Warning! This review is a bit myopic. If you like science fiction that makes you think and science fiction that is new and different, you should read this book. If your looking for just the most brilliant books, accept that this one is brilliant and just ignore me dinging it a star.

So why am I? Well it all goes back to my childhood ... No. Just kidding. But I have a prejudice against any type of mind reading in science fiction. Thompson justifies it in this novel very well, and I wavered between giving it five stars and tagging it science fantasy, and dinging it a star, but giving it the science fiction tag it deserves. (I'll sort of explain the distinction in the next paragraph, but you probably don't care. See? I told you it would be myopic.)

In the end I stuck with the science fiction tag. This is an interesting story in large parts because of an interesting and new-ish "what if in the future?" idea, not an interesting story decorated with old scifi scenery. The latter, to me, is science fantasy. It's not always easy to distinguish the two, because you can have all the standard scifi scenery and make the "what if?" less obviously visible, and you can have some serious interstellar "what if?" world building going on, but only use it to tell the story of Horatio Hornblower in space. (And my terms have evolved over time, so the HH novels might be tagged Science-fiction.)

Whether it is one or the other, I don't like mind reading outside of fantasy, and in general, if there is mind reading in the future, I don't care if it's explained through implants, or quantum, or the lazy "PSI turns out to be real", it pushes things into science fantasy for me. And the less the setting is clearly science fantasy, the more annoying I find the reading of minds.

And Rosewater just isn't science fantasy. It's quite hard science fiction, it's just built up around my least favourite "what if?", so I'm dinging it a star despite finishing it in three days.