Rosewater

Arthur C. Clarke Award winner. Near-future Nigeria reshaped around an alien biodome that grants some people access to the xenosphere — a collective biological data network linking all those touched by alien xenoforms. Sensitives both transmit into and receive from the network, which over time rewrites their cognitive identities. Drawing on Yoruba traditions of collective consciousness, Thompson explores what happens when individual minds dissolve into a shared information pool: the loop becomes identity, and identity becomes the loop. Where Borges's library is a metaphor and Lem's encyclopedia a thought experiment, Thompson's xenosphere is felt from the inside — warm, intimate, and quietly obliterating.