Tobias Buckell is an author I became aware of only a few months ago, when I read and greatly enjoyed his debut Crystal Rain. (See my review of that here) Ragamuffin takes place in the same universe, but offers a very different kind of story.

Hundreds of years from now, the mysterious alien Satraps rule an empire of 48 worlds and several subordinate species, linked together by chains of wormholes. Humans occupy the bottom rung of this society; legally emancipated from the servitude they suffered after the invasion of Earth, they remain an impoverished and despised caste, barred from participation in many areas of society and often physically confined to reservations and human ghettos. Earth itself is lost, the wormhole leading there cut off for centuries.

A mysterious human woman named Nashara travels undetected through the Satrapy. She has come from Chimson, another human world that has been cut off from the wormhole network and remains free. Snuck into the Satrapy by a decades-long interstellar journey at slower-than-light speed, she carries technology that could radically upset the status quo. She seeks out the Ragamuffins, human interstellar traders and raiders who share a common heritage with the people of Chimson. The Ragamuffins have their base in a barren system that contains the dead wormhole that once linked to another human world, one once known as New Anegada. To accomplish her mission, Nashara must deal with the Hongguo, human collaborators who help police the human population and its technology on behalf of the Satraps, and the League of Human Affairs, a group that also wants to throw off humanity’s oppressors- and has no problem with trying to conscript Nashara into their plans. The Satraps themselves have grown more brutal, and may have decided that humans are more trouble than they’re worth. And beyond the dead wormhole to New Anegada, something else is stirring…

Ragamuffinis an exciting book and a worthy successor to Crystal Rain that takes the universe of that book and throws it into an interesting new light. Crystal Rain was set on a single world where steam engines, telegraphs, and dirigibles were on the cutting edge of technology, with poorly understood remnants of advanced scientific knowledge scattered about. Ragamuffin expands the scope enormously, with a story that spans an enormously advanced interstellar empire. Some fans of Crystal Rain may dislike the shift to a more space opera feel, but I enjoyed seeing Buckell take the same fictional universe and successfully do a very different story.

The story itself is enjoyable, with a great deal of action and some intriguing revelations about both the nature of events in Crystal Rain and the wider universe shown in Ragamuffin. My only complaint is that, towards the climax, some fairly major events that I would have liked to know more about happen offstage. It doesn’t bother me too much- it was more or less unavoidable, short of creating completely new viewpoint characters unrelated to the main plot- but it was still a bit disappointing to have only secondhand accounts of something that sounded very interesting. The climax Buckell does show directly, however, is nevertheless quite satisfying. The ending is very poignant, especially if you’ve read Crystal Rain.

The setting is interesting and well-done. Much of Satrapy society is built around lamina, omnipresent computer networks that people access via neural implants or hand-held screens that provide vast amounts of data about your surroundings- your location, directions, the identity of people in the vicinity, and even things like comments other people have left about each other- for instance, Nashara uses a lamina screen to look up what customers have said about a street vendor. They also have military applications, such as mentally linking to the controls of a spacecraft. They have a more sinister side, however- lamina implants transmit data by putting it into your field of vision, which means someone who controls the network can control what people see.

The book was a nominee for the Prometheus Award given by the Libertarian Futurist Society, and Buckell’s skillful portrayal of the workings of Satrapy society and the plight of humans within it makes the nomination well-deserved. Much of the domination and impoverishment of humans is achieved through realistically low-key means such as restrictions on human travel and laws that forbid humans or human firms from making certain products themselves. Real-world oppression and exploitation isn’t always as dramatic and shocking as secret police hauling people to the gulag, corpses piled into mass graves, or slaves toiling under the threat of an overseer’s lash, and Buckell does a very good job illustrating this important truth.

I would strongly recommend Ragamuffin to science fiction readers. You’ll get more out of it by reading Crystal Rain first, but it stands quite well on its own. If you liked Crystal Rain, or you enjoy action-adventure stories or space opera with a gritty edge to it, Ragamuffin is well worth reading.

1 Comment to “Review: Ragamuffin by Tobias Buckell”

1. Reviews central at Tobias Buckell Online — August 1, 2008 @ 5:35 pm
   

   [...] of the blog Vast and Cool and Unsympathetic (great title), follows up his Crystal Rain review with one of Ragamuffin: Ragamuffinis an exciting book and a worthy successor to Crystal Rain that takes the universe of [...]

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