It can cure people of illnesses and it bestows on some humans the power to use a network called the xenosphere to read minds. For one thing, the alien, Wormwood, isn’t all bad. Rob Wolf: The Rosewater books are about an alien invasion of earth, but it’s not a typical invasion. To me that just means that I’ve been successful in showing the different points of view and the reasons for them doing what they’re doing without bias,” Thompson says.Įdited excerpts of the conversation follow. “What someone told me this week about The Rosewater Insurrection was that they don’t know who to root for. The book reflects a subtle grasp of war and politics with characters capable of eliciting a reader’s empathy even as they sometimes behave in less than admirable ways. There are hints of Thompson’s own life in the details-as an emergency department psychiatrist, as a Londoner of African heritage, as a student of history. Meanwhile, the invaders from outer space have their own internecine conflicts, as Wormwood-a powerful consciousness that reads minds and invades human bodies-battles for its survival against a fast-growing plant from its home planet. In Thompson’s tale, however, humans are more likely to fight with each other than with aliens, with the insurrection in the title referring to the city of Rosewater’s rebellion against greater Nigeria. In most tales of alien invasion, mankind and the invaders battle to the death.

, Africa’s first-ever prize for speculative fiction.

Rosewater tade