“An immersive future history, The Unraveling is a fantastic adventure that is also a story about the love that binds us to each other — and to the galaxy itself. Rosenbaum’s writing is wonderfully complex and whimsical, but most of all it is humane. No matter how alien his characters and worlds, they feel like kin.”
“Give him some prizes, like, perhaps, “best first collection” for this book, (The Ant King).”
Available Now / $24.95 / 368 pages
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 world has evolved where each person has multiple bodies, cybernetics has abolished privacy, and individual and family success are reliant upon instantaneous evaluations of how well each member conforms to the rigid social system.
Young Fift is an only child of the Staid gender, struggling to maintain zir position in the system while developing a friendship with the acclaimed bioengineer Shria—a controversial and intriguing friendship, since Shria is Vail-gendered.
Soon Fift and Shria unintentionally wind up at the center of a scandalous art spectacle which turns into 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 . . . when zir personal crises suddenly take on global significance. What’s a young Staid to do when the whole world is watching?
Benjamin Rosenbaum has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, BSFA, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards. He is the author of the short story collection The Ant King and Other Stories, and the Jewish historical fantasy tabletop roleplaying game "Dream Apart." Originally from Arlington, VA, he lives near Basel, Switzerland with his wife and children.
Praise for The Unraveling
“This beautifully written debut is a thorough, well-realized picture of a world with a radically different concept of gender and the body that nonetheless has its own forms of oppression. Rosenbaum's novel is essential reading for anyone interested not only in speculative fiction that plays with gender norms, but also in quality SF in general. Highly recommended.” —Booklist ★
“With this ambitious first novel, Rosenbaum immerses readers in a complex and utterly alien far-future sci-fi world populated by multibodied, cybernetically enhanced humans . . . 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.” —Publishers Weekly
Other Praise for The Ant King
“Urbane without being arch, sweet without being maudlin, mysterious without being cryptic.” —Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing
"Contains invisible cities and playful deconstructions of the form. In "Biographical Notes to 'A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, With Air-Planes,' by Benjamin Rosenbaum"—yes, his name is part of the title—the author imagines a world whose technologies and philosophies differ wildly from ours. The result is a commentary on the state of the art that is itself the state of the art." —Los Angeles Times (Favorite Books of 2008)
"Featuring outlandish and striking imagery throughout—a woman in love with an elephant, an orange that ruled the world—this collection is a surrealistic wonderland." —Publishers Weekly
"Lively, bizarre, and funny as well as dark, sinister, and sensual." —Boston Phoenix