I’ll endeavor to make this a short review, since I’ve already said more than enough about how big a Buckell fan I’ve become recently. I enjoyed Crystal Rain as much as I did some of my all-time favorite reads, such as Stephen King’s The Stand and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Books of such a high level of excitement and so many great ideas don’t just fall out of the sky on a regular basis — though I wish they did.

Ragamuffin takes nearly all of the great ideas Buckell has explored in brief with his short fiction — cybernetic/medical human enhancement, oxygen debt, wormhole transit, human oppression by alien masters — and interweaves them with his grand Crystal Rain universe, which owes a great deal to his fond memories of a Caribbean upbringing.

The book is divided into three parts, “The Benevolent Satrapy,” “The Return of the Gods,” and “Human Affairs.” The first section of the book introduces Nashara, a character who, like Pepper, has been shut off from her connection to humanity and stranded on an alien-dominated world. Also like Pepper, she is no ordinary human — rather a killing machine with vast abilities that allow her to interact with the computerized network known as the lamina, and also to survive even in the vacuum of space. These abilities make for some great cyberpunk ideas that Buckell explores wonderfully throughout the rest of the novel.

The second part of the book returns the reader to the world of Nanagada — or New Anegada, to the Ragamuffins in outer space — where John, Jerome, and Pepper remain separated from their past by a wormhole that has remained closed. While Crystal Rain hinted at a great deal of humanity’s history with the various alien races in the Xenowealth universe, it is in Ragamuffin that Buckell finally starts really having fun with the possibilities of the aliens themselves and the possible motivations behind their influence over the Nanagadans.

Like Crystal Rain, the action never stops, and the reader is hard-pressed to put the book down even to sleep. The plotting is tight, logical, well-structured, and the new characters are both likable and fit well within the context of the saga.

I finished the book, put it back on the shelf, and immediately grabbed Sly Mongoose. I just simply couldn’t wait to get to the third installment. Probably my favorite space opera series. Like Drew Karpyshyn’s Darth Bane novels, I am just enamored by the characters and world Buckell’s created with this series — and that doesn’t mean that the stories aren’t without a fair dosage scientific rigor and great ideas to supplement the masterful storytelling. A truly great book, and as with many trilogies (although let’s hope that Duppy Conqueror, the shelved fourth book in the series, sees the light of day soon), I suspect the second installment may be the best of them all.