Tade Thompson

Whereas the first story in this series is told from the perspective of Kaaro, xenosphere sensitive and S45 agent, he takes a back seat here while Thompson tells the tale of Rosewater Insurrection from multiple perspectives. There's Aminat, S45 agent and Kaaro's girlfriend; Alyssa, a woman who can't remember who she is or any of her family; Jack Jacques, the mayor of Rosewater; and Anthony, the avatar of the alien Wormwood that is the heart of Rosewood. There are also a handful of minor show more characters who help move the story along: Eric the assasin, Walter the author, and Bewon the disgruntled guy.

Thompson doesn't waste much time getting to the insurrection referenced in the title. The president of Nigeria insists that Rosewood have elections and already has a candidate in mind. He's intent on driving Jacques out of office, but the mayor resists and declares Rosewater's independence. This pisses off the president, who calls in the military to violently put down the insurrection. Jacques is counting on Wormwood to protect the city, but something's amiss.

Anthony intuitively knows that something is making Wormwood sick, so he seeks out the cause. Meanwhile, as the bombs fall and bullets fly, Aminat is trying to find Alyssa and bring her in for study as S45 thinks there's a connection between her and the alien.

In Rosewood, we only got to see Aminat through Kaaro's eyes, but she really comes into her own here. She has to walk a fine line between her love for Kaaro and following her boss's orders to bring in Alyssa, made all the more difficult by the battle raging in the city. Alyssa is treated to her own evolution from selfish amnesiac to something more. I admit it took me a while to appreciate her as a character. And we get the mayor's backstory too. Parts of it will certainly have some readers thinking TMI, but it does help explain how he became the man he is.

The Nigeria that Thompson describes in 2066 is as complicated as it is today. Thompson doesn't sugarcoat his descriptions of the place. Suburbs and modern technology are countered by poverty and criminal gangs. The line between politicians and crime lords is a thin one. "The Tired Ones," an organization that Mayor Jacques has been involved with for decades, offers a sober perspective revealing the continent's nations are still stuck in a kind of adolescence.

Thompson also offers us a look into the homeworld of Wormwood. While it seemed in Rosewater that the aliens might've been benevolent in their colonization of Earth, Insurrection reveals that the aliens aren't on a moral high ground compared to us humans. Like us, they're not a monolithic people. All you can do is hope that the good guys win. It might be difficult to determine that though.

4.25 stars show less

This is very good body horror, about a young woman whose blood generates versions of herself that inevitably become violent, attack her, and must be killed. Reading this story literally raises many questions, but I don't think it's meant to be read literally, given the ambiguity about when and where this is taking place. Metaphorically, this is a horrifying rendition of a reality many of us endure or have endured: the unceasing and often violent murders of aspects of ourselves, both good and show more bad, so that we can continue to exist. No wonder Molly was exhausted at the end. No wonder we all feel so exhausted. show less

Thompson, Tade. Far from the Light of Heaven. Orbit, 2021.
Tade Thompson, an English MD who grew up in Nigeria, has been publishing fiction for more than a decade, but he first came to my attention with Rosewater, which won the 2019 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Far from the Light of Heaven is his first space opera, and it is a worthy effort indeed. Shell Campion, the inexperienced captain of the interstellar passenger ship Ragtime, is woken from hibernation early. She finds her AI rebooting and show more missing its personality overlays. She also discovers that more than 30 of her passengers are dead and that their bodies are being dismembered by the robotic cleaning staff. The mining colony planet the ship is approaching sends up an investigator and his android partner. Then, the really strange things start to happen. Thompson says in an afternote what drew him to the story was the idea of a spaceship as the perfect setting for a closed-room mystery. (It is. Mur Lafferty’s Six Wake is an especially good example.) But Thompson also gives his story depth that lies outside the usual genre tropes—a presentation of the interaction between corporate power, government, and colonialism, with all its attendant evils. Nicely creepy. 4 stars. show less

I had a mixed reaction to the first book in this series, a combination of being irritated with the anti-hero figure of Kaaro (who while believable became tedious after awhile), the overuse of flashback structuring (which killed immediacy for me), and a certain suspicion that all I had just read was simply "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" moved to a future Nigeria (though this has a certain value in and of itself as a commentary).

Still, I respected Thompson's achievement enough to give the show more second book in the trilogy a try and I'm glad I did. I can see why there are folks who find this work less compelling because of a more conventional structure but when you're playing with the stuff of thrillers, and all the choices are bad, I expect to be swept along on the tide of events. Also, it may simply come down to that we spend less time with Kaaro and more time with Aminat (a secondary character from the first book); not to mention a woman named Alyssa Sutcliffe who wakes up one morning and finds that she is not herself anymore. It's Alyssa's story that really pulls this work together for me. show less