James Nicoll Reviews

Benjamin Rosenbaum’s 2021 The Unraveling is a stand-alone science fiction novel.

A mere 550,000 years from now, humans and their creations have spread out into the galaxy, into an oblate spheroid a thousand light-years across¹.

This book is about one such world, one that is so utterly indifferent to all worlds save their own that in the tens of millennia they’ve occupied their planet, they’ve never bothered to name the world. Why bother, when it is the only planet that matters?

They are confident that their society is the best of all possible societies. One citizen of this planet, a certain Fift, isn’t so sure that this is true.

The trillion people who live on Fift’s world are divided into two genders, cerebral Staid and volatile Vail. As gender has nothing to do with anatomy, each person’s gender is chosen for them at birth by the wise Midwives. Then the course of each new person’s life is dictated for them by their families. Why force young people to improvise their lives when far more mature people — some almost a thousand years old — would make wiser choices for youth, such as what career they should follow and who they should marry?

In a less technologically sophisticated society, foolish youngsters might explore deviant behavior. Families might stray from the narrow, proper path. On Fift’s world, no need to worry about this. This is a distributed panopticon society, in which every person is always monitored and judged by their families and neighbors. Even the smallest deviation from proper behavior will attract instant opprobrium.

Only a foolish few stray from the path that was chosen for them by their betters. Best not to think of their fates. Fift is well aware of the need to be prudent, but keeps feeling urges that are entirely improper for a Staid. Fift is too fond (in inappropriate ways) of Fift’s friend Shria. To persist is folly, yet time and time again, Fift considers forbidden choices.

Fift is not alone. Many people are unhappy with their designated roles, particularly those functionally discarded by society. This is why those who stray are rebuked and punished. And if by chance that is not sufficient? The answer is clear: escalate punishment.

~oOo~

I am going to talk a lot about the novel’s worldbuilding. Worldbuilding matters to me. I could name dozens of recent SF novels I put down because their worlds were boring or silly.

More than half a million years and however many terraformed worlds are space enough for some very odd societies to spring up through purely natural causes. That’s not what happened here. Long-vanished and prodigiously advanced civilizations have produced immortals who offer their sociological consulting services to planetary civilizations. In the old days, the consultants favored boom-bust cycles, reasoning that the boom phase was much longer than the bust phase, thus maximizing human potential. For the last 200,000 years, the preferred mode is stable, guided societies where nothing very interesting happens for extremely long periods. Which is better depends on what values you prioritize².

Clearly Fift’s world has been stabilized.

Now let’s return to the punishment mentioned above. Most people are actually multiple bodies linked by an advanced communications network. If you want to punish unruly kids, all you have to do is shut down inter-body comms, leaving each instance isolated and terrified. This is what terrifies Fift. The many Fifts.

I recently decided to stop tracking the political systems featured in the books I review, so I don’t have to classify the society in this book. If I tried on this one, I’d have a tough choice. On the one hand, the Midwives appear to be a self-selecting oligarchy. On the other hand, the Midwives are largely off-stage. Most of the active social regulation is conducted by the masses, acting as the most intrusive, gossipy HOA imaginable. The society is simultaneously democratic and incredibly tyrannical, not to mention brittle once enough kipple builds up.

The general situation confronting Fift — that Fift isn’t a good fit for the limited roles available, and that society would far rather hammer square pegs into round holes rather than break out the jigsaw — is all too familiar. The author has chosen to imagine a world in which this is also the case, then explore how it might break and change.

The resulting work is a skillfully-told mix of the familiar and the unusual. I was never sure what would happen next. This novel held my interest from start to finish.

The Unraveling is available here (Erewhon Books), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

Oddly enough, I did not find The Unraveling at Bookshop UK.

1: The local stellar density is about 0.14 stars/parsec cubed, so if I have not bungled the conversions, there should be about two million stars within that volume, give or take. That’s a lot of stars but only a very small fraction of the four hundred billion stars in the Milky Way.

Humans seem to be expanding at about one light year per millennia, so it should take us about a hundred million years to spread across the Milky Way. That’s a very very long time for people, and a long time for a species, but a tiny fraction of the universe’s age to date. 

2: I found this system so abhorrent that I was sure that if I had been stuck there, I would have stolen a starship and headed out for uncharted stellar wilderness. If I could have, which was probably not possible. Star travel is expensive and difficult, and fragile biological humans are not well-suited to survive it.

But also: the culture of this particular world has been carefully shaped to see the benefits of interstellar travel as far too meager to justify the expense. Everyone has to work within the system because this system is designed to make leaving impossible. As the plot shows, this is like making a pressure cooker cook faster by blocking the emergency vent.