Review: The Unraveling, by Benjamin Rosenbaum

 The Unraveling, by Benjamin Rosenbaum

a review by Rich Horton

I'll begin with the meat -- this is the best SF novel I've read from 2021, by some margin -- my favorite novel since Piranesi, indeed. It succeeds on multiple axes. It is absolutely pure quill science fiction, set in the far distant future, on (or in) a world hundreds of light years from Earth. It features characters who are recognizably human but very strange -- they have multiple bodies, for instance, and are very long-lived. It both displays and interrogates a significantly different economy (essentially reputation based, complete with betting pools.) It is deeply interested in a radically different family structure. Perhaps most noticeably, this is a story of a highly gendered society -- and the genders are quite different from those in traditional contemporary societies. 

The Unraveling is, plotwise, several different entities at once. It is a bildungsroman, following its main character from early childhood to early adulthood. It is a romance, and a powerfully affecting one. It is in a curious way a traditional sort of YA novel, about characters who are not quite adults rebelling (to a degree) against their parents' expectations, and against what they perceive (unwillingly?) as their society's faults. It speculates intriguingly about a different model of family. It is about a near utopia, and about that apparent utopia's faults -- and in so doing confronts the age-old questions about utopias (are they too boring? too static?) In a way, the book sometimes seems to be about social media, even! And it is also about what I think SF's most achingly central theme -- exploration. And it's about literature's most achingly central theme -- what is the purpose of human life, either as individuals, or as a community?

Is it perfect? Of course not. "Nobody's perfect," said Joe E. Brown, in perhaps the most perfect movie comedy of all time. At times the YA-ish aspects of the plot seem a bit too pat. Our heroes perhaps a bit too -- not perfect, but "good". But really this is not badly handled, and perhaps it's unavoidable. The society is so excellently different from ours that I felt at times that the narrative shied away just a bit from allowing that difference to overwhelm us,It's understandable -- you don't want to end up with a Murder in Millennium VI situation (this a reference to Curme Gray's 1951 novel, widely regarded as incomprehensible, though Damon Knight praised it.) But the book does sag just a bit towards the middle, after the first major climax, by when we understand the society and its strains fairly well, but it regains its footing later and finishes powerfully. The bottom line remains -- this is a lovely book, a thoughtful book, a powerful book ... and it sticks its landing.

Benjamin Rosenbaum has been one of the most original and intriguing SF writers, one of my favorites, really, since his debut in 2001. He has mostly published short fiction. I've reprinted a few of his stories in my anthologies, most notably, for our purposes, "Fift and Shria", from the 2014 original anthology Solaris 3. Fift and Shria are the main characters of The Unraveling, and the story "Fift and Shria" is a slighly different version of an episode in the novel. Rosenbaum was born in the US, but has lived for some time in Switzerland, and (perhaps as a result) this novel was first published in German translation in 2018, as Die Auflösung. The English version was published by the very intriguing new imprint Erewhon Books in 2021, and I have that edition, and I also got the audio edition, read by Fred Berman. 

The novel centers on Fift, a "Staid", one of the two genders of the humans living in his polity -- the other gender being "Vail". The other main character is Shria, who is of course a Vail. Rosenbaum presented the short story "Fift and Shria" as a rendering in contemporary English, and as such he rendered the pronouns of the two genders ("Staid" and "Bail" at that time) as "she" and "he", while cautioning that those genders don't cleanly map to "female" and "male". In the novel, the pronouns are "ze" and "ve", and this change is essential and very well handled. Staid and Vail have nothing to do with genitalia (indeed, different genitalia can be adopted at different times in this world) -- instead, they represent, essentially, emotional states -- Staids are the "still center", and Vails are more flamboyant, more expressive, more violent, more sexual. And these genders are assigned, in early childhood, by the somewhat mysterious Midwives, who live apart from the rest of this polity.

Their world is a terraformed planet hundreds of light years from Earth. The humans live inside it, with the rarely visited surface devoted to nature. There are several "nations" on the inside, and these nations are further subdivided into habitation. We meet Fift as a young child (nearly 5,) as Staid, ready to be introduced to the Long Conversation, in the company of his nine parents ... one Mother, eight fathers, two Staids, seven Vails. (Later we learn that the cohorts that raise children can come in almost any permutation of genders.)  Fift (and Shria) live in the nation of Fullbelly, and the habitation of Foo. They become friends on a field trip to the surface, at age 9 or so; and by the age of 15 they are feeling romantic attraction to each other, which is quite taboo, at that age, between Staids and Vails. And then they get tickets to the Cirque, a presentation of the Clowns. And there they meet Thavé, an ancient human, something of an historian mainly ... and Thavé makes some observations about their world and civilization that seem to question its central values. And shortly later things are temporarily plunged into chaos, as a revolutionary group of Vails cuts the "Feed" and urges people -- Vails, at least -- to abandon the cultural limits placed on them. And, somehow, Fift and Shria become, entirely involuntarily, celebrities, and symbols of this "revolution" -- though they are by no means sure they support it.

I don't want to say much more -- I think I'm garbling things a bit, and I think the wonders of this novel are best revealed by reading it. My expectations kept changing as my understanding grew. I was surprised again and again. Sometimes I wanted to argue. I was challenged too -- in particular by my default (and often false) genderized assumptions about Staids and Vails, because they so beautifully don't match "male" and "female", and also don't match contemporary non-binary expectations. I was moved to wonder -- by things like the Long Conversation of the Staids, which we only barely begin to comprehend; or by the polysomatic identity of these people, for by Thavé's half-million year perspective on human civilization(s). And I was emotionally moved, by Fift's yearnings, and by Shria's, and even Thavé's. Two short lines, each close to the end of the novel, brought me to tears: "Oh: It was joy." and "Be alive, Siob. You have to be alive."