The Rosewater Redemption is the third volume in a trilogy that began with Rosewater. Abigail Nussbaum reviews it in The Guardian (Nov 22, 2019). From the review:
As he did in the previous volumes, Thompson constructs a vivid, almost overwhelmingly detailed future world, which combines the biological and the technological, human and alien. The xenosphere functions as a sort of spore-based cyberspace, where adepts like Kaaro exist alongside traditional hackers, who combine disciplines with him in search of a weapon to use against the aliens. In the physical world, alien animals – “floaters” who consume human flesh; giant worms that burrow into the ground and emerge to topple buildings – fight for resources and living areas with animal-form robots and surveillance drones. The very definition of personhood is challenged by beings such as the revolutionary Oyin Da, a ghost who exists solely in the xenosphere, or Lora Asiko, a sex robot converted into an assistant by the mayor who has control over her own programming.
Given this theme of cross-pollination, one might expect the Wormwood trilogy to hold out the possibility of coexistence. But while stories of alien invasion are common in science fiction, they are rarely told from the perspective of the formerly colonised. Some humans, like the mayor, believe the benefits the aliens offer are worth the eventual takeover they intend; others, like Femi, look to their nation’s past for a lesson in the foolishness of hoping for the best from colonisers. The countries of the west, meanwhile, are refreshingly absent from this story, with the US quarantining itself off on realising the aliens’ intentions, leaving the fate of humanity in the hands of the Nigerian heroes.
No comments:
Post a Comment