The Unraveling
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“A wildly inventive, funny, and ultimately quite heartfelt novel, The Unraveling is a chaotic romp of gender deconstruction packaged up in a groovy science-fictional coming-of-age tale.” —Chicago Review of Books
In a society where biotechnology has revolutionized gender, young Fift must decide whether to conform or carve a new path.
In the distant future, somewhere in the galaxy, a Staid-gendered youth with three bodies is just trying to figure life out. Fift is struggling to maintain zir position in Fullbelly’s rigid social system, which is only made more difficult as ze develops an intriguing—and controversial— friendship with the acclaimed Vail-gendered bioengineer Shria.
When Fift and Shria wind up at the center of a scandalous art spectacle that precipitates a multilayered Unraveling of society,. Fift is torn between zir attraction to Shria and the safety of zir family, between staying true to zir feelings and social compliance . . . all while zir personal crises suddenly take on global significance. What’s a young Staid to do when the whole world is watching?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With this ambitious first novel, Rosenbaum (The Ant King and Other Stories) immerses readers in a complex and utterly alien far-future sci-fi world populated by multibodied, cybernetically enhanced humans. Young protagonists Fift, who uses the pronouns ze/zir, and Shria, who uses the pronouns ve/vir, feel constrained by their society's rigid gender system, enforced through a social capital–based economy and a system of global surveillance. When the pair are involved in a riot sparked by a mysterious circus performance, Fift must choose: disavow zir friend, leaving Shria to face public censure alone, or speak up and risk destroying zir own family. As the consequences of this choice spiral outward, the pair become unwilling figureheads for a revolution. Embedded in a narrative frame about civilizational expansion and collapse, Rosenbaum's story offers a complex meditation on fame, taboo, gender, and social control. Dense, inventive worldbuilding coupled with the use of neopronouns will present some readers with a steep learning curve, but it's tempered by the competent plotting and deeply human emotional core. Readers of secondary-world science fiction and science fantasy will find this to be as mind-bending as it is satisfying.
