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A review by siavahda
The Unraveling by Benjamin Rosenbaum
5.0
HIGHLIGHTS
~leave all your notions about gender at the door
~ever wanted to be in two places at once? HOW ABOUT SIX???
~would you like a tail??? you can have a tail
~‘I don’t want to lead a revolution I just want to maybe kiss my friend’
~the Clowns are Up To Something
~spoons
Oh, how I adore this strange, wonderful phantasmagora of a book.
…And I’ve been sitting here staring at the screen for minutes upon minutes, wondering how on earth to describe it.
Well, let’s start with that, I guess: Fift’s world is not ours. The story takes place far, far in humanity’s future, and on another, apparently long-since-terraformed, planet. Here, everyone has multiple bodies, which they inhabit and direct simultaneously; everything everyone does is visible to anyone who looks them up in the Feed; and the concept of ‘men’ and ‘women’ is nowhere to be found. Instead Fift’s society is divided up into Staids and Vails, which have nothing whatsoever to do with a person’s (extremely customisable) biology; instead, gender is assigned to newborns by the nearly-all-powerful Midwives. Violence and crime are so rare as to be the stuff of legend, food and clothing are created and available at the push of a button, and humanity has conquered disease: Fift and the others of zir generation are expected to live to be 900 years old.
It’s a utopia. A very odd-looking, but apparently genuine, utopia.
Except, obviously, it’s a lot more complicated than that.
Read the rest at Every Book a Doorway!
~leave all your notions about gender at the door
~ever wanted to be in two places at once? HOW ABOUT SIX???
~would you like a tail??? you can have a tail
~‘I don’t want to lead a revolution I just want to maybe kiss my friend’
~the Clowns are Up To Something
~spoons
Oh, how I adore this strange, wonderful phantasmagora of a book.
…And I’ve been sitting here staring at the screen for minutes upon minutes, wondering how on earth to describe it.
Well, let’s start with that, I guess: Fift’s world is not ours. The story takes place far, far in humanity’s future, and on another, apparently long-since-terraformed, planet. Here, everyone has multiple bodies, which they inhabit and direct simultaneously; everything everyone does is visible to anyone who looks them up in the Feed; and the concept of ‘men’ and ‘women’ is nowhere to be found. Instead Fift’s society is divided up into Staids and Vails, which have nothing whatsoever to do with a person’s (extremely customisable) biology; instead, gender is assigned to newborns by the nearly-all-powerful Midwives. Violence and crime are so rare as to be the stuff of legend, food and clothing are created and available at the push of a button, and humanity has conquered disease: Fift and the others of zir generation are expected to live to be 900 years old.
It’s a utopia. A very odd-looking, but apparently genuine, utopia.
Except, obviously, it’s a lot more complicated than that.
Read the rest at Every Book a Doorway!