The Benevolent Satrapy
(for want of a better name) trilogy continues in this second installment, breaking out from a steampunk inspired war between humans on a lost colony into an all out interstellar conflagration. There’s a lot to keep track of in this book and things get complicated enough that I think I prefer Crystal Rain to Ragamuffin. But it’s a good book despite the flaws and I will pick up the final part, Sly Mongoose when it appears in mass market paperback format.
Spoilers for Crystal Rain ahead, so stop reading now if that sort of thing bothers you.
When we last left our characters, John deBrun and Pepper had helped Nanagada defeat an invasion from an Aztec inspired culture. In the process Pepper reveals that he and deBrun (who suffered amnesia) were augmented humans who helped settle the planet, and that his goal was to return to interstellar civilization after re-opening the wormhole or traveling for decades through interstellar space. But they don’t appear until halfway through Ragamuffin.
Instead the book starts with Nashara, a similarly augmented human from another proscribed world called Chimson. She’s escaping from a reservation for humans. Her mission is to rejoin the Ragamuffin who inhabit the space around the dead wormhole to New Anegada (a.k.a. Nanagada), where deBrun and Pepper are on the other side. The Ragamuffin are opposed to the alien Satrapy that rules, but they do little more than smuggle and harry.
That all sounds simple enough, but there are really about a gazillion factions. Let me make a list:
| The Satraps Hongguo Teotl Gahe Azteca Nashara |
Tolteca Human League Etsudo |
Ragamuffin Nanagadans Loa deBrun and Pepper |
I might be missing a few more factions.
Essentially there are two stories here. Nashara escaping the reservation and fighting the Satraps, and deBrun and Pepper dealing with the return of the Teotl on Nanagada. These are fun adventures tinged with space opera. The characters are fun, though I wish Nashara and Pepper were a little less bad-ass. That’s mostly though that I think the super bad-ass archetype is overused generally. Buckell doesn’t do it badly, I’ve just read a lot of it.
Where things turned more sour for me was when the story lines started meeting up. If I could have focused on the action, it would have been like a movie with good explosions. But I had a hard time following the interplay between the factions. The chess moves confused me. A couple of factions turned, several times even. It felt very over-engineered, in the software development sense where over-engineering often results in complicated and fragile systems. What little I could figure out seemed to be built on a house of cards. It probably all fits together quite well. Buckell must have a huge diagram on his wall to keep track of it all when he was writing. I don’t have the diagram though.
In terms of adventure, characters, and universe building I enjoyed it. And I’ll note that it passes the Bechdel test.
Title: Ragamuffin
Author: Tobias S. Buckell
Cover creator: Todd Lockwood (artist)
Series: Benevolent Satrapy; 2
Imprint / publisher: Tor / Macmillan
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 325 p.
Publication date: June 2008
ISBN-10: 0-7653-5410-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-5410-5
Subject: Life on other planets — Fiction
Subject: Human-alien encounters — Fiction
LC classification: PS3602.U2635 R34 2007
