A review by windsorgrace
Rosebud by Paul Cornell

challenging dark emotional tense slow-paced

1.0

I struggled with this novella. Everything happening and even the characters were difficult to imagine. The ideas were interesting but I felt they didn’t come together in a satisfying way. The story seemed full of itself and its concepts and worried more about that than a digestible plot. 

Our five main characters are “a balloon, a goth with a swagger stick, some sort of science aristocrat possibly, a ball of hands, and a swarm of insects.” So straight from the beginning, with this as the descriptor for the characters, I was a bit put off. And not only are these characters not normal beings, they’re also AI trapped in a digital space on a broken down space ship. While they’re contemplating existence and the meaning of life for each of them, they run across a matte black sphere hovering in space. 

With their ship malfunctioning, the crew has no choice but to board the sphere themselves. They are each put into their own imagining of a physical body. Once inside, they encounter an over the top, God like sentience that could change the universe as we know it. 

I’m not sure who would enjoy this one. As an avid reader and lover of sci fi, I feel I’m the dream audience for a book like this but it fell flat. At only 107 pages, it was a slog to get through and I wasn’t excited picking it up each time I sat down to read. If you do read, or have read it, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Trigger warning: violence against trans folks