If you like his writing, see also "Three Worlds Collide":
a)It was very contrived, and
b)Rape will never be legal, sorry, unless it's an anti-feminist society similar to some Arab countries, which that society wasn't. I know it's just one little thing, but that completely killed the suspension of disbelief for me.
b) was a reference to http://lesswrong.com/lw/xm/building_weirdtopia/
There was some discussion of this when the chapter was posted. The rape idea was really weird, but it made more sense after reading some of the discussion:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/y8/interlude_with_the_confessor_48/q... http://lesswrong.com/lw/y8/interlude_with_the_confessor_48/q... http://lesswrong.com/lw/y8/interlude_with_the_confessor_48/q...
People like to have protagonists with "human" values to root for in stories—in fact, it can be said that consuming narrative is basically how humans indulge in pretending to believe their own far values (by identifying with characters that act on those far values as if they were near, and then "liking" the works of writers that cause those identifiable characters to "win" the story—or, alternatively, that cause characters without those values to "lose", as in tragedies.) That's the reason that any setting, no matter how fantastic (D&D, 40k, HHGTTG) still has (something that acts and thinks like) modern-day humans. However, if you really think in Hard sci-fi terms, you begin to realize that there's no good, probable explanation for "the future" being such a setting without further, conscious intervention on our part to retain our current values (see Eliezer's "Theory of Fun" sequence.)
I explained why it didn't work for me. Any work of fiction- the successful ones, anyway- will always be about people. If they're too different of a people (genetically engineered out of their humanness), then people simply won't enjoy it.
There's a reason that there are virtually no popular science fiction novels where the protagonist is an alien that has a completely different value/mating systems to us. I got like a page into a story about an alternate history of Earth where birds resembling jacanas (a species where the females are behaviorally like the males of other species and v.v.) were the intelligent species on the planet. Then I realized that no-one could ever relate to or care about my characters. They were just too alien. That isn't to say there can't be great fiction where the conflict between alien races is over that difference, like 3 worlds, (Ender's Game comes to mind), but the point is always to reaffirm what it means to be human. You just can't do that if the humans in your book are alien.
...which was, oddly enough, the plot of the story itself! The protagonists decided that the values of the Baby Eaters were a bad thing; and, likewise, the Super Happy people decided that the values of the protagonists were a bad thing. One day, our future, alien selves might decide that our current values are a bad thing, and, likewise, if we see their (potential) values as bad enough, we might consider not allowing such a positive feedback loop toward new values to take place at all.
It wasn't even an especially important or relevant part of the plot. It's not an unusual, or especially heinous sin for SF to be tone deaf about how actual human beings function, but supposing that any kind of peaceful society would allow rape is pretty absurd.
If you mean that an individual human couldn't view sex as something outside themselves, then maybe.
And if you like that, check out "Life Artificial":
If you're not careful when you read it, you miss the True Ending: http://lesswrong.com/lw/yb/true_ending_sacrificial_fire_78/