Rosebud

by Paul Cornell

Overview

“An elegant, elegiac examination of identity, fictionality, God and humanity itself”—Tamsyn Muir

A multilayered, locked-room science fiction novella from Paul Cornell in which five digital beings unravel their existences to discover the truth of their humanity.

“The crew of the Rosebud are, currently, and by force of law, a balloon, a goth with a swagger stick, some sort of science aristocrat possibly, a ball of hands, and a swarm of insects.”

When five sentient digital beings—condemned for over three hundred years to crew the small survey ship by the all-powerful Company—encounter a mysterious black sphere, their course of action is clear: obtain the object, inform the Company, earn lots of praise.

But the ship malfunctions, and the crew has no choice but to approach the sphere and survey it themselves. They have no idea that this object—and the transcendent truth hidden within—will change the fate of all existence, the Company, and themselves.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250765406
Publisher:	Tor Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/26/2022
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
Sales rank:	366,028
File size:	658 KB

About the Author

Paul Cornell has written episodes of Elementary, Doctor Who, Primeval, Robin Hood, and many other TV series, including his own children’s show, Wavelength. He’s worked for every major comics company, including his creator-owned series I Walk With Monsters for The Vault, The Modern Frankenstein for Magma, Saucer State for IDW, and This Damned Band for Dark Horse, and runs for Marvel and DC on Batman and Robin, Wolverine, and Young Avengers. He’s the writer of the Lychford rural fantasy novellas from Tordotcom Publishing. He’s won the BSFA Award for his short fiction, an Eagle Award for his comics, a Hugo Award for his podcast, and shares in a Writer’s Guild Award for his Doctor Who. He’s the co-host of Hammer House of Podcast.
Paul Cornell has written episodes of Elementary, Doctor Who, Primeval, Robin Hood and many other TV series, including his own children’s show, Wavelength. He’s worked for every major comics company, including his creator-owned series Saucer State for IDW and This Damned Band for Dark Horse, and runs for Marvel and DC on Batman and Robin, Wolverine and Young Avengers. He’s the writer of the Lychford rural fantasy novellas from Tor.com Publishing. He’s won the BSFA Award for his short fiction, an Eagle Award for his comics, a Hugo Award for his podcast and shares in a Writer’s Guild Award for his Doctor Who. He’s the co-host of Hammer House of Podcast.

Editorial Reviews

01/24/2022

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. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

No one balances the lighthearted and the unnerving more deftly than Cornell.”—Daniel Abraham, co-author of The Expanse

“An elegant, elegiac examination of identity, fictionality, God and humanity itself—but also a very, very funny story about a crew of dopes. I love them all, except Bob. (In actuality Bob sort of broke my heart!)”—Tamsyn Muir, author of the Locked Tomb series

“A scream disguised as a giggle. Reading Rosebud is like going on an absurdist romp through a sunlit meadow with Douglas Adams, only to suddenly realize that you’re deep in the forest and ol’ Dougie has just slipped a knife between your ribs.”—Peter Watts, author the Firefall series and the Rifters series

“Cutting-edge science fiction from a writer at the very top of their game.”—Gareth L. Powell, author of Embers of War

“A true voyage of the imagination, simultaneously mind-wrenching and laugh-out-loud funny.”—Adrian Tchaikovsky

“Paul Cornell re-imagines the classic SF idea of first contact and turns it upside down and inside out—and then twists it into a multi-dimensional thing of wonder.”—Michael Cassutt, writer for Z-Nation and co-author of The Astronaut Maker

"No word is wasted here, and [Rosebud] builds into a moving story about what it means to be human, even after you have been transformed into a form that decidedly isn't."—Locus

From the Publisher

04/01/2022

A science fiction riddle, wrapped in a locked-spaceship mystery, inside a chaos theory enigma that owes a lot to Schrödinger'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

Library Journal