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The Unraveling
Jan. 10th, 2022 10:22 pmThe Unraveling, Benjamin Rosenbaum, 2021. This novel is outstanding and it is my new favorite book of 2021. If you like Greg Egan or Madeline Ashby's transhuman/posthuman stuff, if you liked Charles Stross's "Lobsters" or Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom or Catherynne Valente's gonzo worldbuilding in Space Opera, if you like Ancillary Justice or Fire Upon the Deep, or RB Lemberg's Four Profound Weaves, there is so much going on here and it's so good.
The Unraveling is a book about what happens when genders become more important than people. (There are binary genders here, but not the familiar ones.) It's a book about how people are always just people, even in the far and vastly changed future. It's a book about personal loyalty and social change and how stories grow up around and shape those things. It's about parents, and children, and underage sexuality, and, unexpectedly, Real Person Fiction. The worldbuilding is wild and lavish and completely taken for granted by the characters - if you like "the door irised open" sort of stuff, there's tons of it and it's a delight.* Because of what's going on with the POV - there is one POV character but ze has multiple bodies - Rosenbaum can play some fun pacing games with multiple scenes happening at once. It was beautiful and I cried and I've already gone back and reread some bits having the whole book in mind and I can't wait to have time some time to reread the whole thing.
*I got curious and looked at the Goodreads reviews and a number of people seem to have been more confused than delighted. I will say this is science fiction clearly written by someone who reads a lot of science fiction - I can see how it might be a lot at once if one was encountering every idea in this for the first time all at once. It's definitely the kind of book that rewards just hanging in there and letting your understanding develop, though? I personally did not get one certain aspect of the worldbuilding until it turned out there were some appendices, and I didn't feel like that hurt anything.
One more thing - I read a lot of short fiction, and most of it blurs and escapes from my memory, but I still think about Rosenbaum's terrific 2004 short story Start the Clock. There is some overlap of style and theme between that story and The Unraveling, maybe worth checking out if you're on the fence about trying this book?
The Unraveling is a book about what happens when genders become more important than people. (There are binary genders here, but not the familiar ones.) It's a book about how people are always just people, even in the far and vastly changed future. It's a book about personal loyalty and social change and how stories grow up around and shape those things. It's about parents, and children, and underage sexuality, and, unexpectedly, Real Person Fiction. The worldbuilding is wild and lavish and completely taken for granted by the characters - if you like "the door irised open" sort of stuff, there's tons of it and it's a delight.* Because of what's going on with the POV - there is one POV character but ze has multiple bodies - Rosenbaum can play some fun pacing games with multiple scenes happening at once. It was beautiful and I cried and I've already gone back and reread some bits having the whole book in mind and I can't wait to have time some time to reread the whole thing.
*I got curious and looked at the Goodreads reviews and a number of people seem to have been more confused than delighted. I will say this is science fiction clearly written by someone who reads a lot of science fiction - I can see how it might be a lot at once if one was encountering every idea in this for the first time all at once. It's definitely the kind of book that rewards just hanging in there and letting your understanding develop, though? I personally did not get one certain aspect of the worldbuilding until it turned out there were some appendices, and I didn't feel like that hurt anything.
One more thing - I read a lot of short fiction, and most of it blurs and escapes from my memory, but I still think about Rosenbaum's terrific 2004 short story Start the Clock. There is some overlap of style and theme between that story and The Unraveling, maybe worth checking out if you're on the fence about trying this book?
