However, women, greatly outnumbered by men, are required to perform a three-year term of sexual servitude, and the "Touchables" underclass can be hunted for sport.

The main themes of the novel are social libertarianism vs. societal control, freedom of self, and what is permissible for the greater good.

[1] Upon the 1986 publication of the Avon mass-market paperback Laserium coordinated an all-classical-music Rainbow Cadenza show which played at the Griffith Observatory and other planetarium venues in the United States and Canada.

Beth Wickenberg writing for the Arizona Daily Star praised the novel's feminist content coming from a male writer: "(Joan Darris) is a reminder that women in her future world still need liberation.

... 'The Rainbow Cadenza' is imaginative and stylishly written, well worth its price for the moral questions it raises, even to those who are not science-fiction buffs.