"Bring me guns," Pepper said. "Lots of guns." ( )

A sequel to Arctic Rising that I read first, though I figured a bunch of stuff out through context. A hostile universe has mostly subordinated humans, who’ve become clients/pets of more advanced races, but a few stragglers survive, including on planets shut off from the main wormhole network. A woman who’s been created as a weapon against the alien computer network fights to survive among others with their own agendas, while elsewhere a nearly ageless modified man tries to save his planet from the return of alien invaders. A lot going on in a short book—maybe too much. ( )

This is really more of a 3.5 stars book for me, but I'll give it the extra half star for the fun factor. I enjoyed this novel, and it's widened scope compared to Crystal Rain gives the book an expansive feel that the previous one lacked.

I blasted through this one pretty quickly, and dug it a lot, but the ending left me feeling a little flat. ( )

Caribbean pirates IN SPACE! Battling hordes of aliens! With internet viruses in place of wombs! Woah!
And yet, not. The first half is rip-roaringly excellent, and can be found in pdf form here: http://www.tobiasbuckell.com/sampler/ragamuffinsampler.pdf
It begins with Nashara, a mysterious and lethal woman, trying to get out of the human ghetto before anyone discovers the dead body she's leaving behind. It's gritty, it's believable, and it's chilling. Through a mixture of ruthlessness, self-control and superhuman abilities, Nashara escapes into the wider galaxy, where humans are pets at best. She seeks to break the control of the Benevolent Satrapi (mind controlling aliens) and achieve freedom for the few ragtag clusters of humans that still survive. Luckily, she has a few allies, including a killing machine named Pepper and a terrorized little girl named Kara.
Unfortunately, Buckell seems to get impatient about halfway through the book. The entire revolution takes about a chapter of a badly written battle, and then abruptly the heroes win! Even as the action is getting more infodumped and less explained, the characters are having longer and longer circular conversations. The League of Humans takes credit for winning, and acts xenophobically. Mere pages after two main characters torture an alien to death, they're all "oh noes we have to live in harmony with aliens, not kill them all!" Which is true, but seems to come out of nowhere. Not well-ended, but what cyperpunk is? ( )

Aw, darn. I didn't realize till looking here on goodreads that this is #2 in a series. I even own #1, sitting somewhere in the TBR boxes. So - I have to admit that perhaps some of my issues with the book might be cleared up by having read the first book first.

It's space opera.
It is an action book. It goes at a mile-a-minute, and something totally new is happening every 3 pages. There is no pausing for explanation, introspection, or anything else.

It's in 3 parts.
The first part deals solely with the bad-ass heroine Nashara, who's a cyber-clone designed to take out the alien masters of humanity, or something (it's not specified). I really liked and enjoyed this part, even though interesting things kept getting brought up and then zipped swiftly by, never to return...

The second part starts very abruptly, and with no seeming connection to the first part. Suddenly, we are on an alien planet where there are Azteca, whose rivals are the Tolteca, and there are recently re-arrived aliens, who some humans regard as gods, called the Teotl. Ok, all fine and good. But there needs to be at least Some Tiny Explanation of why human settlers would re-create a dead civilization, complete with ethnic rivalries. Nothing. Not one line of explanation. And I kept going, "Who are all these people, and how is this supposed to tie in with the first story?"

OK, the third part ties it together. Sort of. Nashara hooks back up with the fleet of Ragamuffin (rebel Caribbean people) ships and uses her cyber powers to take over the Chinese/Japanese ships that are in league with the alien Satraps (these are different aliens than the Teotl), and form a sort-of alliance with the untrustworthy Teotl, who claim to be refugees from some Other aliens, and some children are rescued, and a lot of other people get blown up but the good guys win... for now.

( )