Friendly neighborhood nervous laugh

It's got the classic pulpy hard-sf setup: people in the far future live in orbit around a gas giant and use giant shape-shifting rocket boats to catch fish made out of psionic clay in its atmosphere. Terra is an orphaned rocket boat owner approaching her mid-20s, desperately trying to find a husband so she can live her dreams of spending time in the exotic fishing grounds. None of her trial fishing runs for marriage get anywhere, but then she's approached by Diode, an enigmatic 18 yo who asks if Terra will let her fly the boat. The two prove to have a spark, but they prove to have an uphill battle against social norms and fishing regulations that restrict fishing to husband-wife pairs. As they do, their convenient working relationship begins to blend into their personal lives.

Terra and Diode are pretty fun characters; if you've seen G-Witch they almost feel like archetypes for Suletta and Miorine—socially-awkward teddy bear with an assertive side and extremely technical ice queen hiding her fragile side by sheer force of personality. (The timeline works out on this, the first TCR novel dropped in 2020.) Their interpersonal dynamic is really fun. It captures that nervous energy of finally meeting someone on your wavelength and the fear of whether it'll explode on the way up to orbit.

Ogawa's choice to plunk a lesbian couple into a moresetting like this was a clever choice. Patriarchal norms are often embedded in the ideal of technocratic governance, both irl and in scifi, and Terra and Diode's relationship serves as a vehicle of poking at those norms. Here, the norms claim a justification from the thin margins of survival and the need to maintain "social stability"; Terra and Diode experience it as an excuse for harassment and infringements on their bodily autonomy. The political history of this viewpoint feels almost invisibly woven into the work, which is to say it never exposes itself through the expository sequences sf is infamous for, but emerges in bits and pieces from character interactions and plot beats.

It's a really successful melding of romance with sci-fi that is fascinating whether you're there for one or the other. Read it read it read it it's SO good.