Helpful alien friends take over the world and make everyone immortal and kind of chill, man. It's a metaphor for something or other. Maybe AI, maybe legal weed. Maybe california in general. It doesn't amount to much.
We return to Nicola Griffith to get a more measured take on the lesbian space colony genre, written if not in direct response to Daughters of a Coral Dawn then to books like it. (We know this because of a helpful author's note.)