The Unraveling is @Ben_Rosenbaum's debut novel. If you've followed Rosenbaum's work to date - glittering, cerebral, hilarious short fiction - then it will not surprise you to learn that this is a book that is as weird and wild as shoes on a snake.
the-unraveling.com
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the-unraveling.com
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I wrote a novella with Ben, "True Names," a tribute to the Vernor Vinge classic. It took something like five years to write and got nominated for a Hugo. Writing with Rosenbaum was a genuinely surreal experience.
archive.org/details/TrueNa…
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archive.org/details/TrueNa…
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Like, I'd add 500 words to the story and email it back to him, and he'd mail back 500 more, along with a 2,000 word essay on the nature of consciousness and identity and reality and what he was trying to get at with his 500 words.
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The fiction was amazing, but the notes were like mainlining Rosenbaum's neural matter, some kind of overwhelming frazzledrip mind-meld that I couldn't quite impedence-match. I could see that there was something amazing going on, but I just couldn't quite...understand it.
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It was like attending a recital of the world's greatest poet, but he was declaiming in another language...which turned out to be the language of the dolphins.
But, you know, in a GOOD way.
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But, you know, in a GOOD way.
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That's pharmaceutical-grade Rosenbaum, the stuff that comes up while he's figuring out how to downshift it so it makes sense to the rest of us - his Grundrisse or Silmarillion. It's not really meant to be enjoyed in its pure form - just kind of admired from a safe distance.
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Rosenbaum's been working on The Unraveling for a long time - nearly two decades - and I think the time was basically spent figuring out how to skate precisely on the rim of infinitely dense Rosenbaumium-218 and something that's safe for human neural consumption.
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And he just nails it, honestly. But the consequence of his careful just-this-side-of-too-strange-for-mortal-ken means that summing up this book is hard.
Fundamentally, this is a book about a sociological rupture: the end of a long, stable period of seeming utopia.
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Fundamentally, this is a book about a sociological rupture: the end of a long, stable period of seeming utopia.
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It's set on a distant world in a distant future, something like a million years from now. The world was colonized long, long ago by a long-haul spacefaring human civilization with incredibly advanced technology and the kind of wild hair that sends you to other galaxies.
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Hundreds of thousands of years later, after a lot of turmoil, the spacefarers' descendants have deliberately constructed elaborate, metastable social and technical structures that allows for a trillion people to live in a hollowed-out planet surrounded by artificial moons.
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Everything everyone does is visible to everyone else. Everyone has "followers" and when you do something interesting (or bad), you go viral and your follower count shoots up. Everyone is in constant contact with a bunch of AIs that serve as advisors on social comportment.
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People live in households constructed of collections of "Mothers" and "Fathers" (more on this later) and as many kids as they can get away with, based on ratings with the people who follow them - if your ratings tank, you lose your kids and are forcibly evicted and divorced.
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People have lots of bodies. Three is a conservative number, but some people have dozens of bodies. Mostly these bodies are human-ish, but some people go for weird canids and other fancies.
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Also, they live to be about 1,000, and among them are "aliens" - later-come spacefarers who have access to lost technology that allows them to live for hundreds of thousands of years. People seriously stan these aliens. They've got huge followings.
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There are, finally, two genders.
The Staids are kind of Talmudic scholars who spend much of their time cloistered with sacred spoons (yes) in religious ceremonies where they memorize, recite and debate the "Long Conversation" - their civilization's lore.
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The Staids are kind of Talmudic scholars who spend much of their time cloistered with sacred spoons (yes) in religious ceremonies where they memorize, recite and debate the "Long Conversation" - their civilization's lore.
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Meanwhile, the Vails are hotheaded, romantic, violent lovers who are into rough sex and honor-battles in closed-off dojos.
Vails and Staids marry each other and raise kids together, but they don't have intergender sex, which is considered seriously gross.
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Vails and Staids marry each other and raise kids together, but they don't have intergender sex, which is considered seriously gross.
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Gender, meanwhile, has nothing to do with whether you have a penis or a vagina. Some people have both, or several of one or the other. Some people have genitals that consist of prehensile, twining moss, or long feathers that droop to the ground and drag behind them.
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That's the world, more or less. The hero is a young Staid named Fift whose childhood best friend is Shria (a Vail). It's OK for them to be friends, but there's more going on, heavy Romeo and Juliet stuff with high stakes due to AI and social media panopticon and whatnot.
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Fift and Shria are manage to keep it under wraps until the Clowns - one of the many political factions - declare a new show, and Fift and Shria both end up holding Tickets. As they travel to the outer reaches of the world to find the Clowns, they happen upon a riot.
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This riot is a seriously unusual thing for this society. It turns out that despite 20,000 years of political stability, there's this simmering Vail underclass that resents its political fortunes and wants to overthrow the order.
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Being caught in the riot puts Fift and Shria's forbidden friendship in the social media crosshairs and threatens to cost them both their families and more.
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As Fift's Fathers and Mothers strive to perform social propriety for their feeds, they miss that society itself is unraveling - that the riot was the torch that set off a slow-moving, unquenchable blaze that creeps and then races through the trillion people of the world.
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Fift and Shria, meanwhile, become the focus of the revolutionary uprising, a symbol for all the discontented, gigastars whose actions are monitored by billions (think of Locke and Demosthenes from Ender's Game, but far more anxious).
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Rosenbaum skilfully weaves all of this stuff together with madcap multi-PoV action-scenes inside all three of Fift's heads at once, and a juxtaposed claustrophobic story of forbidden teen love and the vast, slow collapse of an unimaginably huge and ancient civilization.
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It's bananas. It's hilarious, it's mind-bending, it defies description and beggars belief. It's really quite a thing.
Anyway.
Ben and I are launching this strange artifact Monday Aug 23, with LA's @BookSoup. I'm going to make him explain it.
booksoup.com/event/benjamin…
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Anyway.
Ben and I are launching this strange artifact Monday Aug 23, with LA's @BookSoup. I'm going to make him explain it.
booksoup.com/event/benjamin…
eof/
ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
pluralistic.net/2021/08/23/don…
pluralistic.net/2021/08/23/don…
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