Jfc, I swear to God this series was vat-grown specifically for me personally, and I loved every second of it. I think my only complaint is that the ending felt a little abrupt, but then maybe I was just mad that it ended. Like I would totally read a couple hundred pages more of Femi getting back up on her feet after all that, or Aminat working through her grief, or Bad Fish just hanging out being a fucking badass. Thompson just tosses off a half a dozen cool fucking ideas or philosophical questions every chapter, just casually, like it’s no big deal, making it look easy. But also he doesn’t get hung up on the ideas over the characters. Plus, Rosewater, the city, is such a vibrant, fucked up, breathing place, and I am just a total sucker for the fictional city done well.
As I read The Rosewater Redemption, the final book in this trilogy, I kept thinking there were some commonalities with Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem, specifically the mechanism for the alien invasion. I liked Three-Body a lot – it felt big and sweeping in an unselfconscious way, if that makes any sense – but I lost interest as the series got more and more arid in its science fictionality. By which I mean, I felt like Three-Body had a lot of interesting things to say about the Cultural Revolution and modern Chinese politics and there were some real-feeling characters in there, but as the series went on to hundreds of years in the future, Liu focused more and more on philosophical puzzles and scenarios and less on the human ones. Liu reminds me a lot of Arthur C Clarke (complimentary), and I have similar gripes with some of his series (like omg, wtf with every sequel to Rendevous with Rama.)
While there’s tons of ideas in The Rosewater Redemption, the most interesting stuff centered on the philosophy of the mind, on what makes a person a person. Which is I think what kept me very much engaged: it was less Asimovian puzzles and more down dirt deep grappling with myriad emergent stressors of the concept of the self. Because there are all kinds of person-shaped things and conscious things and sometimes both and sometimes neither; there are bodies with consciousness, bodies without consciousness, consciousness without bodies. This sort of thing could get schematic in the wrong hands: I see what you’re doing setting up all of these competing person objects. But even though I could see him doing it, I was regularly surprised, brought up short, or just simply delighted to see Thompson play very seriously with the concept of self. He is having a fucking ball and you can feel it.
But that’s not the only thing going on. I wish I were more in litcrit mode these days because the Rosewater trilogy is an alien invasion story set largely in Nigeria, and, you know, there’s a couple hundred years’ history of European invasion and colonization in Africa. I wrote my senior thesis on War of the Worlds and The Midwich Cuckoos which are two British alien invasion stories, one set before both world wars, and one set after. Both novels detail what is functionally genocide, but the post-war one is considerably more disturbing the way it walks you up to that act. The killing of The Children – the alien antagonists in Midwich – is no act of nature. The Rosewater Redemption also walks you up to a genocidal act as well, but everything about the setting and placement in history turns that act inside out. It makes me want to reread the trilogy again to tease out those themes in my mind, but honestly I ripped through this so fast that deliberation isn’t something my brain can do right now.
Because the other thing is that everything Rosewater – both the series and the place – is cool as shit. There are dozens of characters who have contradictory and conflicting allegiances: to themselves, to each other, to the nation of Nigeria or the breakaway city of Rosewater, to humanity, to the Homians, to their bosses or organized crime or the government. I had a moment when I was reading some godforsaken harebrained plan from Jack Jacques, the mayor of Rosewater, and the reactions to said plan from a couple different characters, and I thought: I love all of these characters so much. Yeah, Jack is a gloryhound and Kaaro is a fuckboy and Femi is … whatever the hell she is – I think probably stone cold bitch – and precisely none of them are what you might call good people, but they are so vibrant, fucked up, and singular. I loved how the Nigerian president kept sending dick pics to Jack and his exasperated response. I loved Aminat meeting Kaaro’s griffin in the xenosphere, after. I loved everything Bad Fish did, and was. I just fucking loved this series.
Tade Thompson has rocketed himself up to one of my favorite authors, and I will read everything he sets to paper. This I swear to you.