It's pretty darn good. Earth humans have colonized and terraformed many alien planets. After a period in which the planets fell out of contact, a subset of them have rediscovered each other, and have apparently formed a very loose confederation, including Capella Two, the moon on which the nominal viewpoint character, Valeri Endrada, lives.
Travel is by matter transmitters, and is light speed.
The fairly rigorous insistence on light speed travel and the corresponding simultaneity problems is a good decision, and is used well in the story. The tech behind all this is very much backgrounded. The original mission to Gammadis ended 63 years previously in disgrace, with the ambassadors thrown off the planet and arriving back on Cappella 12 years prior to the main action. All this is window dressing, and it's not bad. I would quibble, as I often do about other far future novels, that the inhabitants of Capella Two, though they are thousands of years in our future, and have matter transmission, and a goofy sort of information capitalism economy, basically seem like very standard-issue 20th C. people.