Homians planned to find Home-like worlds, replace the native fauna with xenoforms, and upload their consciousnesses into these new life forms.

She removes the dome and drives the Nigerian army away from Rosewater, solidifying its status as an independent state.

Nations such as Great Britain and the United States, which were imperialist, were "quickly destroyed or driven into an isolationist retreat".

Nations such as Nigeria, which already survived an invasion by the British, "successfully formed pockets of resistance or adapted to living with the invaders".

FitzPatrick states that this invocation "encourages readers to reconsider the brutality of real Earth history as well as the justifications of the communities in conflict".

[1] Writing for Strange Horizons, Gautam Bhatia states that Rosewater is about first contact while its sequel is about conflict.

[2] In works of science fiction such as The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin, Bhatia writes that the author portrays a civilization vastly superior to humanity.

However, Thompson uses the character of Alyssa to combine both Homian and human perspectives and approach the relationship between the two species on "nearly equal" terms.

Wormlike alien creatures evoke the sandworms of Dune; Thompson also quotes the works of Stephen King and Oscar Wilde.

It called the novels "aptly named", with "a bitter undercurrent that I find difficult to fully shake from my mind".

[1] Writing for Locus, Gary K. Wolfe called the novel "more traditional" than its predecessor, as "a decades-long slow burn of an alien invasion here gives way to a shooting war".

Wolfe found that the "pace is faster, the stakes far more immediate, and the characters as vivid as ever" as he eagerly awaited the conclusion of the trilogy.

[3] Writing for Strange Horizons, Gautam Bhatia wrote that the novel portrayed "one of the more sensitive, nuanced, and moving accounts of a human/alien relationship".

[2] Writing for Tor.com, Liz Bourke commented that she could "admire its craft" but found its characters were difficult to like, which limited her enjoyment of the book.