Recent Reading: The Unraveling by Benjamin Rosenbaum

The long-awaited—nearly twenty years!—first novel by Rosenbaum is part teenage coming of age novel, part posthuman, far-future extravaganza, a combination that is often delightful but occasionally leaves you wanting more. Set hundreds of thousands of years in the future, on a planet so far distant from Earth that it (and the history of human colonization of the stars) are but a distant memory, The Unraveling appears, at first, to be positing a society of Banks-ian liberty and freedom of expression. The humans on the unnamed planet can change their appearance at will, up to and including their genitals and secondary sexual characteristics (which come in a much wider variety than we're used to). Their society is, if not quite post-scarcity, then aimed at avoiding the accumulation of wealth and property—there is, in fact, no ownership of property, only use-right, which is allocated according to social approval metrics, which also determine access to most goods and services. There doesn't seem to be any government, only part-time officers of the peace who are conditioned never to use force in anger. And everyone is connected through a global network that permits total surveillance, making instant net stars of anyone who happens to capture the public imagination.

(Also, in what I am choosing to take as a reference to one of my favorite SF short stories, Eleanor Arnason's "Knapsack Poems", humans on this planet are multi-bodied organisms, sharing a single consciousness across anywhere between two and six bodies, each of which can be engaged in different activities while constantly aware of the others' sensations. This doesn't end up having much bearing on the plot, but it does make for several extremely well-crafted sequences that relate the experiences of a single person across their different bodies, intercutting between them in ways that create interesting resonances.)

In sharp contrast to the conventions of this sort of space opera setting, however, Rosenbaum quickly reveals that this supposed posthuman liberation is underpinned by an extremely rigid set of social mores relating to gender—despite, or perhaps even because, of the fact that gender in the novel's world appears to have no biological underpinning. There are two genders in this society, whose spheres of interest and opportunities in life are heavily siloed from one another. The Staid (pronouns ze/zir) are cerebral, emotionally reserved, and chastely romantic. They are the keepers of the "Long Conversation", the store of knowledge and philosophy that stretches back to the planet's colonization. The Vail (pronouns ve/vir) are combative, emotional, and sexually promiscuous. Their potential for violence is carefully regimented through a system of official challenges and sanctioned duels. Family units are made up of multiple individuals of both genders, whose cohesiveness—and suitability to raise children—is judged by common consensus, and enforced by the mysterious order of Midwives. The Midwives, who are the closest the novel's world comes to a centralized authority, gender newborn children, police gendered behavior, and have the right to claim children whose behavior doesn't conform to their gender, or whose parental cohort is deemed unsuitable to raising them as proper examples of their gender.

It is eventually revealed that this system has been steadily breaking down, with more and more people (particularly Vail) finding themselves permanently locked out of partnership and parenthood by low social approval ratings and the Midwives' influence. But to begin with, this unrest is invisible to the novel's protagonist, a young Staid named Fift. Ze feels merely a vague sense of unease, of not being able to play the role of the perfect, emotionally detached Staid the way zir parents would like zir to, and of said failure posing a danger to zir family's very existence. That sense of wrongness comes to a head when Fift initiates a sexual encounter with zir childhood best friend, the Vail Shria. This is something that, as a Staid, Fift isn't supposed to be capable of desiring, and it is clear to zir and Shria that it places both of them (and their families) in danger. And yet the two find themselves unable to keep away from each other—and, more significantly, unable to comport themselves with each other as a Vail and Staid should. Fift is always a little too forward with Shria; Shria is always a little too attached to Fift.

This has, obviously, the contours of a lot of Divergent-esque YA tales of individualism rebelling against stifling conformity. But what sets The Unraveling apart from these stories (aside, that is, from its posthuman setting) is its refusal to speak in baldly decisive terms. The novel's society is broken, but in a way that most of us will recognize. A lot of people are unhappy, but their unhappiness is of the faint, subtle variety, that they find it easy to convince themselves is actually their own fault. And most people muddle along, finding things to compensate for their unspoken dissatisfaction. Because when it comes down to it, the system still suits them a lot of the time, and the idea of changing it is scary. What Fift and Shria accomplish over the course of the novel isn't violent revolution, nor do they have a concrete enemy to fight. (It is interesting, for example, that for all the power they wield, the Midwives are rarely present in the novel, and most of the repression within it is achieved through the self-perpetuating mechanism of popular consensus.) Rather, The Unraveling is the story of the emergence of a social movement, one that requires its young heroes, first of all, to articulate to themselves what it is they actually want, and second, to find a way to convey that vision of the future to the society around them.

Along the way there are some thrilling and wonderfully-executed set pieces. Fift and Shria are caught up in a riot, triggered by a Vail supremacist who urges vir followers to take what they've been denied for so long. Fift, in a confrontation with a Vail who had attacked zir during the riot, breaks Staidish detachment and superiority to really listen to vir complaints, which are whiny and hostile but still have a grain of truth in them. (In an elegant touch, before the confrontation the global ratings agencies had good odds on the attacker experiencing a mental breakdown in the near future; but the more ve puts words to vir frustration, the longer those odds get.) Fift and Shria's story captures the imagination of other young people, who repackage it into narratives that promulgate on the world's networks, helping to bring on board other followers and creating nesting levels of metacommentary (of which the novel itself ends up being yet another). I particularly appreciated the way Rosenbaum crafts Fift's relationships with zir parents—zir controlling, emotionally withholding mother ("mother" here refers to the childbearing parent), and zir fussy, infantilizing fathers. Rosenbaum strikes a perfect balance between normal teenage frustration with parents who haven't quite grasped that you're becoming your own person, and the slow realization that these people who are supposed to love you aren't capable of acknowledging or addressing your needs, and that you're going to have to go on without them.

Through it all, the construction of the roles of Staid and Vail—both as something that reveals a lot about the personalities and inclinations of the people in question, and as something that restricts the full expression of their humanity—is subtle and thought-provoking. The careful balancing of stereotypically masculine and feminine traits between the two genders helps keep the reader from automatically reading our genders into the characters, and also reminds us of how all gender—in and out of the novel—is a social construct. It's notable, for example, that we never get to find out how the Midwives determine a baby's gender, as if to reinforce the inherent arbitrariness of the process. A passage at the end of the book even suggests that the codification of genders was a social process that took place over generations, one that many thinkers in the Long Conversation had strongly objected to. Without denying the fact that there are differences between groups—as various characters in the novel refer to it, between the Expressive and the Stalwart, the quick and the still—The Unraveling's construction of its genders, and exploration of characters who defy those genders, serves to reiterate that drawing firm lines around those differences, and punishing those who cross the lines, is irrational and ultimately harmful.

Another way in which The Unraveling differs from the YA novels that it recalls is its ending, which is determinedly undecisive. Fift and Shria get the ball rolling, they make certain changes. And they are also beaten back, forced to make compromises, to ask whether there's any point in fighting, or whether it would be better to just retreat from the world. A character even likens the process to space exploration and terraforming—you set out on a long journey whose ending you might never see, you work hard to create a world that is ultimately quite similar to the one you left, all in the hope that what results will be the right fit for you, the home you couldn't find in your own world.

If I have any complaint against the novel, it's that it doesn't show us enough of this process—the story proper ends when the heroes are still in their teens, with an epilogue set a few decades later to show us how they have both triumphed and retrenched, how the world is changing, but much more slowly than they'd like. I would have liked more of a glimpse at those intervening decades and the ones beyond them, more discussion of the grown-up task of fighting for change, not just the teenage realization that change is necessary. Still, there are worse complaints to make against a novel than that you would have liked to read more of it. The Unraveling is a dazzling, original, clever dissection of some of the core tropes of space opera, and some very ingrained ideas about gender. Whether he ends up continuing its story or doing something completely different, what Rosenbaum has given us with this novel feels entirely vital.