Benjamin Rosenbaum

Rosenbaum, Benjamin. The Unraveling. Erewhon, 2020.
If science fiction has one persistent structural issue, it is exposition. How much information does a reader need to understand, say, life on a distant planet in the far future? Some writers, such as Kim Stanley Robinson, provide large infodumps that orient the reader but break the narrative flow. In The Unraveling, Benjamin Rosenbaum operates very differently. His approach is to require a reader to gather information about his narrative show more world inductively. The narrative thus proceeds without interruption, but it risks confusing some readers. This is especially true in The Unraveling, because Rosenbaum is at pains to put the trans in trans-human. Our protagonist, Fift, has five parents and three bodies in which Fift is simultaneously conscious. Gender is no longer divided into male and female, because one’s genitals and their associated plumbing are now a fashion choice, easily combined and changed. Gender is now divided into staid and vail, each with its own set of pronouns. Reproduction is now a group decision, and interactions between staid and vail genders is strictly limited by community secrets and taboos. Understanding how all this works (or doesn’t work) engages more of the reader’s attention than the plot. One hardly notices, for example, that buried somewhere in it is a rather good coming of age story. The only book to which I can compare The Unraveling is Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. That is rarified company for a novel to share. It’s worth the work. 4 strong stars. show less

four and a half stars for the most brilliant and thought-provoking book i've read in a long time. a look at the far future on another planet, where gender is based on type not sexuality because body modification is so rampant, an individual having nine bodies (all conscious and independent) to coordinate is not unusual, family dynamics and social engagement are everything (with all the problems entailed), disease is unknown, and immortality is within sight. go now and read it, marvelling at show more how very much of the underpinnings have been completely thought through (and even more marvellously, realized on the page); it's exceedingly brilliant sociologically and also as a vivid story with real characters, and although the writer's choice is to throw the reader in at the deep end, the shock of the water does not last long, and everything goes err... swimmingly after the first few strokes. show less

A collection of short stories, some of which sit firmly in the realm of science fiction or fantasy, and some of which are simply uncategorizably strange. Rosenbaum reminds me of Italo Calvino in many respects: the use of dreamlike or fairy-tale logic, the playfulness, the fascination with meta-narratives. One of the pieces in this collection even seems to be a deliberate homage to Calvino's Invisible Cities. But Rosenbaum isn't just some sort of Calvino imitator; he also shares Calvino's show more inventiveness. There's an incredible feeling of originality about these stories. Even when Rosenbaum is using familiar SF elements or riffing off of well-known works of fiction, he gives the sense of looking at whatever it is through absolutely fresh eyes and inviting the reader to do the same. Some of these stories did more for me than others, but I came away from the book with the overall impression of having just experienced something marvelous, in every sense of the word. show less

A very brain-intensive read, with the prose structure closely echoing the experience of being one person in multiple bodies which are frequently in different places at the same time, each one having its own conversation with someone else. The world is also one where gender roles are both entirely divorced from biological sex and also rigidly determined in ways orthogonal to current Western gender roles (and just about equally as useless at mapping to people's actual personalities), and show more increased longevity means families consist of massive polycules of dozens of spouses working together to raise a single child at a time under the omnipresent and ever-judging eye of the entire networked community.

This alien culture was simultaneously really engaging, while serving to distance a bit from the characters and plot. I had sympathy for the main character, but their host of bickering parents were not pleasant to read about even as they illustrated the tensions beneath the surface of stability maintained by society with such determination.

Adolescent rebellion and societal revolution prove equally inevitable. Forbidden love triumphs. On the plot level I felt a bit meh, but the world-building left lots of thinky thoughts and possibilities floating around my head. show less