Tor UK signs Arkady Martine's gothic AI science fiction novella

Tor UK, part of Pan Macmillan, has signed ROSE/HOUSE by Hugo Award-winning author Arkady Martine.

Editorial director Sophie Robinson acquired UK and British Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Chris Scheina at St Martin’s Press. North American rights were also acquired by Kelly Lonesome at Tor US.

The novella was originally published by Subterranean Press as a limited special edition hardback, and has since been shortlisted for Best Novella at the 2024 Hugo Awards, and the book will be published on 13th March 2025.

"Basit Deniau’s houses were haunted to begin with," the synopsis says. "A house embedded with an artificial intelligence is a common thing: a house that is an artificial intelligence, infused in every load-bearing beam and fine marble tile with a thinking creature that is not human? That is something else altogether. But now Deniau’s been dead a year, and Rose House is locked up tight, as commanded by the architect’s will."

The synopsis adds: "Dr Selene Gisil, a former protégé, is the sole person permitted to come into Rose House once a year. Now, there is a dead person in Rose House. It is not Basit Deniau, and it is not Dr Gisil. It is someone else. But Rose House won’t communicate any further. No one can get inside Rose House, except Dr Gisil. Dr Gisil was not in North America when Rose House called in the death. But someone did. And someone died there. And someone may be there still."

Robinson said: “If Shirley Jackson had gotten her hands on AI whilst writing The Haunting of Hill House, it would have looked something like ROSE/HOUSE: sharp, unsettling with an atmospheric dread built so powerfully that I could scarcely breathe by the end. I am thrilled we can bring this extraordinary work to even more readers.”

Martine added: “Rose/House is my arthouse fever dream novella — deserts, architecture and artificial minds wrapped up in my eternal fascination with the gothic — who was it who said ’a gothic is a story where a girl falls in love with an evil house’? They weren’t wrong. I’m delighted to get to share Rose/House with a wider audience in the UK and Europe and it’s a joy to get to work with Tor UK again.”