The Unraveling

February 1, 2020

In Queen of Storms, the second in the "Firemane Saga," Hatushaly and young wife Hava restore the fire-blackened Three Stars in trade-rich Beran's Hill, but they aren't the cheerful innkeepers they appear to be (100,000-copy first printing). A young woman in small-town Queensland, Australia, undertakes a gothic journey after hearing from her long-gone brother, thus launching Hugo- and World Fantasy-nominated illustrator Jennings's buzzing debut novel, Flyaway. In The Relentless Moon, sequel to Kowal's Hugo, Locus, and Nebula-Award winning The Calculating Stars and The Fated Sky, the moon is being colonized even as a meteor strike brings climate crisis to Earth. Originally scheduled for October 2019, Malerman's Malorie reveals what happens to the title character eight years after events in Bird Box, basis of the Netflix mega-hit. The perennial best-selling Modesitt's Quantum Shadows is set in a place called Heaven, where humankind's major religions each have their own land and places of worship are being scarily marked with inscrutable black images. With his stories already nominated for Hugo, Nebula, BSFA, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy honors, debut novelist Rosenbaum (The Ant King and Other Stories) returns with The Unraveling, which dreams up a far-future, distant-galaxy, rigidly structured society where individuals have multiple bodies and staid-gendered Fift and bail-gendered bioengineer Shria wind up in the midst of an eyebrow-raising art spectacle. Salvatore's Relentless closes his "Generations" trilogy with Zaknafein reunited with son Drizzt Do'Urden and reconciled to life's unpredictability (100,000-copy first printing). In multi-award-winning Walton's intriguing-sounding Or What You Will, a character who's been a dragon, lover, scholar, warrior, and thief in the many books penned by Sylvia Harrison knows that the 73-year-old author won't be around much longer and is trying to figure out how the two of them can escape into immortality. Born in England to South American parents and raised in Africa near the historical territory of his Xhosa ancestors, Winter draws on his background to light The Fires of Vengeance, second in "The Burning" series, wherein a queen who has lost her throne joins with a young warrior in a battle to regain it (75,000-copy first printing).

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 10, 2021
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. Agent: John Silbersack, the Bent Agency.

Starred review from May 15, 2021
Rosenbaum's (The Ant King and Other Stories, 2008) debut novel is now available for the first time in English. On an unnamed world 500,000 years after the ""dispersal of humanity,"" the centuries-living inhabitants move through near-constant mutual digital surveillance called ""the feed,"" possess multiple bodies, and are divided into two genders, the emotional and vibrant ""Vails"" and the logical and methodical ""Staids."" These genders don't reflect any kind of physical sex, as any body part is optional, but are still rigidly, if unofficially, enforced by general opinion and the powerful Midwives. The plot follows Fift, a Staid in zir First Childhood (where inter-gender love is not yet allowed) whose unwitting curiosity about the world around zem, and zir affection for a young Vail named Shria, will lead to zem transgressing all manner of boundaries, social or otherwise. 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.

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