures, as if rehashing generational memory.

  Why would they come all the way to Earth? What might their motivation be, to embark on generational ships on the off-chance of stumbling upon Earth? True aliens would surely be unknowable.

  NICK: Like in some of the work of The Strugatsky Brothers?

  TADE: Yes, perhaps a bit of that – leaving their enigmatic rubbish, as in ‘Roadside Picnic’. I enjoyed their work.

  NICK: Rosewater is set in Nigeria, which was formerly a British colony - can you tell us if there is an association between the new invaders Wormwood and the old British colonialists?

  TADE: My book might be a metaphor for neo-colonialism, a colonization of the mind. That’s just my reading of my own work, though.

  If you watch music videos in Nigeria, many of them are mimetic, using the semiotics of American rap. So that’s odd, watching gang signs from LA being used out of context. “Sound and fury, signifying nothing,” as the Bard said. Or, maybe it signifies minds colonised, as per the distribution of resources and aspirations involved.

  NICK: Your novel structure is unusual and intriguing, alternating between a younger and older Kaaro - and not always in an obvious sequence - what drove this structural choice for you?

  TADE: That’s how people tell stories, it’s not perfectly sequential. They jump backwards and forwards, so this is a way of mimicking normal tale telling according to director Alejandro González Iñárritu.

  With rewriting I had to wrestle with this structure, part of me supporting the link between art and chaos. But in the end I opted for an alternating structure of past and present perspectives, with Missions slotted in-between acting as linking narratives between young Kaaro and older Kaaro.

  I don’t like linearity – I find it boring. I can avoid writer’s block by jumping around and then piecing the parts together.

  It’s also a way of keeping the reader engaged. If you can’t predict what’s coming next, you keep turning the page. The problem with working like this, though, is that I have to know exactly where and when everything happens and to whom. The real nightmare was keeping track of the stuff that happens off-camera since the novel is written in first person.

  NICK: America goes 'Dark' in Rosewater - I do hope you have plans to enlighten us as to what is happening there - AND how it gets resolved?

  TADE: Yes, some people have drawn parallels with Trump in the US. The Americans have run all the scenarios and realise there’s no way to beat Wormwood, and so have initiated the ‘Drawbridge Protocol’ which is extreme isolation from the rest of the world.

  NICK: Rosewater has been garnering many great reviews and I'm hoping will feature on awards shortlists significantly - but what next (or right now!) for you, Tade?

  TADE: The next book in the series goes further into the experiences of the aliens in Nigeria, focusing more on Aminat. I’m enjoying writing it; it's tentatively called Rosewater: City State.

  We find out what happened to America in the third book, Humans of Rosewater.

  NICK: So it’s a trilogy?

  TADE: Gah! I don’t like trilogies, but I guess it is. Sort of. Maybe a quadrology, because there’s a novella between book two and book three. Ideally it’s one big book (and I hope there will be an omnibus edition one day). Lord of the Rings was originally one book, but was seen as too unwieldy on its own.

  I keep my options open – although I know the entire narrative through to the end, what happens to Earth, America, humanity, the aliens…

  It’s very real in my head and I have it in files, in my notebooks and with flowcharts providing rough signposts. That way, I keep my characters and dialogue open and free, plotting more closely when I review what I’ve written. All the elements in the book have a function – they’re not there just for spectacle or decoration. My ‘reanimates’ are not just zombies but are in evolution and have a purpose, particularly in Book 2.

  NICK: As a founding member of African SF Society, how would you characterize African SF? And how much does your own work dovetail with this - or not?

  TADE: African SF is primordial – there’s no obvious pattern, it’s huge and diverse. There’s probably more magic than technology overall, more speculative fiction than hard SF (I hate that label). We’re getting some extrapolation of Hollywood films, some mimesis of Western SF tropes.

  Kojo Laing’s ‘Woman of The Aeroplanes’ on the other hand is a brilliant evocation of a town in Ghana perhaps quantum entangled with a town in Scotland. Its strength lies in its poetic language and ability to pass the stage of Western mimesis. This is what we need to focus on – what are OUR narratives; how can we tell OUR stories, using and pushing the tropes of SF further.

  Nnedi Okorafor in the US and Lauren Beukes from South Africa are the two obvious writers most people think of when considering African SF. We need to write more of our own experiences. We need more writers from Lilongwe and elsewhere in the continent.

  I write from London of a remembered Africa. I’m not speaking for anybody in Africa. I write beyond Africa as well.

  NICK: What are some of the African SF books you have particularly enjoyed?

  TADE: There’s a lot to like. I’ve enjoyed your Azanian Bridges, as it’s clearly emerged from the soil of South Africa -- and I’m not saying that just because you’re interviewing me.

  Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria is a masterpiece EVERYONE should read. The richness and beauty of its language and its uncompromising vision is so powerful it should be read several times! It’s very good indeed.

  Chikodili Emulumadu’s Candy Girl is a weird and absurdist story, growing from local African space.

  Part 2 of Nick Wood's fascinating interview with Tade Thompson can be found here

  Tade Thompson lives and works in the UK. He is the author of a number of SFF, crime, general fiction, and memoir pieces. His alternate history crime novel Making Wolf from Rosarium Publishing was released in September 2015 and his latest novel is Rosewater. More of Tade's thoughts and writing can be found at his blog, Long Time After Midnight.

  Nick Wood is a Zambian born, South African naturalised clinical psychologist, with over a dozen short stories previously published in Interzone, Subterfuge, Infinity Plus, and PostScripts, amongst others. Nick has also appeared in the first African anthology of science fiction, AfroSF – and now in a collaborative novella follow-up with Tade Thompson in AfroSFv2.

  His book, Azanian Bridges, explores a current but alternative South Africa, where apartheid survived. Nick has completed an MA in Creative Writing (SF & Fantasy) through Middlesex University, London and is currently training clinical psychologists and counsellors at the University of East London in England. He can be found on Twitter, @nick45wood or on his blog.

Science fiction/fantasy
Jackie Cassada
Library Journal.
137.12 (July 1, 2012): p64.
COPYRIGHT 2012 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text: 
THIS SUMMER'S OFFERINGS of sf, fantasy, and horror tackle a wide variety of issues and continue to pursue popular trends. The fascination
with zombies takes a slightly different turn in Devil's Wake, a series opener by Steven Barnes and Tananarive Due. Environmentally conscious sf
makes a strong showing in Edward M. Lerner's Energized, about the depletion of Earth's fossil fuels, and E.J. Swift's Osiris, a global-warming
saga that is also this column's Debut of the Month. Genre favorites also make an appearance this month. SF veteran Ben Bova returns to his
"Orion" series with Orion and King Arthur, Terry Brooks opens a new trilogy in his Shannara universe with Wards of Faerie, and then there's the
final collaboration between the late Anne McCaffrey and her son Todd in the ever-popular "Pern" series, Sky Dragons.
On the fantasy front, James Blaylock's Zeuglodon combines fantasy and magical realism in an adventure story for all ages. Two new series are
launched with James Enge's A Guile of Dragons and Jeff Salyards's Scourge of the Betrayer, while Liz Williams's Worldsoul begins a cosmic
fantasy series with librarians as action heroes.
Fantasy with a Renaissance flair makes an appearance in K.J. Parker's Sharps, a tale of fencing, murder, and politics, while Megan Powell kicks
off a new urban fantasy series with No Peace for the Damned.
Presenting a variety of excellent reading choices is The Apex Book of World SF 2, a smorgasbord of world literature, and The Sword & Sorcery
Anthology, which collects more than 70 years of fantasy adventure.
Urban fantasy dominates the list of mass market paperbacks with series installments by Keri Arthur (Darkness Devours), Kalayna Price (Grave
Memory), James R. Tuck (Blood and Silver), and Carrie Vaughn (Kitty Steals the Show). Rounding out this month's column are several awards
and nominations to provide new sources of reading.
Jackie Cassada, formerly with Asheville Buncombe Library System, NC, has been LJ's SF/Fantasy columnist since 1984
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Barnes, Steven & Tananarive Due. Devil's
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When a mysterious epidemic transforms its victims into rage-filled creatures driven to attack and feed on other humans, a few survivors seek
refuge in a world driven mad. Teenaged Kendra, set adrift when her family succumbs to the virus, encounters a group of young people in a school
bus heading down the West Coast in the hope that they can find one of several rumored safe places before they fall prey to the many roving
zombie gangs. The husband-and-wife writing team of Barnes (Great Sky Woman; Shadow Valley) and Due (My Soul To Keep; The Black Rose)
puts a fresh spin on the zombie plague motif by hinting at an extraterrestrial origin of the phenomenon. VERDICT Gruesome but not overly
graphic, this tale of young people struggling to remain human--and humane--in a post-apocalyptic near future features top-notch storytelling and
believable characters.
Blaylock, James P. Zeuglodon.
Subterranean. Aug. 2012. c.224p, illus.
ISBN 9781596064546. $35. FANTASY
Since the disappearance of her explorer mother, Kathleen Perkins and her orphaned cousins Brendan and Perry have lived with their eccentric
Uncle Hedge. Their relative is a member of the Guild of St. George, a society dedicated to keeping track of history's most mysterious artifacts.
When the discovery of a casket containing the figure of a mermaid and a map found under the floorboard of a secret museum leads to attempts to
kidnap Kathleen and her cousins, the children and their uncle set out on a journey. They're looking for the entry to the "hollow earth," where a
legendary inventor lies sleeping; his dreams are the portal between outer and inner earths. VERDICT Mad scientists, persistent social workers,
real-life mermaids, and magical keys blend into an atmosphere of mystery and adventure reminiscent of the works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.
Blaylock (The Digging Leviathan; The Paper Grail) brings a hint of magical realism to his tales of a world touched by the strange and wonderful.
Suitable for both YA and adult readers.
Bova, Ben. Orion and King Arthur. Tor.
Jul. 2012. c.464p. ISBN 9780765330178.
$25.99. SF
A servant of Aten, one of the Creators, Orion has lived many lives traveling through time and space and carrying out his master's wishes. Sent to
Britain after the departure of the Roman armies, Orion befriends a young warrior named Arthur, whom Aten wishes to bring stability--but not
much more--to the island. Orion, however, sees what Arthur can become and sets out to aid him in becoming a king and a hero. Returning to his
"Orion" series (Orion Among the Stars; Orion in the Dying Time; Orion and the Conqueror; Vengeance of Orion), Bova places his immortal
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wanderer into the middle of the Arthurian legend and gives the classic tale a cosmic spin. VERDICT Combining sf storytelling on a grand scale
with military sf and alternate history, Bova has written a fast-paced, larger-than-life tale that should appeal to fans of the Arthurian legends and
the author's large readership.
* Brooks, Terry. Wards of Faerie. Del Rey: Ballantine. (The Dark Legacy of Shannara, Bk. 1). Sept. 2012. c.384p. ISBN 9780345523471. $28.
FANTASY
Researching magic in the books and scrolls housed below the palace, young Elven Druid Aphenglow Elessedil discovers a diary that recounts a
forbidden romance between an Elven girl and a Darkling boy and hints at the fate of the long-vanished Elfstones. As troubled times return to the
Four Lands and a tyrannical human-centered Federation seeks to dominate the other Races, Aphenglow sets herself a dangerous task--to follow
the clues left in the diary and uncover magic that might save her people and her world. Set in a time after magic has given way to science, the
latest addition to the best-selling Shannara series marks Brooks's return to that setting after a seven-year hiatus. VERDICT In time for the 35th
anniversary of The Sword of Shannara (first published in 1977), Brooks opens up a new avenue for more tales of magic and epic adventure. His
many fans will want this.
Enge, James. A Guile of Dragons. Pyr: Prometheus. (A Tournament of Shadows, Bk. 1). Aug. 2012. c.284p. ISBN 9781816146283. pap. $17.95.
FANTASY
The son of Merlin Ambrosius and Nimue Viviana but abandoned at birth, Morlock Ambrosius grew up among the dwarves of Thrymhaiam.
Though he is cherished by his adoptive father, Tyr syr Theorn, his differences as a nondwarf led to a parting of the ways. When the dragons
defeated ages ago by the dwarves return in an unholy alliance with the dead kings of Cor, the task of confronting them falls upon Morlock. Using
a narrator who recalls the somberness of Norse myth, this series launch serves as a prequel to the novels featuring Merlin's son (The Wolf Age;
Blood of Ambrose; This Crooked Way). VERDICT Providing a back door into the Arthur/Merlin mythos, Enge creates a fascinating counterpoint
to the familiar legends.
Lerner, Edward M. Energized. Tor.
Jul. 2012. c.336p. ISBN 9780765328496.
$27.99. SF
When human error causes Middle Eastern oil fields to become radioactive, the world faces an immediate energy crisis. The sudden appearance of
the asteroid Phoebe leads to a bold attempt by the United States to capture the object--and its potential as a fuel-rich resource--into orbit around
Earth. But special interests, including the remaining oil producers, seek to block through any means possible America's plan to avoid economic
dependency by mining Phoebe. Lerner's (Small Miracles; Betrayer of Worlds, with Larry Niven) near-future sf thriller features a plausible
scenario that combines concern about the planet's diminishing energy resources with the current interest in asteroid mining and the potential
danger of meteoric impacts. VERDICT Plot and political intrigue take center stage in this sf adventure that should appeal to fans of hard sf and
technothrillers.
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* McCaffrey, Anne & Todd McCaffrey. Sky Dragons. Del Rey: Ballantine. (Dragonriders of Pern). Jul. 2012. c.368p. ISBN 9780345500915. $26.
SF
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Although the dreadful plague that killed many of Pern's dragons has passed, the scarcity of these creatures, whose fire breath is vital to destroying
the deadly Thread that periodically falls from the sky, leaves the world vulnerable. Xhinna, the first female rider of a blue dragon, leads a few
survivors back in time to an uninhabited group of islands where they hope to provide a base for breeding and raising enough dragons-and training
new dragonriders--to ensure the safety of Pern. Peril awaits them in the form of unforeseen dangers to the un-hatched eggs as well as constant
challenges to Xhinna's ability to guide the new colony. Written shortly before Anne McCaffrey's death, the fifth (after Dragon's Time) and final
collaboration between the creator of the Pern universe and her son fills in another portion of the planet's history, exploring the complex
relationships between the dragons and their riders and the delicate balance of power needed for a society to survive. VERDICT Memorable
characters and a good balance of individual dramas and large-scale action make this a strong addition to the Pern saga, one made more poignant
as the responsibility for continuing the series passes from mother to son.
* Parker, K.J. Sharps. Orbit: Hachette.
Jul. 2012. c.480p. ISBN 9780316177757.
pap. $15.99. FANTASY
After 40 years of war, the nations of Permia and Scheria have finally arranged a truce and a celebratory fencing tournament to showcase a sport
popular in both nations. The Scherian team consists of a former fencing champion, the youngest son of a famous Scherian general, an accidental
murderer, a female fencing expert, and their coach, the head of the Fencers' Guild. As they cross into formerly enemy territory, bizarre events,
near mishaps, logistical nightmares, and the last-minute addition of a "political" officer to handle diplomatic matters cause the fencers to question
the real purpose of their tour. The author of the "Engineer Trilogy" (Devices and Desires: Evil for Evil; The Escapement) portrays a group of
mismatched individuals, united only by their swordsmanship, as they grapple with the murky worlds of international politics, diplomatic intrigue,
espionage, and potential betrayal. VERDICT Parker's skillful control of pacing, expert rendering of characters, and subtle sense of humor add
depth and believability to this stand-alone fantasy that should appeal to fans of the quasi-Renaissance fantasies of Melissa Scott and Steven Brust.
Powell, Megan. No Peace for the Damned.
47 North: Amazon. Jul. 2012. c.266p.
ISBN 9781612183602. pap. $14.95. FANTASY
Magnolia Kelch's criminal family draws their power from supernatural sources, and her ability not only exceeds that of her relatives but also
thwarts their efforts to control it. When she escapes their experimental tortures designed to test her limits, she finds herself part of the Network, an
organization dedicated to battling supernatural crime. Powell's debut urban fantasy introduces a heroine with unusually strong powers that come
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from an unknown and malevolent source. As Magnolia deals with issues of trust in her newfound allies and her rejection of her own family, she
also finds a potential bond with one of the Network. VERDICT Powell bypasses standard vampire, zombie, and werewolf themes for a more
nebulous--so far at least--take on the supernatural in this series opener that should appeal to most fans of urban fantasy.
Salyards, Jeff. Scourge of the Betrayer. Night Shade. (Bloodsounder's Arc, Bk. 1). Jul. 2012. c.264p. ISBN 9781597804066. $24.99. FANTASY
The soldiers serving the Syldoon Empire are notorious for their ruthlessness and cold-blooded efficiency. None is more feared than Capt. Braylar
Killcoin and his band. When Arkamondos, a young scribe, accepts a commission to chronicle the band's experiences, he must weigh his desire to
act as a witness to events that could change the balance of power against his fear and curiosity about the enigmatic, taciturn Kill-coin. Salyards's
first novel launches a fantasy adventure series filled with grim characters, fierce battles, and dark magic--as well as a hint of macabre humor.
Killcoin embodies many mysteries, including a cursed weapon and a past that remains to be explored, while Arki serves as a brilliant counterfoil,
his initial naivete glowing brightly against the dark background of his chosen world. VERDICT Reminiscent of Glen Cook's "Chronicles of the
Black Company" series and Ari Marmell's Corvis Rebaine novels, this fantasy adventure should have broad appeal among fans of military fantasy
and sword and sorcery.
Williams, Liz. Worldsoul. Prime. Jul. 2012.
c.312p. ISBN 9781607012955. pap. $14.95.
FANTASY
The great city of Worldsoul stands at a crossroads among realities and serves as a gathering place for stories and works of literature lost to the
ravages of time and history. When the Skein, formerly responsible for governing the city, disappear, librarian Mercy Fane tries to track down a
renegade demon that manifested ill the library. Her quest brings her into contact with an alchemist. who is possessed by an ifrit. Williams (The
Ghost Sister: Empire of Bones; "Inspector Chen" series) launches a new series set in a universe of multiple dimensions where stones and books
have a life of their own and librarians are caretakers of literature in more ways than one. VERDICT Stunning descriptions and appealing,
distinctive characters will attract rims of literature and myth to this fantasy adventure.
The Apex Book of World SF 2. Apex. Oct. 2012. c.356p, ed. by Lavie Tidhar. ISBN 97819370090405. pap. $16.95. sf
From Hungary comes Csilla Kleinheincz's story of a woman's attempts to change her father's prophetic pronouncements ("A Single Year"), while
Zimbabwe's Ivor W. Hartmann tells a bittersweet coming-of-age story set in a dystopic future ("Mr. Goop"). This second volume of international
sf, fantasy, and horror includes stories from the Philippines, Cuba, New Zealand, India, and Poland, some of which are published in English for
the first time. Authors include Finland's Hannue Rajaniemi ("Shiboyu no Love"), Russia's Ekaterina Sedia ("Zombie Lenin"), Peru's Daniel Salvo
("The First Peruvian in Space"), and Nigeria's Tade Thompson ("Shadow"). VERDICT Like its predecessor, this anthology serves as a solid
introduction to many authors unfamiliar to American readers, as well as a top-notch showcase for the genre.
The Sword & Sorcery Anthology. Tachyon, dist. by IPG. Jul. 2012. c.480p. ed. by David G. Hartwell & Jacob Weisman. ISBN 9781616960698.
pap. $15.95. FANTASY
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Classic tales of sword and sorcery including Robert E. Howard's "Tower of the Elephant," featuring Conan the Barbarian; Michael and Linda
Moorcock's "The Caravan of Forgotten Dreams," featuring Elric of Melnibone; and C.L. Moore's "Black God's Kiss," a Jirel of Joiry adventure,
illustrate the genre's beginnings. Meanwhile, tales by Caitlin R. Kiernan ("The Sea Troll's Daughter"), Jeffrey Ford ("The Coral Heart"), and
George R.R. Martin ("Path of the Dragon") bring the story form up to date without losing the heroic spirit and the emphasis on action and
storytelling. VERDICT The 19 stories in this volume span a time period from 1933 to 2012 and provide a strong introduction to this fantasy
subgenre.
DEBUT OF THE MONTH
* Swift, E.J. Osiris. Night Shade.
(Osiris Project, Bk. 1). Jul. 2012. c.400p.
ISBN 9781597804172. $26.99. se
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Fifty years after the cataclysmic Great Storm that flooded Earth with rising waters, Osiris is believed to be the last city standing and serves as the
collection point for survivors. Divided into Citizens who enjoy the privileges of prosperity and Refugees who live confined in Osiris's
impoverished western quarter, the social fabric has begun to unravel as dissent and fear further divide the haves from the have-nots. When
Adelaide, the renegade granddaughter of the city's Architect, joins forces with Vikram, a refugee on a mission of justice for the neglected
westerners, the beginnings of a resistance spark a mixed reaction from the city's powers. VERDICT Swift's first novel, with its brilliant nearfuture
vision of an ecologically and socially devastated world and characters who resonate with life and passion, marks her as an author to watch.
NEWSWORTHY
Awards and nominations for awards continue to accrue 7912 as the year progresses.
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This year's nominees for the MYTHOPOEIC FANTASY AWARD FOR ADULT LITERATURE to be announced this August at Mythcon XLIII
in Berkeley, CA, include:
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The Uncertain Places by Lisa Goldstein
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
The Heavenly Fox by Richard Parks
Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente
Among Others by Jo Walton
The NEBULA AWARDS for 2012, chosen by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) were presented in May.
NOVEL Among Others by Jo Walton
NOVELLA The Man Who Bridged the Mist by Kij Johnson
NOVELETTE What We Found by Geoff Ryman
SHORT STORY "The Paper Menagerie" by Ken Liu
Nominees for the JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARDS, to be presented at the Campbell Conference and Awards Ceremony in Lawrence, KS, this
month, include:
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
This Shared Dream by Kathleen Ann Goonan
Soft Apocalypse by Will McIntosh
Embassytown by China Mieville
The Islanders by Christopher Priest
The Highest Frontier by Joan Slonczewski
Dancing with Bears by Michael Swanwick
Osama by Lavie Tidhar
Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson
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Home Fires by Gene Wolfe
Seed by Rob Ziegler
More information on the above awards can be found at sfsite.com/news/.
MASS MARKET PAPERBACKS OF NOTE
Arthur, Keri. Darkness Devours. Signet: NAL (Dark Angels, Bk. 3). Jul. 2012. c.400p. ISBN 9780451237118. pap. $7.99. FANTASY
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Risa Jones (Darkness Unbound; Darkness Rising), half-werewolf and half-Aedh, can see the reapers of dead souls and enter the half-world
between life and death. When the Vampire Council of Melbourne sets her in search of a killer of vampires, she hopes her success will convince
them to stop trying to kill her.
Price, Kalayna. Grave Memory. ROC: NAL. (Alex Craft, Bk. 3). Jul. 2012. c.384p. ISBN 9780451464590. pap. $7.99. FANTASY
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Grave witch and police consultant Alex Craft (Grave Witch; Grave Dance) uses her ability to raise the dead temporarily to solve crimes. When
the shade of a suicide victim can't recall his passing, Alex determines that his death is actually a murder.
Tuck, James R. Blood and Silver. Kensington. (Deacon Chalk Occult Bounty Hunter, Bk. 2). Aug. 2012. c.352p. ISBN 9780758271488. pap.
$7.99. FANTASY
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Monster hunter Deacon Chalk (Blood and Bullets) becomes the target of a murderous lycanthrope pack when he attempts to protect a pregnant
were-creature from her abuser.
Vaughn, Carrie. Kitty Steals the Show. Tor. (Kitty Norville, Bk. 10). Aug. 2012. c.352p. ISBN 9780765365668. pap. $7.99. FANTASY
Werewolf Kitty Norville (Kitty's Big Trouble) and her friends travel to London where she is the keynote speaker at the First International
Conference on Paranormal Studies. Kitty also encounters a convention of vampires and finds herself in the limelight in more ways than one.
"QUOTABLE "But when you lose something that can never be replaced, and more particularly, someone, then you'll know grief, true grief. The
kind that tortures and warps and threatens to destroy, the kind that turns your insides to ash, that draws you toward madness or your own death.
This grief will never leave you, ever. It will change shape, and if you survive its initial ravages, it will subdue, but it will never leave, periodically
springing up again to catch you unaware with a new fierceness, like a plague that lies dormant for years only to return again with renewed
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ferocity. You'll never fully escape it. For your sake, I hope you experience this grief soon. You'll be that much closer to living a complete life."--
Jeff Salyards, Scourge of the Betrayer
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Cassada, Jackie
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Cassada, Jackie. "Science fiction/fantasy." Library Journal, 1 July 2012, p. 64+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA323858129&it=r&asid=ae717fe7274be7dda585b8849abfd34a. Accessed 21 June
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A323858129

---

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Rosewater
Publishers Weekly.
263.40 (Oct. 3, 2016): p103.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
Rosewater
Tade Thompson. Apex, $16.95 trade paper (360p) ISBN 978-1-937009-29-8
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In this futuristic thriller set in the middle of the 21st century, a Nigerian psychic goes up against aliens, criminals, and bizarre phenomena while
coping with an increasingly weird world. Kaaro, once a thief capable of finding anything or anyone, now works for the ultra-secret Section 45 as
a telepathic interrogator and investigator. When his fellow psychics start dying off, his attempts to discover the cause lead him to the alien-created
biodome in the center of the city of Rosewater. As Kaaro's past, including his previous experiences with the biodome, unspools in this nonlinear
adventure, he learns the disturbing secret of the aliens who have settled on Earth. Thompson (Making Wolf) cleverly lays out a compellingly
strange yet accessible setting, with an underlying mystery to drive the fast-paced narrative. The story bounces over multiple decades, laying out
Kaaro's sordid past and assorted sins, but it never loses sight of the big picture, in which the machinations of aliens (whom the reader will find
both understandable and frightening) and psychics are just the backdrop for a character-driven, morally gray tale of hope and potential
redemption. (Nov.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Rosewater." Publishers Weekly, 3 Oct. 2016, p. 103. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466166595&it=r&asid=feacede11e7a19132683ad0581392f92. Accessed 21 June
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466166595

• Strange Horizons
  http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/rosewater-by-tade-thompson/
  Word count: 1850

  REVIEWS SIZE / / /
  ROSEWATER BY TADE THOMPSON
  BY: SESSILY WATT
  ISSUE: 13 FEBRUARY 2017

  A map is cleverly encoded in the opening paragraph of Rosewater, Tade Thompson’s near future novel of mind-readers and aliens. In symbols and signs, the paragraph tells the reader where the book is going and the paths it will travel. It begins with a surge of anxiety: ''It's how I usually start my day,'' says the narrator. ''This time it's because of a wedding and a final exam. Not my wedding, not my exam'' (p. 1). Wedding, exam, and anxiety all belong to customers of Integrity Bank, going about their business fifteen floors below the narrator and his colleagues. The novel soon explains why the narrator experiences the anxiety of bank customers he doesn't know, but it would be a mistake to move too quickly past this moment of blurred boundaries, this anxiety that both is and is not the narrator's. There is a distinction that is easy to miss by turning the page too quickly. After all, it's common to feel anxious for someone else—while listening to a friend talk about their own anxiety, or while watching a character in a movie, or while reading a book. But experiencing anxiety in sympathy with someone else is not the same as actually experiencing someone else's anxiety. Imagine it for a moment. What would it mean for your identity to have an experience that is not yours? Who are you if, however fleetingly, you are also someone else?

  Blurred identities and blurred boundaries are packed into many of the scenes in Rosewater, along with interrogations, government secrets, explosions, and aliens ranging from the carnivorous to the fungal. The narrator, whose name is Kaaro, spends his days protecting bank customers from being mined for information by "sensitives," who, like him, can read minds. He also uses his mind-reading ability at his other job, conducting interrogations for a secret branch of the Nigerian government. The narrative soon takes off on two parallel mysteries, alternating between the year 2066, in which sensitives like Kaaro are getting sick for an unknown reason, and the year 2055, in which a younger Kaaro tries to find Oyin Da, also known as Bicycle Girl, a woman who is part urban myth and part political activist. By the end of the novel, past and present converge on the mysterious glowing dome in the middle of the city of Rosewater, and the alien known as Wormwood.

  There is enough action in the plot to encourage reading at a quick clip, to find out what happens next or what new creation is waiting in the next chapter. The narration encourages a quick pace as well. Both the younger and older versions of Kaaro are not given to long bouts of self-reflection. The younger Kaaro is a selfish, misogynistic man, focused on his own desires for money, sex, and (when things get bad) his own survival. The older Kaaro narrates with a distance reminiscent of a cynical detective, jaded by the horrors of the world and his own part in them. Early on we see this side of him in more detail when he describes an interrogation, treating the subject of the interrogation as a puzzle to be solved. He doesn't know why the man is being interrogated. He doesn’t know what the government wants with the man. He is completely, deliberately distanced from the process:

  I don't like interrogations, but I'm good at them. I feel proud of myself when I solve a puzzle, and then I feel disgust. I try to think of myself as a lawyer, operating within certain parameters that do not include morality. Focus on the task. (p. 14)
  "Focus on the task," Kaaro reminds himself, and so he does, breaking into the man's mind inch by inch. He sets aside disgust and wraps himself in amorality as best he can.

  Given that amorality, it's unsurprisingly uncomfortable to spend time within Kaaro's perspective. Neither hero nor villain, he often makes wrong or imperfect decisions, hurting others and himself as much through inaction as action. For this reader at least, that discomfort became a distraction on my first read of the novel. The misogyny and selfishness of the younger Kaaro blended with the cynicism and detachment of the older, making it difficult to tell their stories apart, though their alternating chapters are clearly marked. The younger Kaaro in particular kept me on edge, to the point that I felt a palpable sense of relief in the moments when his misogyny and selfishness are called out. My second read of the novel was much more fruitful. I began to recognize the distinctions Thompson draws between younger and older, and the lines that connect one to the other—how, for example, the arguments which the older, jaded Kaaro has with his government handler are an empty echo of the arguments the younger, selfish Kaaro has when he first meets her. I noticed the character’s changes, as well, as the younger Kaaro is pushed more and more to look outside of himself and the older Kaaro is pushed to take on at least a small stake in the world.

  A second read also revealed layers of image and resonance, like the map I mentioned encoded in the opening paragraph. The elements of that paragraph—Kaaro's borrowed anxiety, the city streets he observes, and a skylight above him—are little gifts to discover when you already know what happens next.

  As described above, the map begins with Kaaro's anxiety, which is a sign for the mind-reading so integral to the rest of the book. This mind-reading is a particular feat of imagination on Thompson’s part. For Kaaro, it first appears as an ability to find things, which he makes use of as a thief:

  I find [my aunt's] gold and diamonds in a box under the carpet in a false floor. I know the key is on her dresser hiding in plain sight. I know my uncle has thousands of dollars in cash in the ceiling space. I also know they have a vermin problem and that he is worried about rats eating the cash. I take an indeterminate wad of cash and stick it in my waistband, then I take a golden crucifix from the jewellery stash. I know, in the same transcendental way, when my cousin Eliza is about to come looking for me. I know when and where to hide from her to avoid discovery. (p. 36)
  Initially, Kaaro experiences mind-reading as knowledge without a clear source. He simply knows where the gold and diamonds are, and where the cash is hidden, and when his cousin will come. His mind-reading ability doesn’t take on its full shape until he receives training from Section 45, the secret branch of the Nigerian government that employs him. Through training, he and the other sensitives learn how to enter into a kind of psychic landscape called the xenosphere.

  I use "landscape" as a descriptor deliberately—the xenosphere includes more than verbal thoughts. Sensitives appear in this psychic space as a mental embodiment of themselves, and they can travel through it, visiting the minds of others. Actions in the xenosphere have a dream-like resonance, but they also have very real implications for physical and mental health. For Kaaro, adventures in the xenosphere often carry a direct threat to his sense of identity. A striking example is in the first “Interlude,” one of the occasional scenes of his government work, inserted between the numbered chapters. In this first interlude, he falls so deeply into the interrogation of a subject that he believes that he himself has committed the crime, ultimately losing nine months of his life to hospitalization and treatment.

  Of course, in the opening paragraph, all of this is yet to come. For now, mind-reading is just a mundane fact of life for Kaaro, mentioned briefly and then set aside as he moves on to a second integral part of the novel. The city.

  In my seat by the window I can see, but not hear, the city. This high above Rosewater everything seems orderly. Blocks, roads, streets, traffic curving sluggishly around the dome. (p. 1)
  The city of Rosewater is as essential to the book as mind-reading and the xenosphere. It is another character in the novel, the blocks, roads, and streets described in its pages with careful detail. Though it seems orderly from fifteen floors above, up close there are robots built in India, carnivorous aliens, reanimated corpses, drones and cyborg hawks, people who pretend to be machines, a friendly stray dog named Yaro, the Section 45 office hidden within a building belonging to the Ministry of Agriculture, people on pilgrimage from all parts of the world, and a mayor who has figured out how to make money off those pilgrims. And at the center of all this—by which I mean the center of both the city and the book—is the dome, Utopicity, which Kaaro and the reader spiral ever towards.

  The opening paragraph ends on a subtler note. Kaaro shifts his observation from the city to the sky, specifically the open skylight above him. The skylight is important for two reasons. First, he and his colleagues, all sensitives, are far above the city, at the very top of the Integrity Bank building. As Kaaro will be reminded again and again, other people don’t trust sensitives and don't like them. He is often kept at a distance, separated from other people by windows and screens, his internal detachment emphasized by the outer world. The skylight is also important for a more familiar reason: "The climate in the room is controlled despite the open skylight, a waste of energy for which Integrity Bank is fined weekly. They are willing to take the expense" (p. 1). In 2066, like 2017, those with money still pay to get away with whatever they can. Kaaro will confront this reality in multiple ways, as his city and world are manipulated by those with more knowledge and deeper resources.

  These, then, are some of the essential layers of Rosewater, laid out in the first paragraph: mind-reading and the blurring of identity that comes from experiencing feelings and memories not your own, the city of Rosewater and the secret at its center, and the pressures exerted by those with more power and resources. There is all this and more—I haven't talked about Thompson's inventive aliens and realistic-feeling invasion, his keen observations of how easily people ignore and accept what should be terrifying, the intriguing characters (many of them women) who have lives of their own beyond the pages of Kaaro's perspective, the fascinating isolation of the United States, or the lived-in feel of Rosewater, Lagos, and the other places described. I haven't talked about survival, and its limits. "We live our lives" (p. 287), says Kaaro, and it's almost more than he can hope for.

• Shaviro
  http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=1422
  Word count: 2872

  The Pinocchio Theory
  "If you fake the funk, your nose will grow." — Bootsy Collins
  Tade Thompson, ROSEWATER

  WARNING: numerous spoilers, since I cannot really discuss the novel without them

  Tade Thompson’s extraordinary new SF novel Rosewater is the second recent book I have read with the premise of extraterrestrials arriving in Nigeria. The first is Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon, equally wonderful, but in an entirely different way. Both novels go explicitly against the common tendency to set such narratives in big cities of the Global North. Of course, there is always the danger that a white anglophone reader from a hegemonic country and culture (i.e., somebody like myself) might find any such futuristic depiction of the developing world to be alluringly “exotic,” if only on account of its unfamiliarity. However, both Thompson and Okorafor guard against this tendency by immersing us in the social background, without any special explanations. The underlying state of Nigerian society is simply taken for granted in both novels — which forces the reader (no matter his or her own background) to take it for granted as well. Lagoon and Rosewater both expose the provincialism of the very North American, British, and European readers who tend to congratulate themselves on their supposed cosmopolitanism. The fact is, both authors (and many of their characters) are far more cosmopolitan than I am, because they are intimately familiar both with Western (US/UK) society and with societies in Nigeria and elsewhere.

  In any case, Rosewater is set some fifty years in the future (2066, with flashbacks to earlier dates in the mid-21st-century). In Thompson’s future Nigeria and future world, computing technologies have been pushed — mostly for reasons of political control — well beyond their actual state today. For instance, people all have implants that allow them to broadcast their location — or to be tracked by the police and by others, even when they do not want to be. Many (but not all) people also have implants that allow them to access the phone and data networks, without the need for an external device. There are also ubiquitous mobile surveillance mechanisms, often lodged in the bodies of animals like birds and cats. The novel doesn’t make all that much of these new technologies; they are fairly linear extrapolations from devices that we already have today. They simply form part of the everyday background of the novel. Surveillance as it exists today has been both expanded, and completely routinized and “normalized.”

  The same can be said for the social and political dimensions of Rosewater. The extrapolation remains fairly linear. The world of 2066, in Nigeria and elsewhere, is riven by the same inequalities of class, the same rampant capitalism (and the same downscale version of it, rampant criminal organizations), the same violent prejudices (e.g. against gays and lesbians), and the same governmental corruption and deep-state surveillance and control that we already have today. “Neoliberalism” is never named as such in the text, but despite its complete failure as an economic and social program, it evidently remains as the hegemonic — indeed, as the only — social form. No collective movement for change seems possible. Social, political, and economic forms of oppression therefore exist as obstacles that each individual must navigate on his or her own. In this way, Thompson keeps us aware of the constrictions of what the late Mark Fisher called capitalist realism: the situation in which we find it easier to imagine the end of the world, than any concrete alternative to globalized neoliberal capitalism.

  There is one ironic exception to this situation. At some point in the half century between today and the novel’s future projection, America “goes dark,” shutting off all contact with the rest of the world. There is no trade, and no communication. This is perhaps the triumph of Trumpism, born in reaction to neoliberalism’s utter failure. From the very little information people in the rest of the world have managed to get, America seems to have become a completely closed and regimented society. In any case, neither in America nor elsewhere is there any indication of any movement towards a more equitable social system.

  The novum (science fictional novelty) that drives Rosewater is something entirely different from this incremental development of human technologies and social arrangements. It is rather the presence of entirely alien (extraterrestrial) life forms and artifacts. We are introduced, early in the book, to what people call Utopicity: an enormous biodome, of alien construction, that is closed off to all human access. Utopicity is opaque to all outside inquiry; but it crackles with electricity, and it seems to possess almost supernatural powers. Once a year, the gates of Utopicity open for just a few hours: the dome emits radiation that almost instantly cures the illnesses (from cancer and HIV down to the common cold) of anyone who is exposed to it. Because of this, the new city of Rosewater, forming a ring all around the biodome, has grown, in just a decade, from uninhabited savannah to a major metropolis. (The name “Rosewater” is an ironic allusion to the foul river smells of the city, whose sewage treatment facilities have not kept up with its swelling population).

  The alien technology of Utopicity is so advanced as to be (in the words of Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law) indistinguishable from magic. Importantly, though, this technology is not infallible. For instance, the beings in the dome sometimes get the details of human anatomy wrong. The radiation from the dome cures all sorts of ailments, but it sometimes leaves the patients with “knees which point backwards,” or with “multiple and displaced orifices.” The radiation also affects recently dead bodies, reanimating them as shambling, mindless zombies — which then have to be dispatched by the police and the army.

  We only learn gradually, in the course of the novel, about the aliens and their actual powers. In Rosebud‘s timeline, an enormous intelligent living entity falls from outer space, and lands in central London, in 2012. People call it Wormwood. It is not the first of its kind to come to our planet, but it is the first to survive. All the previous ones die soon after entry. But Wormwood sinks into the earth, and spends several decades burrowing through the crust. It finally re-emerges in Nigeria in the 2050s. When government forces attack it, it builds Utopicity for self-protection.

  Apparently, Wormwood is not quite a single, unified organism, at least in the way that we understand such things on Earth. It seems to contain multitudes within itself. Portions split off and take on a quasi-independent existence. For instance, in order to communicate with human beings, some portions assume a more or less humanoid shape, while others emulate the fantastic appearance of cyberspace avatars. Still other aspects of Wormwood are monstrous and directly threatening, like the floaters: carnivorous flying vampiric entities released from the dome into the surrounding environment. In any case, these different aspects of Wormwood “are not all the same.” They often work at cross-purposes; at times, they even seem to be arguing with one another.

  Wormwood also generates an enormous mass of microscopic fungal spores, which it releases into the Earth’s atmosphere. These spores are ubiquitous; apparently they work to gather information about the environment and organisms of Earth. These spores grow in — or better, they infect — nearly everything in the world, living or not. They also form a worldwide transmission network called the xenosphere, through which they funnel data back to Wormwood. The xenosphere can be blocked temporarily, through the use of antifungal medications. But sooner or later, it always grows back.

  Most human beings are oblivious to the xenosphere; it gathers data from them without their knowledge. But a small number of people are able to feel the xenosphere directly; they are known as sensitives. They develop psychic powers as an acccidental side-effect of the alien incursion. One of these sensitives is Kaaro, the novel’s protagonist and narrator. He is able to plug into the xenosphere, and use it to access other people’s minds. Kaaro explores the network: he goes into a trance, takes on an avatar, and encounters complex informational structures, together with the avatars of other sensitives. At times, he even encounters aspects of Wormwood itself. The way that Kaaro moves through the xenosphere is quite similar to the way that people surf cyberspace in classic cyberpunk novels (e.g. William Gibson’s Neuromancer). But even without such deep immersion, Kaaro is able to read the hidden thoughts of ordinary people, and also to manipulate those people by implanting suggestions into their minds.

  Kaaro is the novel’s sole narrator. We only experience things from his perspective. This means that the reader needs to remain vigilant, because Kaaro is not an entirely reliable narrator. It’s not that he is deceptive in what he tells us; but he is a bit selective and slanted in what he chooses to reveal, and when. Also, Kaaro is not a particularly sympathetic character. At least he isn’t an outright sociopath: he fears and avoids violence, and he sometimes tries to do right by people he cares about. But Kaaro is still basically a grifter: he is sleazy and sexist, and always seems to be looking out for the main chance. Even when his conscience gets the better of him, he insists that he is “not the saving-the-world type.”

  When Kaaro first develops his telepathic powers, in adolescence, he quickly becomes a thief. He reads people’s minds in order to discover where they stash their valuable items. And he spends the money acquired in this way on sex, drugs, and partying. When Kaaro finally gets caught, he is forced to accept a deal from the cops. In lieu of punishment, he is drafted into the Nigerian secret police. His job is to scan the minds of political prisoners, after they have been tortured, in order to extract their secrets. He doesn’t enjoy doing this, but he has no choice. Kaaro is perpetually disaffected, alienated, and anti-social; but he never imagines that this somehow puts him outside the system. He knows that he’s a tool, and a fairly limited one at that.

  The novel finally turns upon the implications of the alien presence on Earth. But the details only get filled in obliquely, and quite slowly. The book has a complicated temporal structure: in between the chapters happening in the present moment (2066), there are also chapters set in 2055, and still others set at a few other times. These flashback chapters give us Kaaro’s backstory, and his earlier experiences with Wormwood and with the secret police. Within each time sequence, events are linear from one chapter to the next. But these timelines interfere with one another as we weave back and forth among them. Each chapter, regardless of which portion of the timeline it comes from, is narrated in the present tense, and made to feel viscerally immediate. This results in an odd sense of displacement. (I couldn’t help thinking, at least a bit, about David Wittenberg’s powerful discussion of time travel narratives, even though it is only the reader, and not the narrator, who actually shifts back and forth between one time and another). In fact, it is only by grasping what happened in 2055 that we can make full sense of what happens in 2066; but we don’t achieve this grasp until almost the end of the novel. The book’s narrative is therefore a slow burn; at the end, we need to look back and revise our understanding of earlier incidents, in the light of what has finally been revealed.

  Thompson’s oblique narrative strategy obviously works to keep the reader enthralled. But there is more to it than that: if the narration is oblique, this is really because the events being narrated are themselves oblique. As Seo-Young Chu argues in her general theory of science fiction narrative, so for this novel in particular: it’s not that Rosewater cognitively estranges the process of representation, so much as that it straightforwardly represents a state of affairs (or a referent) that is in and of itself cognitively estranging. Wormwood’s presence on the Earth is neither simple nor straightforward. It doesn’t have a single identity, and its effects on the planet are multiple and inconsistent. This has a lot to do with the formal complexity of the xenosphere. In recent years, we have become accustomed to think that everything is entangled in dense and diffuse networks, so that we cannot isolate individual entities (but also so that we can’t find unity or identity on the level of the network as a whole). Things are separated from one another, and yet entangled with one another, all at the same time. Causality is not arbitrary, but it is also not linear.

  Rosewater takes our emerging understanding of networks, and raises it, as it were, to a higher power. Wormwood is radically alien to us, and yet we find ourselves more and more implicated in what it is doing. The xenosphere, with its powers of connection and disconnection and its incessant work of surveillance, both mimics and takes its distance from the social, political, and technological networks that we are already accustomed to, and that have become even more virulent in 2066 than they were in 2016. Wormwood may be seen as an allegory of colonialization; and its ubiquitous surveillance may be seen to reflect that of the neoliberal State. But Wormwood must also be taken as something entirely apart from such power relations; both its autonomy and its dependency on us, and we on it, work in another dimension than that of neoliberal economics and governmentality. Wormwood’s logic is essentially biological, but in a very different manner than the one characterized by our usual understandings of neoliberal biopower and biopolitics. Wormwood’s alien strangeness is what the novel effectively communicates, both in its story and in its form of narration.

  Finally, Kaaro worries about alien invasion, and its potential effacement of everything that we have previously understood as human — both for good and for ill. It seems that, when Wormwood heals people with ailments, and when it opens human contact to the xenosphere, it is taking the opportunity to replace our DNA with its own. This is not a biological shift in lieu of a social or cultural one — because it is both, inextricably, at once. Wormwood is taking over, alike by insinuating itself within our cells, and by changing our conceptions and our feelings. Other people, besides Kaaro, feel and experience this. For instance, there is his girlfriend’s half-brother Layi, who seems to be able to fly, and to ignite spontaneous fires; these are evidently powers given to him by Wormword (or more precisely, by some portion of Wormwood); but people in Lagos and Rosewater — in accordance with the heavy influence of evangelical Christianity in Nigeria — presume that his mother was made pregnant by an angel. In fact, by the end of the novel all human beings have had some percentage of their cells “replaced by xenoforms.” This parallels the way that also “we are all part machine,” due to the various technologies that are embedded in our bodies. We are already cyborgs in 2016; this will be all the more the case in 2066. “How human am I?”, Kaaro wonders, and he has no way to tell.

  There is no easy answer to this dilemma. Kaaro thinks at times that perhaps this transformation is only “what humanity deserves.” People already have been “conquered and killed by invaders” without knowing it; and the saddest part is that they don’t even care. “Humans don’t care about anything as long as their TVs and microwaves work.” For its part, the government doesn’t care either; after the catastrophic failure of its efforts to destroy Wormwood, it cynically uses whatever advantage it gets from the entity in order to maintain and increase its own power. (Kaaro’s last assignment, which he refuses, is to monitor the mind of an opposition politician, so that the party in power will be better able to win the next election). As for the few people and groups who know about the alien invasion, and try to do something about it: they themselves are ironically also dependent upon Wormwood, for it protects them from the official authorities. The only thing to do, then, is simultaneously to “work with and against the xenoforms.”

  At the end of the book Kaaro compares the xeno-invasion of Earth life to such catastrophes as global warming, or an asteroid crashing into the Earth, like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. But “the alien in me” tells him that this isn’t quite the case. The coming disaster is, and will continue to be, an intimate one. It will be something for which “we will all be present,” even as we are devastated by it.

• Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together
  http://www.nerds-feather.com/2015/09/microreview-book-making-wolf-by-tade.html
  Word count: 1286

  Microreview [book]: Making Wolf by Tade Thompson
  A book that makes grimdark fantasy feel like a slightly lukewarm but otherwise pleasant bath.

  The novel is available on Amazon here.

  The Meat:

  Sometimes novels take us to the heights of achievement. Heroes overcoming great trials, great evils. There is a sense of jubilation as villains are defeated in the last moment, as battles are won, as good triumphs. As readers there is a shared pride at having reached such an ending. Sometimes, though, novels have no interest in the heights of achievement, in evil as something that can be banished or defeated, in heroes of any sort. In such books, instead of sharing the triumphs of the protagonist, the reader is made complicit in their sins. Making Wolf definitely fits into the later category, creating a rich and haunting narrative that moves with power and destructive energy of a truck tearing a man in half.

  This is not a book for the feint of heart. The speculative element comes from the alternate history it creates taking place in Alcacia, a fictional Yoruba nation that in this setting formed during the Nigerian Civil War. What arrives out of this speculative landscape is a world where bribes are king, where violence is omnipresent, and where the food sounds delicious. Seriously, the detail given to the world here is vibrant, revealing a setting torn and stitched back together and torn again. The nation is one defined by the damage done by colonizers, the corruption that is the lasting legacy of the West.

  "Alcacia isn't kind to anyone" (262)

  I think that might be the most comprehensive summary I can give to the plot. The novel follows Weston Kogi as he returns to his home country to attend a funeral. From there he is drawn into a plot that places him in the sights of just about every faction in play. Told to solve the murder of a beloved figure in the region, Weston accepts as much to stay alive as because he has nothing else to do. As a character he is drifting, passive, and completely buying into his own lack in agency. He moves through life as an outsider in his former home, constantly reminded through beatings, through the crimes he witnesses and participates in, that the world he left is rotten.

  If Alcacia is rotten, though, it is because it has been bruised. Hard. The prose does such a great job of capturing both the humanity and beauty of the place right alongside the extreme and pervasive ugliness. And Weston, for all he wants to be above and separate from the crimes he sees, is right in the middle of them. It's an unsettling read, because as a reader there was a part of me rooting for Weston, wanting to see him survive, win. It's a trap, though, that the novel expertly lays. There is no winning here, no escape. For all that Weston believes it's not really his fault, for all that it's understanding what he does, he does some terrible and unforgivable things during his time in Alcacia, and in the end he does them because he wants to, because he wants to be a person with power, of power. And I, in wanting him to survive, became just as guilty. In rooting for Weston, I was rooting for murder, for rape, for corruption. Because Weston is not strong enough to resist, to fight for something that might benefit more than just himself. He is drawn along, and as much as it doesn't seem like he has any better options, the truth is that he decides to keep going, decides to try and see it through, is bought and sold no less than anyone else that he looks down on as corrupt.

  It is an incredibly difficult read. I would call it a grimdark fantasy, because as alt-history it fits into a sort of fantasy, but it has none of the distance that grimdark normally affords from the real world. Here there is no comfort. Which is part of my overall dissatisfaction with grimdark as a genre. It posits the world as dark, gritty, and relentless, but the depictions always toss those things into the past, into some fantasy realm that looks like historical Europe. When George R.R. Martin is asked about all the rape in his stories, he falls back on the "well that's how things were" logic that falls apart in the face of a work like Making Wolf. Because here the crimes are not pushed back into the past. They exist on (basically) our planet, in our time, are witnessed and committed by a man who has been in many ways "Westernized" from living in London most of his life. And though the plot unfolds in Alcacia, his Western-ness does not save him or keep him above what happens. If anything it locks him into being part of the problem, in trying to believe that the things he sees are separate from himself. It is the scars of colonization that exist right now that open up the ugliness of humanity to be viewed, that make colonizers of Alcacia's own sons, including Weston.

  And it is the strength of Making Wolf that it refuses to let the reader off the hook. [And here we might get into some mild spoilers, so be warned!] There is no moment of redemption for Weston. There is ugliness and it does not end. In fact, Weston benefits from it. Is seduced by it. And it's hard to blame him. It's impossible to forgive, but it's hard to blame, and that is the ultimate triumph of the book, to leave the reader no easy release, no easy victory. To force that confrontation with the dark. And fuck I think I need a drink after reading this. For every sweeping snapshot of persevering beauty there are five moments of terror and filth and gut-wrenching pain. There are no heroes and, in some ways, no villains either. There are victims. Layers of victims. It would be difficult to say that Weston is not a victim, for example. But his victimization is very different from, say, that of the women in the story, which he becomes complicit in, which he in many ways condones by writing their hurt off as just part of the setting. So the novel is very much engaging the ideas of victimization and grittiness and pain and agency and providing a damning look at how basically being a man and opting to still try to be the hero plays out.

  So I have to applaud the book for its unflinching look at humanity. At crime and punishment. It's not really the most pleasant book to read (though the food is lovingly detailed and I want to try it all), nor the most uplifting. Nor is the ending all that satisfying in the traditional sense. But it all works. It works and it's dark and it's a definitely worth picking up and struggling with. And I'm off to get that drink.

  The Math:

  Baseline Assessment: 8/10

  Bonuses: +1 for being unflinching, uncomfortable, and uncompromising

  Negatives: -1 for leaving me numb to happiness (seriously, I need to go look at kitten videos for a while now)

  Nerd Coefficient: 8/10 "quite, quite good!" (check out our rating system here)

  --

  POSTED BY: Charles, avid reader, reviewer, and sometimes writer of speculative fiction. Contributor to Nerds of a Feather since 2014.

  REFERENCE:Thompson, Tade. Making Wolf [Rosarium, 2015]

• SF Crow's Nest
  http://sfcrowsnest.org.uk/rosewater-by-tade-thompson-book-review/
  Word count: 815

  Rosewater by Tade Thompson (book review).
  December 14, 2016 | By AndyWhitaker | Reply
  I like alien invasion stories as they present the opportunity for displaying the best side of humanity while introducing weird aliens and technologies. ‘Rosewater’ by Tade Thompson doesn’t present the best side of humanity but is the better book for not doing so. It is quite simply one of best books I have read for quite some time, although part of this might be down to it being set in Nigeria. The author uses his knowledge of Nigerian people, customs and beliefs to build a completely believable near future environment for the story to unfold.

  Rosewater is a place not too far from Lagos which becomes notable after an alien presence forms a large impenetrable dome. A town forms around the dome once it becomes evident that once a year when an opening appears and any illnesses in the local population are cured. It does, unfortunately, have the effect of reanimating any recently deceased people though. They are not killer zombies but there’s a special unit of the local police that helps them return to being dead just in case.

  The central character of the story is a man called Kaaro and its just ‘Kaaro’ with no surname or first name. Kaaro is a sensitive who starts to develop his special skills at about eight or nine years-old. Unfortunately, his abilities coupled with his poor background provide just the right leverage to tip him into a life of thievery. Kaaro can read people’s minds and what stands out are their thoughts about valuable items. He’s able to trawl their memories and discover the places where they are hidden.

  We learn about Kaaro’s early life during flashbacks prior to the story’s current time in the year 2066. Each chapter name, as listed in the table of contents, is followed by the year of when it happened except for the ‘Interlude:’ sections. These do have the year in the chapter’s initial page so you can piece together when the events are happening. The current event chapters are interspersed with chapters from earlier times and the interludes. It sounds complicated but it works well but does show up the limitation of an e-book reader. In a physical paperback, its trivial to flip back a few pages to the chapter start to check the date. Trying that on an e-book reader is a pain in the proverbial.

  Kaaro’s special abilities are a side-effect of the alien macro and microorganisms introduced into the Earth’s atmosphere when the alien entity known as Wormwood crashes into the Earth. They were originally deployed to aid in the alien’s study of Earths fauna and flora which, of course, includes us humans. Not everyone gets mind-reading abilities, just a very few ‘sensitives’ who also get access to a xenosphere. This can be thought of a mental dimension were the sensitives can take different forms and interact with each other.

  Not surprisingly, Kaaro comes to the attention of Nigeria’s government agency S45, who recruits sensitives as agents in their fight against organised crime and political opponents. Being forced into S45 and having to undertake rather dodgy assignments does nothing for Kaaro’s disposition. He could be said to be an anti-hero as he doesn’t like violence, won’t carry a gun and appears to not like most of the people he has to interact with.

  The book artfully depicts Kaaro’s early life, S45 missions and his growing awareness of what is really happening to him and the world in general. Being set in Nigeria and calling on the varied traditions and beliefs of the country give the story a completely different aspect which is refreshing. Trade Thompson’s writing is brisk with the story having multiple layers. I found it quite hard to put down as there’s always something going on. The ending, when it comes, isn’t obvious. While it is a complete book with a proper ending, there is the possibility that there might be more tales from Rosewater.

  I enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone who likes a very good Science Fiction story. Its only after you have read it and think about the aliens and the technologies used do you really appreciate how much trouble the world is in. I’m going to re-read this book at some point which indicates just how much I rate it. Tade Thompson is also on my list of authors to watch out for. I’m interested to see what he releases next.

  Andy Whitaker

  December 2016

  (pub: Apex Publications. 364 pages. eBook edition: Price: £ 5.55 (UK). ASIN: B01N8VTS76. Paperback: Price: £12.99 (UK). ISBN: 978-1-937009-29-8)

• The Skiffy and Fanty Show
  https://skiffyandfanty.com/2016/11/17/book-review-rosewater-by-tade-thompson/
  Word count: 778

  Book Review: Rosewater by Tade Thompson

  17
  NOV
  In the mid-21st century, the year 2066 to be precise, Kaaro has a number of jobs and ways to make ends meet in the conglomeration of humanity known as Rosewater, located in Nigeria. From foiling Nigerian bank scams to finding people and things, Kaaro’s unusual psionic abilities, his connection to the so called xenosphere, are a mixed blessing to be sure, but they are also a way to make ends meet. It is a living, for better and worse. Rosewater, too, is much like that, a welter of humanity that lives around the alien domed structure known as Utopicity. Every so often the dome opens, and people who are near the dome when it happens can be cured of their ailments, diseases and problems. This is, for better and worse, not always a smooth process for those chosen to be healed.

  Over a variety of time frames, we piece together not only Kaaro’s story, but the story of Rosewater as well, Kaaro’s crucial role in the creation of the alien dome, and the community around it. And we slowly get to unfold what its future, and the future of Kaaro, too, will be.

  51vhxopp1zl-_sx319_bo1204203200_Rosewater is a novel by Tade Thompson.

  The novel drops readers into the deep end, giving that variety of time frames, with interludes, to let readers sort out Kaaro as a character, as well as the 21st-century African world that he inhabits. The novel switches between various time frames, going back to his childhood in the 2030s and 2040s, as well as key events between then and now. There is a high level of care that the author takes in withholding information or letting the reader guess and deduce things about the world, to finally confirm and clarify such speculations in a scene set in one of the prior scenes. The novel rewards very careful reading and reflection in order to tease out details, intimations, and aspects of its worldbuilding. The nature of the aliens, the history of this 21st century, and how and why Rosewater came to be all spools out, making for a rich tapestry of a world to be immersed in, and to learn to understand.

  This teasing out of information also goes to the protagonist, Kaaro, as well, and some of the characters he deals with over the years. From knowing zero about Kaaro, we slowly and carefully piece together his history with the fragmented narrative. Just as with the worldbuilding, the questions I had about Kaaro — his background, his relationships, and his history — are slowly and carefully answered. The mysteries of the world and the character enrich the narrative. It also does make revealing some of these secrets and aspects to the novel tricky in a review: The true nature and origin of the aliens. Where Kaaro’s psychic powers really come from. What the acquisition of those powers means for Kaaro’s future. Just what his true connection to the aliens really is. All this and more await readers. It’s difficult to talk about many aspects of this novel without spoiling it, because the discovery process is one of the joys of the novel. Know that it’s exceedingly well written, and it spools out for the reader like a beautiful sunrise, illuminating the reader as a rising sun reveals the landscape.

  I like to think of Rosewater in the same breath and same mindset as Nnedi Okorafor’s fabulous first contact novel, Lagoon. Both feature an African setting and protagonists, and firmly immerse the reader into cultures, societies and landscapes that for a lot of western readers, is not entirely familiar, or at an angle to what they are used to. Alien contact with the natives, ranging from the ground level to the governmental level, is necessarily different than a first contact in Rome, London, or New York City. Thompson’s novel, with its hopping around the timeline, is not that first contact that Lagoon has going for it. The alien contact HAS happened, and the world, especially the local environment, is long since accustomed to having dealt with it.

  It’s quite the high wire act that Thompson has going in Rosewater, and he manages not to slip off that high wire. Rosewater was more than just a way for me to broaden my science fiction and my reading to cultures, places and ideas that are beyond the typical. It was, at its base, a way for me to read some excellent science fiction.

• James DAvis Nicols
  http://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/strange-fascination-fascinating-me
  Word count: 962

  Strange fascination, fascinating me
  Rosewater — Tade Thompson

  rosewater
  2016’s Rosewater is Tade Thompson’s second novel; it follows 2015’s (unrelated) mystery Making Wolf.

  Kaaro was once a talented thief. Now he’s a very reluctant member of Nigeria’s Section Forty-five, an obscure branch of the Ministry of Agriculture. S45 specializes in the odd and weird, the occult phenomena that have become all too real in the world created by the alien incursion of 2015.Nowhere on the world is the strange as present as it is in Kaaro’s hometown of Rosewater, which formed around an alien dome (known as Utopicity) in the 2050s.

  Utopicity seems happy to remain sealed and indifferent to humanity but the lifeforms it released have spread quietly across the world. A lucky few have been transformed. Kaaro is one of those changed ; that’s why he has ESP. Which in turn makes him valuable to S45.

  Kaaro is a reluctant draftee, but he’s also too lazy to do anything strenuous to escape his bureaucratic servitude. He limits his protest to habitual insubordination. Happily for Kaaro, adventure is coming for him.

  Kaaro would be the first to admit that he is missing some vital element of humanity, that is, morality. In the past, he used his abilities to steal, whereby to fund a lifestyle of immediate gratification: prostitutes, drugs, and alcohol. He feels no gratitude for any kindness; if he helps anyone, it’s only because he wants something in return. Still, he knows that he is outside, wistfully looking into human community.

  Fellow psychic Bola plots to entice bachelor Kaaro back into that community, hoping that love will thaw his frozen heart. She arranges date after unrequested date for the indifferent Kaaro. He continues impervious … until he meets Aminat. Aminat and Kaaro form an unexpected and entirely genuine bond. Love is entirely new to Kaaro and, as one might expect, he has few applicable skills.

  While Kaaro is busy learning how to be a reliable boyfriend and dealing with Aminat’s own interesting baggage, S45 presents him with a new mystery to solve. He’s not all that interested. He would be if he knew what his superiors at S45 had hidden from him. One by one, Sensitives like Kaaro are dying off. The die-off is slow but seemingly unstoppable. S45 has no idea what is killing the Sensitives nor any ability to prevent or cure it.

  In fact, of his entire cohort of Sensitives, Kaaro is the only survivor. And he’s developed a nagging cough….

  ~oOo~

  I usually discuss the author’s missteps early in the review so that I can build from the negative to the positive. Rosewater is deplorably deficient in such missteps.

  The aliens responsible for Utopicity arrived on Earth in 2015, half a century before the events of the novel take place. This might indicate that Rosewater took some time to get to print; however, I think it more likely that the author is writing alternate history. The 2015 arrival was not the first time the aliens landed on Earth; it was only the first time they managed to establish a foothold.

  This is also a hard SF novel, in that there is a physical mechanism that facilitates telepathy and it isn’t just quantum woo. The details of how exactly ESP works in Thompson’s world affect how it can be used. Anyone familiar with the biology involved could invent some fairly straightforward countermeasures1 . Some people may find the details a bit horrific … but after all, this is no worse than the possibility that millions of people around the world are T. gondii’s meat puppets.

  As intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic go, Earth’s new masters don’t seem like such a bad lot … at least if you compare them to conventional human colonialists. True, they control everything that matters to them; their long-term plans are not in our best interests; and there is absolutely nothing any human can do about it2 . Most humans are free to ignore all that, at least for the moment; it’s no more relevant to their daily lives than climate change. It’s not as if the aliens have turned severed human hands into a currency.

  Kaaro could very easily have been an extremely unsympathetic character. His rudimentary sense that he lacks something important makes him something other than a selfish sociopath, as does his disinclination to knowingly harm other people without a good reason. (Although the fact that he doesn’t set out to hurt people does not mean he has not hurt people. In fact, he has left a trail of dead and damaged people in his wake, as a consequence of his crimes. All of which he eventually realizes, to his horror.) His struggle to become worthy of Aminat also helps redeem him.

  Whether Kaaro’s struggle matters given his context, I could not say. But really, he is no more and no less doomed than any of us: the one guarantee in this world is total oblivion: in a billion years it won’t matter what decisions anyone makes today. Or in 2066.

  Rosewater is available here.

  1: Shades of one roleplaying game wherein one of the first things my telepath did was work out the physics of telepathy, followed in short order by monetizing that information. He invented and sold affordably priced mind-screens.

  2: Well, the US managed to sequester their entire nation. The glimpse we get of the US suggests that the costs of that strategy may outweigh the benefits.