The main ‘bad guys’ of the books are terrorists, particularly religious extremist terrorists who threaten another extremist into helping them destroy this colony. There are absolutely absurd info dumps where we find out the gender relations of the rest of the colonies, how the Rounds came into being and structure their society, and even the discussions of gender in general.Īdditionally, this is one of the clearest cases of ‘its not about the future but about the present’ kinds of writing I’ve read in forever. This was obviously a thought experiment by an author who was more interested in having a bunch of thoughts about gender than she was about making them work in a cohesive world. Even the bigender “Rounds” (yes, that’s what they’re called) seem to be around just to confuse the other characters. Some get in fights, but you’re not really sure why since they’re only allowed to have the most obvious of emotions. Some fall in love because they’re sort of hanging around and you need some love, but … really there is no good reason. There is no actual character development, simply wooden figures who have absolutely no individualized voices. I can see it being *slightly* better in Japanese, possibly, but only slightly. Sadly a terrorist organization that believes their existence is destabilizing the rest of the universe has hired some people to wipe them out, and the story follows some of the defense forces who are sent to the base in order to protect against the attack. But they’re not allowed off the space station at all because that was a condition of the interest groups back on Earth and Mars colony who agreed to help fund the project. The premise is that, on a space station on one of the moons of Saturn in the future, there is a biological experiment of 150 people (three generations) who have their chromosomes altered so they aren’t XX or XY, but have both functioning organs and can both impregnate others and gestate babies (who will then be bigendered babies). First off, I really want to get a hold of the Japanese for this book, because the translation must have been fascinating to do – the author distinguishes between hermaphrodite and bigender, intersex and transgender, but in many cases in Japanese those words are either very similar or the same. It was all about the possibility of bi-gendered people in the future.
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