The Cage of Zeus

by Sayuri Ueda

The “rounds” are humans with the sex organs of both genders. Artificially created to test the limits of the human body in space, they are now a minority, despised and hunted by the terrorist group Vessel of Life. Aboard Zeus I, a space station orbiting the planet Jupiter, the “rounds” have created their own society with a radically different view of gender and of life itself. Security chief Shirosaki keeps the peace between the “rounds” and the typically gendered “mono,” but when a terrorist strike hits the station, the balance of power and tolerance is at risk, and an entire people is targeted for genocide.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Japanese Literature, Queer, Speculative Fiction, LGBT, Japan

286 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2004

About the author

Born in Hyogo Prefecture, Sayuri Ueda (上田 早夕里, Ueda Sayuri) is one of the more innovative science fiction authors in Japan. She made her debut in 2003 with Kasei daku barado (Mars Dark Ballad), which won the 4th Komatsu Sakyo Prize. She has published a series of highly original, much discussed works, gaining avid fans not only in Japan but throughout Asia and the West. Karyu no miya (The Ocean Chronicles) won the Hayakawa Publishing “SF ga Yomitai!” Award for Best Japanese SF Novel in 2010, as well as the 32nd Japan SF Award and 10th Sense of Gender Award in 2011. She also writes actively in genres other than science fiction, and in 2018, her historical novel Hametsu no ō (The King of Ruin) was nominated for the 159th Naoki Prize.

Reviews

[Maverynthia · Rating 1 out of 5]

TL;DR: This book is a dumpster fire.

So let's have an author that doesn't understand sex, gender and sexuality write a story that involves ALL of those and fuck it up so spectacularly. Add to that a homophobic soldier in a world where being gay is supposedly OK or something? and wow.

So the Rounds are bigender, which shows the lack of understanding about what gender is. They love as male and are loved as female, thus the bigender. Yes women are passive and males are active. You have that pile of misogyny going on here. Next you have Rounds that want to be Unigender, who sabotage everything. Add to all this the fact that Rounds are supposedly "true hermaphrodites", both the author and translator do not use the word intersex, and that's what makes them so special. They also have an II chromosome because the X and Y chromosomes would never create a "true bigender". Mind you there's talk of trans people, but it's mostly passed off and "they aren't real like these Rounds here".

Now the story is about a paraste that gets released that fixes the "gender" of the Round it infects. Yes, it's some kind of bullshit thing where it renders the sexual organ unusable and thus FIXES the gender. Of course some rounds are like "I'm still bigender" but it goes against what is written in the book that "you are your sex" as Rounds start saying they are male or female after the infection.

Did I mention this book ends on a downer?

Now Harding's incident is that he wanted to love Veritas "as a woman" and Veritas wanted to love Harding "as a man" and does the whole gay stereotype of chasing Harding down to have sex with him, where in they get punched, laughed and and then want to take their own life. Harding here is severely "no homo" despite the whole world being open to that thing... but I guess NOT. Harding says he's no "bisexual" and thus doesn't want that relationship with Veritas.... which is the whole crux that the whole bigender thing is shit as the Rounds would be a different gender.

That's the whole limitation of this book is that there are ONLY two genders, male female. Which missed the whole point of the discourse on gender, sex and such and how gender and sex are social constructs and there are a ton more genders and sex and sexualities out there than the binary.

Also punishment against Calendula is sterilization to one sex.. yup... Like the way the Rounds are treated in this book as if they aren't human and thus they get punishments that are the types handed out to animals.

[Nicky · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this. I mean, it's very gender and sexuality aware, focusing on issues that I care a lot about. It sounds maybe a bit like The Left Hand of Darkness, in that sense. But the writing -- gah, so much exposition. I don't need six pages worth of explanation of the difference between sexuality and gender, and I'm bored to death by a very basic run-through of bioethics that is less wide-ranging than the first week of my neuroethics course.

So I got about a third of the way through this and just... I don't have time for this when I can (and should) be rereading The Left Hand of Darkness. Which has its own problems, of course, but which never has me going "oh my god get to some plot already" in this way.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're in the mood for a philosophical adventure wrapped within a sci-fi story, then The Cage of Zeus is for you. The narrative takes a little while to get going, but once it does, you're hooked. Human society has made it into space as far as Jupiter where a space station lies in orbit. Studying Jupiter and its moons is only part of the mission of the station. The other is to create humans who have functioning male and female sexual organs. Of course, not all of humanity is excited about this experiment. A terrorist group called The Vessel of Life is determined to sabotage the station. That provides the main arc of the story as we follow scientists, security professionals, and the Rounds (the male and female humans) as they go about their business on the station. Along the way, the reader is treated to some wonderful discussions of gender and gender roles as they have developed over the course of human evolution. What does it mean to be a man or a woman? Do we have a choice? Can you start off as one and change to the other? Does it even matter? The reader gets wrapped up in these discussions while waiting for the action to begin. And when it does, boy does it deliver. It's rare to read a story that can deal with weighty philosophical issues while people are trying to kill each other. What I most like about the book is when the Rounds have center stage. They're as human as the rest of us but are able to impregnate and be impregnated at the same time. Weird, huh? But they are very aware of their special position. The Rounds inhabit a secure section of the station where non-Rounds can't go. They have started to develop their own society and resent the way the other station inhabitants look at and relate to them. There's an anthropological feel to the whole thing too. What does it mean to be human? I highly recommend reading this book.

[Sean O'Hara · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.)

[Daniel Wright · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating concept of artificially created bigendered humans and their place in society that unfortunately isn't the best executed. While the characters and plot are interesting - if predictable at times - the book spends slightly too long as an exploration of gender and sexuality and less on what those ideas mean for the characters and world that book exists in.

[Jim · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a translation of a Japanese novel dealing with complex ideas of gender, sexuality, and the meaning of humanity. In the (near?) future, science has advanced to the point where full genetic manipulation is possible, and one group has used that knowledge to create a new human subspecies: The Rounds. The Rounds are "perfect hermaphrodites," with fully functioning genitalia from both biological sexes, and altered chemistry that makes them wholly hermaphroditic. They are limited to a single space station out near Jupiter, and strict laws keep them from coming into contact with "Monaural" society (the word used for non-Round humanity). This story is ostensibly about a terrorist attack aimed at them, and the people called on to protect the Rounds.

It is also about concepts of gender, and society, and the oftentimes violent resistance to change.

I hated this book.

I hated the failure of its ideas, I hated the clumsy treatment of a truly interesting topic, and I hated the crappy translation.

The topic of gender is so important, and so timely, that it truly does call for the kind of deep exploration that SF can often provide, but none of that thoughtfulness is on display here. The treatment of gender and physical sex and sexuality are so clumsy and so torturous that nothing of interest actually is said. There are attempts to imagine what it would be like to interact with humans who have no natural male/female awareness, but it's based on utterly bizarre hypotheticals.

Take, for example, the book's repeated insistence that the Rounds, who have no male\female gendering at all, are always perceived by cis (het?) men and women as being the opposite gender--Cishet men see them as women, and cishet women see them as men. And thus, the "mono" humans quickly fall in love/lust with rounds they meet. This is... Nuts. At every level. The two women characters who run into a Round doctor instantly begin fantasizing about this "kind, romantic man" while the man sees that same character as a "strong, resolute woman." Androgyny exists, and this is not how others perceive androgynous people.

The book also tries to create a truly genderless society, but still uses gendered language for even the most basic ideas, like sex. Here's a quote:
"A Round couple can love as a man and be loved as a woman in a single act of intercourse." (p. 87)
or this bizarre exchange...

"...I’m afraid my staff only wanted to visit the special district out of curiosity. If you’d known that I doubt you would have complied.”
“Yes, I was quite aware. I am a man and a woman, after all.” (p. 96)
The first speaker is a Mono, explaining why his team members wanted to visit the special area where only Rounds are allowed to the second speaker, a Round doctor who let them in.
The second speaker's statement "I am a man and a woman, after all..." makes no sense in or out of context. It's made abundantly clear throughout the book that the Rounds are not men or women. They are bi-gendered, without any cultural, social, or physical tendency toward either. And, of course, what does it MEAN? How does that create awareness?

And then there's the almost total dismissal of the pure horror of Round existence. The Rounds are wholly artificial. Their bodies are not only hermaphroditic, they have been genetically modified to have hyper long lifespans, altered maturation rates, and immunity to all kinds of genetic diseases. However, they are forbidden to procreate freely, and their education is limited to science, math, and English (this is specifically stated several times. They only speak English. Because it's the future, and that's all Japan can imagine?) No history, no art, no culture. They live empty lives as pure scientific tools, designed for the exploration of deep space. It's slavery and eugenics in their purest forms, but the book never gets into that very serious issue at all.

And of course there's the translation. It's awful. I say this as a professional translator of Japanese to English: This was not professional level work. The dialog is clumsy and characterless, the word use is bizarre, and sometimes it's just flat-out wrong. Take, for example, the idea that the Rounds only ovulate after sexual stimulation. This is called in the book reflexive ovulation, which is a standard term apparently. However, the book calls normal human ovulation "voluntary ovulation." The scientific term is "spontaneous ovulation" because it happens on its own, without stimulation. It is not, in any way shape or form, voluntary... The translator simply didn't check, apparently?

Anyway, yes. Not a great book. Not worth the time. The only reason I kept at it was basically as a hate-read.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this to be a very interesting book whether you enjoy a science fiction yarn or a great study on gender. I enjoyed both aspects and the author chose a great setting as the backdrop. It's told in third person view and follows and switches between several characters throughout. I like science fiction stories that also raise societal questions and yet make you believe that this is something that could really happen. And then they make you react/question what you would do in that situation yourself. 'Never Let Me Go' was another book that did that to great effect. Gender and sexuality are the main themes in this book since another gender of human is genetically created to test the outer reaches of space exploration. Certainly a book to discuss!

[Toby · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most thought-provoking books I've read in years. To its discredit, it's been marketed as some kind of kinetic hard-sci adventure. It's a lot more than that, and uses the emergent framework of a bigender human sub-species to ruminate almost extraordinarily on what it means to be a man, or a woman, or maybe both at the same time. Stunning.

[Marcus Laurence · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was prepared to give this book points in the beginning. Two old men (cops, even!) talking about how they don't understand Transgender people but still think they deserve protection, safety, and autonomy? Willing to lead the charge to protect them themselves? Amazing! No notes!

I ended up taking all those points away by the end. For a book purportedly about gender and sex, this book fails on so many fronts. Every page reeks. It reeks with a lack of understanding about how real-life queer people live, think, exist, and fuck. Sayuri Ueda CLEARLY never asked for advice which she so truly needed. Consult a queer person about queer themes? Consult an intersex person about that? Nope, the mind of a sci-fi author doesn't need to tread carefully, apparently.

Despite the insistence that the intersex people are neither male nor female, there are so many lines that insist on viewing them as one or the other. "Male half" this, "Female half" that. Good lord. There is constant deadnaming going on, by all characters (even the intersex ones!). This culminates in a laughable scene where one of the intersex people is talking about their sexual anatomy being different enough that it prevents them from having intercourse with other intersex people. This is hilarious because the author has clearly never heard about any sex position other than missionary. Doggystyle?? Reverse-cowgirl? Scissoring? The most cursory knowledge about sex kills 90% of Sayuri Ueda's ideas. This is the first time I've found myself wanting to recommend an education from Pornhub.com.

Of course, the author also manages to take shots at Ace people. You can't be complete as a human without intercourse, of course.
What's the point in writing a story about queer people when you still subscribe to the idea that sex organs and gender are intrinsically linked? More evidence that she never consulted anyone that she should have.

The ending is an extravaganza of violence towards the intersex community (both in the book and real life). All the intersex people are forcibly given the equivalent of SRS, permanently. And to boot, one character is explicitly given SRS as a punishment for *checks notes* having the gall to try to kill the killer of a bunch of intersex children. In the end, the book is far more about the cis characters than it is about the people it's apparently trying to examine.

This book was harrowing, and not just because of the dry-as-saltines translation. As a queer intersex person, I kindly would like to bleach my eyes, thank you.

[Kat La russe · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a disappointing read for me. All the ingredients were there: Jupiter! Terrorists! Gender theory! Space exploration! And yet...
May be the translation was lacking, especially for the usage (or lack of usage) of gendered pronouns, but it didn't flow well...

Then there's the story. Hooo boy. So we live in a post-gender society where sexual minorities are no longer treated as such, being trans is completely accepted, but the moment that one of the characters is faced with the possibility of a homosexual experience all of a sudden it's "no homo" and his teammates mocking him for potentially sleeping with someone with male genitalia and "get away from me" and ostracizing a whole community because of the actions of one person. Post gender society my ass. [spoiler] That whole story arc, by the way, with Harding having a relationship with Veritas until ey try to use their second set of genitalia on Harding, him getting squicked off and punching em, em trying to commit suicide so... Whelps, I guess no Rounds are ever permitted to interact with any human ever on a space station with barely 200 people, that's going to work out well. Also we'll not tell any newcomers the backstory and then get upset when they try to break our completely arbitrary rules. Blarg.

Also, the vaguely upsetting rhetoric around intersex people, who are apparently not bigender because they're not? But the Rounds being bigender is cool because science? I didn't get that part so well. There are too many things problematic with the character development to list.

Anyway, I was really disappointed, this could have been such a cool book.

[Eric Mesa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is 1 of 2 books I was reading at the same time heavily using Science Fiction as a metaphor for modern issues. (The other is The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer)

The Cage of Zeus is written in the style of a Golden Age SF novel. That is to say, the characters spend many pages debating the philosophical issues of the novel. So if you like those old novels (think Asimov or Arthur C Clark), you'll probably like this one.

This book deals with modern issues of gender fluidity, pronouns, etc via the SF concept of creating a human sub-species born with both sets of genetalia, both functioning, and arranged on the body such that both partners can simultaneously participate in sex. This leads (and other things I won't spoil) leads to these new humans creating a new type of society in which there are no gender issues because everyone is the same gender. The antagonists are those who find this new subspecies to be an abomination and wish to end the project.

There is a bit of a reverse-diehard once the climax of the plot has begun, with the antagonist trying to sneak around to achieve their goals and escape.

Because it's in the style of the Golden Age SF, it's very anvilicious and it's very slow until it's suddenly fast so the plot can happen and resolve. This may or may not be for you, but I found it entertaining enough.

random fact: I got this as part of a Story Bundle bundle focusing on Japanese SFF.

[kite ⭐️ · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5 stars
#fromthelibrary #ilovethelibrary

first of all, read the entire book today for a final presentation i will be giving on friday... yeah. this book was incredibly interesting. i think to start i will say a lot of the ideas about gender and sexuality are quite undeveloped, as well as not particularly nuanced in the way i was hoping for. for a plot that revolves around a hyper futuristic society with a new bigender subspecies of the human race, there was a huge reliance on pretty outdated, normative ideas of the binary - both with gender and sexuality. i am keeping in mind this was written 20 years ago, but i know for a fact the conversation around gender and sexuality studies was not as opaque as we think it might've been in 2004. there was also a huge current of misogyny and toxic masculinity, playing into the harmful ideas of women/femininity being submissive or docile. i also thought the very very brief mentions of lesbians and trans people at the beginning quite cavalier and dismissive. i think the author maybe didn't know how to incorporate those very real identities into this plot, which is strange, so she just left them to the wayside... there was also hella exposition that was pretty clunky and felt very much like writing for the sake of explaining. both in world building and of basic ideas of gender and sexuality.

all that to say: the ideas the book was exploring were worthwhile in my opinion. i do think there was a lot being said that also did critique our society's understanding and obsession with the binary and segregation and how it is a flawed ideology. and i really liked was Ueda was doing with those ideas. but it was just kind of half-baked. i couldn't find much about Ueda and don't know if she writes often about these topics or if she is cishet which would very much change my understanding of the book but unfortunately i do not know. ALSO, i think the translation was quite weak. to be fair it's a pretty hard book to translate, but i got the feeling things were a lot stiffer and literal than the original japanese might've been. i stg one day i'll be able to read all this in the original bro.. ok anyway.

so, the content. there were a few passages and characters that i felt i really understood, and the complexity of humanity and relationships was described quite well in some instances. i think Dr. Tei specifically was one of the characters who most embodied the desire to connect and understand, that curiosity that is often snuffed out because of fear or prejudice. although Shirosaki was a complex character, i think his point of view is also valuable- a middle ground that often gets overlooked in topics like this. not necessarily needing to understand, but able to tolerate and be at peace with people other than himself. Arino's character as well speaks to an important experience, living a life blindly dictated by society's norms and ideals that the option to live outside heternormativity goes unthought of until confronted with it face on. i won't get into what i thought about every character though. some characterizations felt pretty stereotype-y (read: Harding... but it is true that is quite a common experience unfortunately), and some plot points didn't make sense to me - why did Karina supposedly hate the Rounds with all her heart when prior to being contacted by the Vessels of Life she never expressed or acted on those thoughts? such vehement hate as to vilely assault a Round and also bioengineer a weapon that would change the entire physiology of this subspecies? like.... she was working on Europa for over a decade and seemed to be doing fine? she didn't even want to join the Vessels of Life mission until she was threatened? maybe i lost the plot on that one...

i think i am able to enjoy this book because i am giving it the benefit of the doubt and want to understand and value the ideas it's putting out. the discussion of gender are complex for everyone and to tackle it in a work of fiction is no small feat. as a trans person with very strong feelings on the matter i want to see the good in this book before tearing it apart. however i can fully see how someone may read this and be disappointed, or even hate it and be hurt and confused by its message. beauty is in the eye of the beholder. not that this is a masterpiece because i don't particularly think it is, but i think reading with an open mind helped me enjoy a lot of it.

enough of that. here are some passages that provoked thought:

"'How does your society manage to maintain equilibrium despite all the disparities that arise between the sexes? How can a society with sexual differences manage to nurture the same unshakable solidarity as ours, which has no such differences? These are the things I'm curious about. Like solving the mysteries of the universe. Tell me, Sub-commander Arino. How do I look in your eyes? Do you see me as a man? Or a woman?'"

"Many of the Rounds grew fascinated with and yearned for a Monaural lifestyle, just as Arino felt his concept of gender and sexuality challenged by the Rounds' existence. The Rounds were not lab animals, after all, but intelligent beings, and it was only inevitable that curiosity would eventually get the better of them."

"'So this is the Monaural way,' Wolfren said with a sneer. 'You seek a resolution through guns and violence. Whenever anyone proposes a different idea, you people pretend to listen, going through the motions of a discussion, but in the end, you crush the new and revolutionary by brandishing morality and common sense as weapons.'"

(after the bio-parasite affected the Rounds' physiology) "'I am male. But that doesn't mean I self-identify as male. The Monaurals don't suddenly become something else when they lose their sexual function, do they? That goes for us too. We were raised in a society where being bigender is a natural fact of life. My generation has matured inherently identifying as both male and female. Even though we have lost one of our sexual functions, we remain bigender. Karina may have destroyed the Round physiology, but she hasn't destroyed out souls.'"

ok that is all

[Mori Mayaan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book had some really fun ideas, pulling on that ‘what if’ that almost every gender diverse person has asked; ‘what if society had no gender’? I do think that it was written from a cisgender perspective, but it was nice to see the author ask the same questions that our entire community has been asking for decades. Now it’s not a complete win, because I will say there were some moments that I felt could’ve been left out entirely, namely a moment of sexual assault that was never revisited after it happened. Also the books pacing is a bit weird, there is a really long set up to the point that you almost forget that a conflict is going to happen. I am gonna blame that on translation issues because there was definitely a romance subplot that was supposed to be there that did not translate well and ended up getting entirely forgotten. Overall, I’d read it again, I recommended it to a friend, I would encourage cisgender people to read it and start asking yourselves some important questions.

[Mars Dorian · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was curious about this topic although I wasn't curious about the topic--gender.
Since many Japanese authors I've read always wrote well-researched sci-fi books with a non-preachy style, I looked forward to reaching to 'The Cage of Zeus'

The first 10% sounded promising, but the novel soon scattered into page-long explanations and philosophical blabbering. Mmmmmmm.
The story structure was a mess, as were the characterizations. The characters sounded stilted and similar. It was hard keeping the 'ordinary' humans from Mars apart from the genetically-enhanced Rounds from Jupiter. It could be a translation issue but I can only judge what I read.

It's not a terrible book, but because of the lengthy explanations, repetitions, and seemingly non-existent plot structure, I had to leave this book a digital dust collector on my Kindle. At least I made to around 75%.

[KJ]

So both my buddy read Kat and I decided to DNF this book. I'm at around 30p and while I could continue...I'm not going to, right now.

While I'm curious about the bioterrorism plot that's unfolding, I'm majorly uncomfortable about the entire way the book approaches the gender and sex aspects of the Rounds and the society in general, which is a significant part of the book that I can't ignore lol. So I'm not in a rush to continue, though I may pick it back up over the course of a few months if I'm bored.

I tried to read this for the Tome Infinity and Beyond readathon 2018. You can see some of my thoughts in the above status updates, but for more, check out my wrap-up video: https://youtu.be/sBxeRsCXSHE

[Joshua · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an intriguing book. The topic of gender is one that many scifi writers don't go into very much, and this one explores it quite thoroughly. There are a few too many characters to keep track of, and some of the science is flawed, but otherwise it keeps your attention. If you like this book, you should read The Left Hand of Darkness by LeGuin which takes on the same subject but in an entirely different setting.

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was fairly disappointing, as the concept was interesting but the execution felt fairly disjoint and the story ended on a flat note. Part of the issue may have been the translation, which felt a bit stiff, but I think there were some structural issues here as well that detracted from my enjoyment.

[Amy Peavy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have REALLY mixed feelings about this one.. On the one hand it covers gender diversity very well.. on the other... there are some scenes in this book that I would rather not have read. Further more, the mood of the book changed drastically towards the end. It felt quite abrupt.

[bookmaggot · Rating 3 out of 5]

i have no idea how i feel about this or if i'd even recommend it but at least i finally read a book recently that's made me feel Something. the r*pist cyborg terf with a twagic backstory, replaceable limbs, a switch in the roof of her mouth and a spear gun took me out.

[T. Blake · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really hope the quality was lost in translation. This is one of those I had to leave unfinished.

[Lark Drapper · Rating 1 out of 5]

"Mom I want The Left Hand of Darkness"
"We have The Left Hand of Darkness at home"
The Left Hand of Darkness at home: The Cage of Zeus

[Allyn Nichols · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic

[Jason Seaver · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting science fiction novel set during my favorite period - the expansion to the outer planets - but one which disappoints a bit where its main goal is concerned. This book exists to discuss the idea of the "Rounds" - humans genetically engineered to have both male and female sex organs - as well as various other aspects of sexuality beyond the conventionally heterosexual, but aside from a fairly dry lecture toward the beginning, it doesn't do that so much, and we really only get glimpses at the Rounds' unisex society.

As an action/adventure story, it does all right - plenty of nasty ideas about future terrorism and a cast of reasonably interesting characters - but that's not really the point of the book.

[Catriona · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was literally the worst book I have ever read. Filled with gore, and an unfollowable plot, I think that Sayuai Ueda could have done a better job of writing this book. It needs way less gore [come on. I don’t want to hear how their blood splattered on the ground!] Way less random plot changes [wait, why is this character now important? And who on earth are they?] And attachable, relatable characters [oh my gosh! My favourite character is now a big jerk!]. I wonder what possessed me to want to read this book. Even the name of this book makes no sense, what cage? What does Zeus have to do with anything? I recommend this book to all those who have nothing else to read, and hate awesomeness. Yuck.

[Aly · Rating 2 out of 5]

Where do I even begin with this book? I wanted so badly to like it. I was excited about it for multiple reasons: the author is a Japanese woman, the story is feminist, the story features a third gender, the story takes place on a space station above Jupiter! So many exciting things.

But I was disappointed. I enjoyed the story itself, but it got a little preachy at times. The moral debates about the ethics of creating this third gender and what it meant for the rest of humanity were interesting, but they got very repetitive. I read the same arguments and discussions played out over and over.

Moral of the story: it was good, but not great. I wanted to love this.

[Steph Bennion · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a fairly straightforward sci-fi yarn with some interesting ideas about how sex/gender shapes human behaviour, beliefs and societal roles. However, the English version is a bit of a clunky read, making me wonder if a lot had been lost in translation. I thought the term 'bigender', used to describe the genetically-modified humans called Rounds who are essentially true hermaphrodites, was badly chosen: it's used as a label for sex characteristics, not gender (and worse, I kept reading as 'big-ender', not 'bi-gender'!). Aside from that, the actual sci-fi setting was rather old-fashioned, like something from a 1960s pulp novel. Still, the book was certainly something different...

[707 Maeve P. · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was ok. I dont like books that change to different character perspectives practically every chapter. But i do like the overall setting. Sci-fi is really my thing