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Yeah, that's a pretty reasonable summary of A Long Way To A Small Angry Planet. I don't think it's the critical problem, though. A Miracle Of Science actually has a pretty similar big-strokes plot summary (including 'scuffle and then people lecture and stop') and I'd unabashedly recommend it, and am a little disappointed it doesn't have broader recognition.
((Or for more conventional FemSciFi, Chanur does it on a few books.))
But A Miracle of Science is a masterclass in maintaining rising tension and serious threat and explaining reasonable motivations even (maybe especially) for its best heroes and worst villains, where Chambers and Emyrs... aren't.
Tbf, some stuff in the furry fandom suggests at least some sexual orientation stuff is very specific to humans, especially since the plains-folk are implied to tie gender and reproductive role a little more loosely than humans do ("work out who’s going to take what role, and shifting what parts of your bodies are awake to accommodate each other"). Though I definitely agree Emrys doesn't take it nearly with the level of introspection that would be necessary from other authors to avoid a cancelling if she had the wrong politics, nevermind enough to make it seems reasonable.
I think the more damning part is that it never really goes anywhere. There's kink works where the kink reinforces the overall theme (sometimes even the non-sex theme!): games with an exhibitionism kink can say things about honesty, noncon or slavery-kink about disparities of power, (most) coming out games have a pretty obvious connected theme, so on. I won't pretend that's always (or even often) done well, but it's almost always more fulfilling than its absence.
And works where the One Fake Science reinforces the central theme can do a lot more than even great porn authors like Robert Baird's statements about interpersonal interaction do. See Zahn's Conquerors Trilogy for an example here, where one species has ghosts stick around that are harmed by radio waves, and Zahn uses this to make a lot of statements about the difficulty of peace and communication across drastically different species including a 'species' that is neither human nor magic-ghost.
There's a pretty obvious plausible connection to the central conflict about ever-increasing resource demands destroying civilizations! Especially if it's a major shared value, and a value the author proposes as vital. Even if it's something the author wants to have a villain bring up for the reject. And nothing ever shakes loose from it. At most, there's a throwaway line about maintaining populations.
That's not really a problem specific to the sex stuff. You don't need (or even want!) all the details for a story to interact with the overt themes. But the dandelion networks and the EPA (yes, it's literally the EPA in the book) don't really interact, somehow; asexuality seems to just be a missing mood; egg-theft is an Important Thing for the solution to the plot but nothing else. Even the climate engineering vs 'harmony with nature' just kinda flounders when the denouement turns into a 'we can coexist'. Charitably, there might have been some parts of the transguy's interactions that are supposed to be about the conflict between strongly gendered and less-strongly gendered people that the bizarre alien physiology is supposed to resonate with, but if so it's either so subtle or indirect I didn't catch it.
I get that the author wanted a lot of it to just be normal, not just in-universe but as a detail to add to a universe, but the more related they get to the story's plot without touching on the story's themes the more they feel like the social-science equivalent of Teching The Tech in the worse Star Trek episodes.
Which, to be fair, is a lot more plausible than most Teching. But "better than Voyager's bad episodes" is faint praise indeed.
"Brazil has decided you're cute."
It really is an underrated series. Well, more underrecognized, as youre the only other person I've met in the wild who's familiar with it, so thats 2 for 2 on rating it highly.
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