Kaaro is a psychic employed by a government agency to use his powers for interrogation, invading the memories of suspects to extract information. When others with the same abilities begin dying one by one, he begins investigating the circumstances in the hope of forestalling his own demise. Meanwhile, an alien entity living inside a biodome slowly makes the purpose of its presence known.
Rosewater is a more complicated story than you might think, especially for one with an alien presence at its core. The story jumps back and forth in time, from the present of 2066 where Kaaro attempts to discover the cause of the deaths of his fellow psychics, and various points in the past up to a decade previously that chart Kaaro’s growth from a borderline sociopathic thief to someone who, while not exactly an upstanding member of society, at least has a defined place in it. This gives things a structure that’s somewhat disjointed, but ultimately more rewarding than had everything been lain out linearly. There are no easy infodumps to clue you in to worldbuilding details, and since most of the characters don’t really know everything that’s going on, it keeps things a refreshing mystery for the reader.
The narrative is also atypical from being told in the present tense, reading like the story has been pieced together by an external source from Kaaro’s own muddled memories, as though it were the representation of someone using abilities similar to his own to delve around in his history and relate what they found.
The fact that Kaaro is not especially likeable is part of what makes him such an interesting protagonist. He’s an inveterate coward, unthinkingly selfish, unapologetically sexist, and has a nasty habit of using his abilities to inflict imagined pain that people’s brains register as all too real, purely because they mildly irritated him.
Although the alien entity plays a significant part in how the swiftly expanding and developing titular shanty town in rural Nigeria came to be, its presence is for the most part relegated to a background detail, a looming macguffin whose true purpose awaits revelation, while it gives off electricity that powers the settlement and annually sends out healing vibes that sometimes have an unfortunate side effect of reanimating the dead. The near future setting is full of ideas that augment the story, such as the omnipresence of avian drones, communication through electronic implants and the internet having been superseded, as well as more fantastical ones like the xenosphere, a thought-realm accessible by psychics through fungal spores the alien unleashed upon its arrival.
A gripping opening instalment of a trilogy, Rosewater eventually reveals what kind of saga it’s going to be, and when these intentions are made clear it provokes an immediate desire for the next chapter so you can see how things will progress.
ROSEWATER / AUTHOR: TADE THOMPSON / PUBLISHER: ORBIT / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
