Commander Shirosaki and his security team are about to start a one year tour aboard space station Jupiter I, a research center near Europa that's home to a colony of genetically engineered hermaphrodites known as the Rounds. But two weeks from the Jovian system, he receives disturbing news: intelligence operatives on Mars have uncovered a terrorist plot to exterminate the Rounds. With the terrorists already en route to Jupiter I, Shirosaki's team will have to join forces with Commander Harding and his men who've already spent twelve months on the station and are ready to rotate home.

But when Shirosaki arrives at Jupiter I, he finds a situation far more complicated than he'd been told. Something has gone wrong between the Rounds, the scientists who run the station, and Harding's security team. The Rounds have retreated into their own district of the station, venturing out only when absolutely necessary and forbidding normal "monaural" humans from entering. No one's willing to tell the newbies what went down, but Shirosaki hears enough rumors to know that Harding is somehow responsible.

With station society schisming around him, will Shirosaki be able to mount an effective defense against the terrorists? Will he discover the truth about Harding and the mysterious Round, Veritas? Will we be treated to any hot hermaphroditic sex scenes? Can Dr. Chandra reactivate HAL's higher brain functions and find out what went wrong with the Discovery mission?

The story does not begin well. After a brief scene introducing us to the terrorists, we're treated to an expository scene involving people who will never again appear in the story, discussing the intelligence report. For some reason, these characters' thoughts keep running off on tangents that are irrelevant to what they're talking about but supply valuable information to us the reader. THEN we get a scene with Shirosaki receiving the information we just heard in the preceding scene.

Things pick up once Shirosaki gets to the station and we discover that not all's well at the Ponderosa. The mystery of what happened between Harding and Veritas serves nicely to keep things moving while we wait for the terrorists to arrive and the real conflict to start -- though Ueda does interrupt the plot for a fourteen page philosophical discussion on the difference between sex and gender and the implications of modern (read: future) technology for the issue.

One point that's brought up is that the Rounds were created for space exploration -- if everyone is capable of impregnating and being impregnated, it halves the size of the population necessary to keep the gene-pool healthy -- but if they're used for that, it means the people who colonize deep space won't be entirely human. This echoes one of the arguments Lewis made in Out of the Silent Planet. When Weston tries to justify coming to Mars to Oyarsa, he makes the point that Mars is but the first step: humanity must eventually spread beyond the solar system to escape the end of the world, leaping from one star system to the next in order to perpetuate the race. Oyarsa is horrified at the idea, seeing Weston as trying to escape God's judgment come Doomsday, but the counter-argument he puts forth is that the people who leave Earth would have to adapt to many different environments until they evolve into something that is no longer human. Given that this is exactly what the scientists on Jupiter I are working for, I can't help but think that Lewis would view the concept of this novel with almost Lovecraftian revulsion, and might even side with the Vessel of Life terrorists.

But while this discussion is interesting, it goes on too long and would've worked better split up into several smaller conversations spread throughout the book. As is, it's like going for a bowl of soup and finding a whole chicken in the pot.

I do have a couple issues with the translation. First is the word "bigender" used to describe the Rounds. While we're supposed to parse it as "bi-gender", without the hyphen it's easy to see it as "big-ender" instead, which led me to constantly wonder whether Vessel of Life originated in Lilliput (which would actually explain their name). The other issue is Nieda's choice of Michael Spivak's gender neutral pronouns, which are produced by dropping the "th" from third person plural pronouns (i.e., they->ey, their->eir, them->em). But the problem is, the resulting neologisms still sound plural, so I had to pause every time one appeared and force my brain to read it as singular. I much prefer the Hulme pronouns Greg Egan used for Diaspora (ve, vis, ver), which, though they took some getting used to, were easier to parse as singular. The translator's note at the beginning merely explains what the Spivak pronouns are, with only a passing reference to the use of pronouns in the Japanese original. Now as it happens, I just got done reading the manga Wandering Son which deals with a boy and girl coming to realize that they're transgendered, and the translator there included an extensive afterword on the use of gendered and gender-neutral pronouns in Japanese and the difficulties they present when translating stories like these. I would've appreciated something similar from Nieda, explaining how Ueda employed pronouns in the original Japanese text -- for example, in the English text, the security team is advised to use Spivak pronouns around the Rounds, but what exactly were they told in Japanese? Like all Haikasoru editions, the book contains no honorifics -- was this something Ueda did, or did the translator simply remove them, and if so, how were they used? These kind of things are interesting, and it's a shame they aren't discussed anywhere in the book.

(And to those wondering -- yes, there is a brief hermaphroditic sex scene, but no, it's very not hot.)