Rosebud

January 24, 2022
Cornell (the Witches of Lychford series) ponders the inevitability of change in this unrewarding far-future novella set in the C Ring of Saturn. Long after Earth and Mars have been devastated by global warming, five sentient digital beings spend 300 years crewing Rosebud, a spaceship programmed by the mysterious Company to bring peace and prosperity to the humans of the solar system. When Rosebud calls the AIs together to analyze a mysterious black sphere floating nearby, the beings decide to earn glory for the Company by being the first to acquire alien technology. To explore the sphere, each shifts into a different body: Haunt, into Christopher Lee’s Dracula; Diana, the luscious woman of her dreams; Quin, a giant wasp; Huge, the artist Bob Ross; and foulmouthed Bob, a vicious tiger. The sphere admits them, but their bizarre experiences exploring it yield strange déjà vu intimations, contradictory memories between crew members, and startling revelations about extraterrestrial life, the Company, and humanity itself. The slippery narrative makes it difficult to parse Cornell’s shifting themes, and though the sheer strangeness of the crew’s excursion into inchoate probabilities may entice some readers, many will long for something to hold on to. This unsettling glimpse of AI-dominated existence raises more questions than it answers.

March 15, 2022
Called together by the ship to investigate a mysterious, perfectly spherical object out near Saturn, the five intelligences aboard the Rosebud argue about which approach will please the Company without getting too much attention. Each of them has some reason to not want to engage with the Company, overlaid with programmed recitations about how benevolent the Company is. The secrets half revealed about the crew are where the book's content warning about institutionalized transphobia comes in--the Company is, whatever the Rosebud's programming says, sinister. As they approach the object, their communications array fails, leaving them to enter a weird, many-layered state that iterates their decisions. Whatever intelligence is behind the object--timing and reactions indicate that there is something--it is investigating the interior lives of the Rosebud's crew to determine how they and the Company will react to this discovery. This is a thematically ambitious piece for such a short novel, with its consideration of identity, consciousness, and a grim status quo; how successful it is will ultimately depend on the context the reader brings to it for reading between the lines.

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April 1, 2022

A science fiction riddle, wrapped in a locked-spaceship mystery, inside a chaos theory enigma that owes a lot to Schr�dinger's cat. Set in a far-future ruined by humanity, the tiny spaceship Rosebud and its crew of even tinier artificial intelligences is on a collecting mission; a needy, greedy Earth run by the all-encompassing Company has programmed the AI to serve unquestioningly, forever. Then the Rosebud crew meets an anomaly: the ship malfunctions and they stop receiving updates from the Company and are thus finally able to question everything--including themselves and the anomaly that reveals the what-ifs of their existence. What unfolds is a thoughtful, quirky exploration of what it means to have all the choices in the universe...along with all the consequences. VERDICT Cornell's (Witches of Lychford) thought-experiment novella explores what it means to be human and asks age-old questions (What is down the road less taken? Is it better to be comfortable and complacent or to sacrifice one's own happiness for the greater good?).--Marlene Harris

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