In the physical world, alien animals – “floaters” who consume human flesh giant worms that burrow into the ground and emerge to topple buildings – fight for resources and living areas with animal-form robots and surveillance drones. The xenosphere functions as a sort of spore-based cyberspace, where adepts like Kaaro exist alongside traditional hackers, who combine disciplines with him in search of a weapon to use against the aliens. As alien separatists attack humans and the Nigerian government bankrolls a gang war within the city, Aminat, now Rosewater’s head of security, must decide whether to remain loyal to the mayor and his vision of an independent city, or join Kaaro in assisting Femi’s plot to get rid of the aliens once and for all.Īs he did in the previous volumes, Thompson constructs a vivid, almost overwhelmingly detailed future world, which combines the biological and the technological, human and alien.
Jack Jacques, the charismatic but monomaniacal mayor, declares the city’s independence just as the first alien personality transfer takes over the body of a middle-class woman, Alyssa Sutcliffe, who eventually becomes Wormwood’s avatar.Īt the end of that novel, the Rosewater leadership and the aliens reach a detente, but as The Rosewater Redemption opens, those relations are already breaking down. In The Rosewater Insurrection, published earlier this year, the purpose of Wormwood’s actions is revealed to be the conversion of humans into suitable receptacles for the stored memories of Wormwood’s alien masters, whose own planet was lost to ecological catastrophe.Īminat and Kaaro’s former boss at S45, Femi Alaagomeji, is determined to prevent this takeover, to which end she exploits the political tensions between Rosewater and the Nigerian government. The later volumes have shifted tone towards the adventurous Kaaro becomes a secondary character while the more dynamic, heroic Aminat takes centre stage. Rosewater was a meditative novel, dominated by Kaaro’s cynical worldview and ambivalent about the prospect of alien transformation. At the end of that book, Kaaro and his lover Aminat, who are both agents of the secret government department S45, discover that Wormwood, by performing healings and seeding the xenosphere, is transforming human cells into alien ones, slowly remaking the human race. Some humans, like Rosewater’s protagonist Kaaro, are able to sense the xenosphere and manipulate it, giving them psychic powers. The alien bacteria released into the atmosphere by Wormwood form the “xenosphere”, which connects all living beings on the planet.
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