Aminat is now working for the government agency S45, assigned by her glamorous but ice-blooded boss to visit a long-silent space station (keep that in mind for later), but who has to postpone it for a more immediate problem: a woman has been found “with a xenoform count of seventy-nine percent,” and Aminat needs to track her down. Rosewater ended with the main character Kaaro retired from his secret government job and living with his girlfriend Aminat and his dog, waiting out the alien invasion, which he now knows proceeds by gradually taking over one human at a time with “xenoforms.” Kaaro is largely offstage in The Rosewater Insurrection, which is mostly told from four viewpoints.

(It’s not Thompson’s only nod to other writers he quotes Oscar Wilde and Stephen King, and there’s even a scientist named Bodard.) There are even huge insatiable plants which can absorb people and which are rather pointedly dubbed Beynons as a tribute to John Beynon Harris, who, as John Wyndham, created their triffid ancestors.

Scary Rob Bottin tentacles can emerge from a character’s torso and wreak havoc, and one hapless victim of a government experiment explodes in a splatter of brown goo. There are giant wormlike things with maws the size of apartment buildings that can erupt like Dune sandworms at convenient or inconvenient times. The hapless “reanimate” zombies, which mostly just wandered about aimlessly in the first novel, can now be organized into attack teams (if you’ve got the right connection to the xenosphere, the atmospheric motes that permit some sensitives to read and manipulate minds). While the aliens seemed remote and enigmatic for most of the first novel, here they act more like traditional body snatchers, no longer coy about their intentions, and we learn about how their Krypton-like dying home planet (they call it Home, and themselves Homians) has sent them house hunting. It’s also more traditional in how it employs familiar SF tropes and visuals. Those readers might find The Rosewater Insurrection, the second novel in the Wormwood trilogy, a bit more comfortable, with its more linear chronology – set mostly in the year after the main action of Rosewater – and multiple viewpoints familiar from a whole generation of disaster tales. Tade Thompson’s wildly original first novel Rosewater, with its political savvy, its problematic main character, its inventive notion of alien contact, and its colorful setting of the improvised city of Rosewater – which grew up around an alien dome near Lagos, Nigeria – also seemed to challenge some readers with its shifting timelines and questions of narrative reliability. The Rosewater Insurrection, Tade Thompson ( Orbit 978-8-3, $15.99, 378pp, tp) March 2019.

Rosewater wormwood trilogy