Tag: Science Fiction

There are a lot of valid critiques of Western gender norms and the ideologies which venerate binarism and “traditional” sex roles. Many have taken to science fiction to air these critiques in various formats and frames. What Benjamin Rosenbaum asks with his book The Unraveling, is what if you had all that gender critique and a bag of cyberpunk/body-modding/deep future craziness chips?

I read this book in preparation for the 2025 NarraScope conference, where the author will be speaking on his work in ChoiceScript development. Sidebar: if you’re interested in the topics this blog discusses, why not NarraScope? I consider it the premiere North American game design conference for people who aren’t absolute buffoons of capital 🙂 You can even attend via Discord without leaving the comfort of home.

Okay, so The Unraveling is about a youth named Fift Brulio Iraxis who lives on a planet far from Earth many centuries in the future. Fift and everyone else on this planet possesses multiple bodies all inhabited at once. Strict norms about conduct and gender roles rule Fift’s society, and Fift’s own ability to conform to zir gender of Staid is in question. This is risky not only for Fift but also for zir’s sprawling cohort of parents. Everyone lives under constant peer-to-peer surveillance through an internet connection embedded in all their heads.

Like all effective utopian/dystopian literature, The Unraveling uses its exaggerated setting to confront the troubles of our world. The genders of Fift’s world, Staid and Vail, have no relation with genitals or reproductive role, both of which are completely malleable thanks to tremendously advanced body modding technology. Instead, these two genders oppose each other along a binary of emotional expression: the Staids are meant to be constantly serious, scholarly, and rational, while the Vails are assumed to be perpetually rash, lively, and libidinous. If these sound like arbitrary divisions that no one could possibly live up to every minute of every day, congratulations: you are soooo close to a big realization about gender in general. The Unraveling succeeds in thoroughly defamiliarizing the reader with the ideas it deconstructs without having to constantly double-back to reference real world Western gender norms. It makes no sense to divide the world between Staids and Vails, and I, a reader who had no meaning to assign to the words “Staid” and “Vail” until beginning to read this book, can easily see how silly this division is. And with that lingering thought in my head, I might wonder if it really makes that much sense to fervently divide the world into “men” and “women”, when those categories becomes incoherent under even cursory inspection.

This clarity of intention does not make The Unraveling necessarily an easy read. Rosenbaum unloads a truckload of new future terms to describe Fift’s society and all it contains. The protagonist’s multiple bodies force the interweaving of two or three different conversations, locations, and streams of thought during many pivotal scenes. This painstaking engagement with the minutiae of unusual consciousnesses and impossible technology reminded me sharply of Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep (a high compliment since that book also rocks). 

Not only can Fift’s POV shift between three different bodies, but ze can also look in on any other citizen using the distributed surveillance technology which has ossified their society into stultifying dullness. Though the world of The Unraveling is free of many of the miseries we face today (war, disease, premature death, etc.), Rosenbaum is wise enough to see that any seeming utopia will have citizens who find themselves unsatisfied with the structures that keep the peace. Rule through consensus maintains a large core group of somewhat-satisfied, somewhat-bored people who spend all their time chasing approval from viewers in order to achieve a modicum of success, and that leaves people who fail to conform on the margins of society, viewed only pruriently and disapprovingly. And while the misfits of Rosenbaum’s world are not starving, like they often are in ours, they’re also not free to live full lives. Lampooning the practices of a society dependent on surveillance and consensus ratings from peers without slipping into the goofy anti-cancel-culture dingusery of contemporary right-wing SF isn’t easy, but Rosenbaum succeeds because of his expansive compassion for all the characters.

At the heart of The Unraveling is the romantic friendship of Fift and zir classmate, a Vail-gendered person named Shria. Young people in the world of The Unraveling are expected to mix only with those of their same gender and never with others, and as Fift and Shria grow closer, they push the limits of what their society will allow. Because they happen to live in a time of growing discontent, their taboo-breaking catapults them into celebrity/symbol status. I will admit I didn’t always find the Fift/Shria relationship compelling, but I also think Rosenbaum knew some readers might feel this way because he tweaks the skeptics near the book’s end with the inclusion of humorous in-universe shipping discourse. More than anything else, the connection between Fift and Shria is an engine to fuel questions about why the world they inhabit is so rigid and whether that rigidity truly benefits anyone.

I think I was also perhaps unsatisfied with the emotional depth of Fift and Shria’s relationship because Rosenbaum draws some of Fift’s other relationships with such poignancy. Fift’s relationships with zir numerous parents moved me profoundly. Each parent loves and care for Fift in their own way, and yet is deeply imperfect and wounded by the pressures of their intrusive and controlling society. In each of Fift’s parents I saw some failings of my own family members and myself, and in the text’s affirmation of their sincere love I was reminded of the constant tension between our love for others and our infinite capacity to fail them. Though society at large castigates Fift and zir family, and zir parents castigate themselves for raising such an abnormal child, Fift’s slow-growing bravery and conviction testifies to the best of zir parents’ efforts in raising zir.

I read some reviews of this book which complained about the ending: its abruptness and lack of resolution. But this is a key part of the viewpoint Rosenbaum advances. Fift was never going to be able to change the belief systems of a whole world, not with Shria’s help or anyone else’s. Ze was only one small part of a big wave of change and confusion, a societal Unraveling. The book leaves Fift as a young adult, with zir own life and future. It is not the future zir parents planned for zir, nor is it the future society insisted ze desire. It isn’t perfect. But it has its own unique satisfactions because Fift chose it. This is a good way to look at one’s own gender expression–it may not be what people are expecting or what they believe is right, but if you chose it and created it and feel comfortable in it, then it’s right for you. Fift doesn’t lead a gender revolution that changes the whole of zir society. But ze creates a small space for zirself and zir friends to thrive, and ze does so not by inventing new different additional colors of straitjacket for everyone to wear, but by genuinely enforcing the rule of “wear what you want”. In time, the space Fift built might grow to encompass the world, as the Ages pass.

Last year I read Jo Walton’s Among Others, a lovely book about a Welsh teen’s magical coming-of-age in the wake of her twin sister’s death. I thought that book was quietly bold, so I looked into Walton’s other work and marked My Real Children for priority investigation. And happily My Real Children was at my local library (yes, this is another “my local library” post).

In this book, Walton unfurls an entire human life, twice. The novel’s protagonist is Patricia (sometimes Pat, sometimes Trish), a British woman born early in the 20th Century. Late in life, confined to a nursing home due to dementia, Patricia discovers a strange divergence in her memories: she remembers two completely different lives. In one life, where she is nicknamed Trish, she marries her college boyfriend and he proves to be an extremely typical awful 1950s husband. In another life, where she is nicknamed Pat, she falls in love with a female botanist and becomes a successful travel writer. And yet despite the obvious disparity in those premises, it’s not so easy for Patricia to say which life she wants to be real, if she can only choose one.

For one thing, she has several children in both lives and will not say that she loves her four children with dismal Mark any less than she loves her three children with scientist Bee. Her experiences mothering all seven of these children provide the structure that defines her adulthood and the love that sustains her. 

Moreover, the world itself is profoundly different in these timelines. Though Trish’s personal life smothers beneath her husband’s cruelty, around her a stable socialism-tinged peace extends over the globe, science and diplomacy surging ahead to support a successful international moon colony. And while Pat luxuriates in familial and romantic contentment, multiple nuclear exchanges during the 20th century drive many nations into hard-right turns darker than the ones we’re experiencing IRL.

These developments seep into Walton’s narrative not through a direct engagement with foreign affairs or international politics, but through the daily details of Patricia’s life. My Real Children is a deeply materialist novel, attending closely to the moment-by-moment, year-by-year activities that accrete into Patricia’s life. When Pat and Bee wish to have children together, Walton relays their quest through its logistics: their investigation of IVF, their selection of a suitable father, and the physical mortification of pregnancy and birth. When Trish discovers second-wave feminism after years of marital unhappiness, her ideological development expresses itself in the changes she makes to her daily life, the meetings she joins, the friends she makes, an expansion of horizons once curtailed by marital expectation.

Not every reader will enjoy this approach. Walton’s unflinching commitment to the material and quotidian marginalizes the more straightforwardly science fictional story elements, and the “reason” or “explanation” for the doubled timeline is never revealed. The book’s pacing is relentlessly rhythmic, metronoming back and forth between timelines in several-year chunks, getting faster and faster until Patricia’s nearly out of time. There’s no obvious a-ha punchline at the end of Patricia’s lives (there’s not gonna be one for your life either, but many people are uncomfortable hearing about that).

All this is critical to the feminist ends towards which Walton writes. She offers the book on the predication that everything hinges on Patricia’s answer to Mark’s marriage proposal, but this is sleight of hand skillfully carried out. Though the timeline splits at this point, Trish going with Mark to be married, Pat going off unmarried to meet Bee, there is no indication that this split is responsible for the other divergences in the timeline. Mark amounts to nothing in either timeline, so his marital status is not the pivot point on which nuclear war hangs. Bee makes tremendous contributions to botany in both timelines, whether Pat is there to support her or not. This decision, held up as the central moment of the book, does not affect the world outside Patricia and her children, all of whom grow up to be very average people who do little to affect the flow of history.

Like so many women, Patricia’s whole world is reduced to the decision to marry a man or not. The book sets us, the readers, up to buy into this idea, at least at first. After all, this is the point of divergence! This is the core of the multiple timelines! We need to get the Infinity Stones so we can go back and make sure Patricia makes the right choice! (Which is?)

As her lives go on, we see that in so many ways Patricia’s decision about marriage is less significant than we’ve been led to believe. Pat’s family life with Bee is happier than Trish’s, but Trish actually has a much richer life outside the home as she becomes involved with feminist and environmentalist politics. In both timelines Patricia’s mother, and then Patricia herself, slide slowly and inexorably into dementia. In both timelines, Patricia experiences horrible heartbreak, disappointment, and loss. In the end, both sets of her children consign her to a miserable senescence in a nursing home.

Through these timeline rhymes, Walton paints a truly astute, intelligent, and complex picture of women’s struggles using the second-wave feminist frame which corresponds with Patricia’s lifetime. Mid-century feminist theory highlighted clearly how women are so often the prisoners of social and historical forces, constrained by the expectation that their lives only matter in the context of who they marry and mother. Patricia does not escape these expectations. She is not the most active or heroic protagonist, not the masculinist hero who Makes His Own Destiny through the power of having always had all the options. But Walton’s loving attention to Patricia’s life in all its mere and minor aspects reveals her as a true, whole person, doing her best to create an endurable life out of the circumstances built up around her. Moreover, Walton subtly upends the expectation that men will be active agents in their Heroic Singular lives. The most significant men in both of Patricia’s lives are humiliated by chance and history, made miserable playthings of infirmity long before Patricia is.

Walton employs the multiple timelines of My Real Children to reveal an urgent and profound conclusion: no matter how many lives we lead, no matter which choices prove pivotal to our development, and no matter the sex and gender assigned to us by our culture, we are all much smaller than history. Our task then is to follow Patricia’s example and make the best of what we have, even when the world around us is terrifying, even though sorrow is always hovering in the offing.

Big news in weird decisions by me: I’ve started reading a lengthy novel series by picking up a random installment in the middle. That series is The Vorkosigan Saga, and that installment is Mirror Dance.

Now, in my defense, I didn’t go in entirely unprepared. I had previously read several of the Vorkosigan short stories and skimmed a scan of A Civil Campaign, and most importantly I had received a tremendous blow-by-blow description of every single major event in the series from my sister, Daisy, a certified Vorkosigan maniac. When I happened upon a cache of Vorkosigan novels left out for the taking, I captured them and brought them back home, determined to see what enchanted my sister so.

I started with Mirror Dance because I was going on a train trip and the pile of free Vorkosigans I found included two copies of Mirror Dance, so I didn’t have to fear retribution from Daisy if the book was damaged by Amtrak’s tender mercies. At last, I would immerse myself in Vorkosimania.

The Vorkosigan Saga, written by Lois McMaster Bujold, comprises a number of novels, novellas, and short stories concerning the adventures of one Miles Vorkosigan, the son of space nobility, who is a minor genius and deals with a number of chronic health problems. As he is the son of a major Vor Lord (yeah, really) of the planet Barrayar, he has many terrible responsibilities and constantly confronts the prejudices of a planet set against people with visible disabilities. He also goes through a lot of Drama, on both the interplanetary scale and the interpersonal, as well as sometimes the cringe. The publishing dates on the series extend from the late eighties to the late twenty-tens, so journeying back into the deep archives uncovers its fair share of uncomfortable material. Mirror Dance specifically has some moments of unpleasantness regarding the narration around Miles’ nonbinary coworker, as well as some eye-rolling but comparatively minor moments of orientalism.

On the plus side, Mirror Dance is a truly soap opera or Bollywood-level plot. Miles’ somewhat deranged clone brother, Mark – originally grown by villains to kill Miles and family – comes out of hiding to suborn Miles’ private mercenary group in an ill-fated attempt to rescue other young clones who will soon be harvested for their organs. Miles discovers Mark’s altruistic treachery and rushes off to try and stop him. He catches up to Mark just slightly too late. That’s when it gets complicated.

There’s soooooo many moments of twin hijinks in this. Mark and Miles continually switch identities, including another cover identity of Miles’, Admiral Naismith. One gets abducted and pretends to be the other, then the other gets caught and has to pretend to be the first one. Miles’ friends, romantic interests, and coworkers are tormented by the doubling of their Vorkosigan-related troubles. The Vorkosigans’ enemies are entirely reduced to despair by the end.

Mirror Dance also goes to some very dark places. The tone of the Saga as a whole is interesting. Bujold possesses a solid, straightforward prose style with a wry edge which keeps the reader bumping along comfortably with every plot twist, and she throws in jokes and humorous encounters with near-clockwork regularity. But every so often, she pulls back the curtain to remind us that humans in space are just as capable of depravity as humans here on Earth.

The vessel of much of the darkness in Mirror Dance is Mark. While Miles, despite the challenges of his youth, could count on a loving, powerful, wealthy family to support him through everything, Mark grew up in the hands of violent men with dark intentions and a profound hatred for the people from whose DNA Mark grew. He trained as an assassin, but he was also relentlessly victimized by his creators: bullied, tortured, and eventually sexually assaulted. This damage causes Mark to act in some very unwise and unethical but realistic ways. His trauma around intimacy drives him to nearly reenact his own abuse on someone very vulnerable, which will understandably turn a certain subset of readers against the character and story entirely. But Mark’s journey to redemption gives the story a hard core of genuine feeling which elevates it above a simple space romp, and his tremendous failings make him more poignant and sympathetic in my eyes. As someone who’s made my own mistakes and had my own mental challenges, I felt for Mark, even if some of the mistakes he made were much worse than mine.

I won’t try to claim that Mirror Dance is the best entry point for The Vorkosigan Saga. But it worked for me. More than any of the previous stories I’d read in the series, Mirror Dance captured my interest because of the strong and compelling central relationship between Miles and Mark. This relationship grounded the sillier and soapier moments and leavened the darkest and most serious ones. I would like to read more of Miles’ adventures, if only to make sure Mark is okay.