We meet our new focal character as she's fleeing an assassination she's just conducted. Nashara is a heavily modified living weapon of war who's on a mission to reach a world she knows as New Anegada. Bereft of backup and bumming across the stars, she's just sold her services to the League of Human Affairs, a terrorist group that's trying to liberate our species from the Benevolent Satrapy. (The alien Satraps are hundred-foot-long spacegoing trilobites.) But the League reneges on payment, and so Nashara is forced to turn to the Ragamuffins, human "pirates." She finds herself aboard a ship called the Queen Mohmbasa, heading on an emergency basis for fuel to an O'Neill-style colony called Agathonosis. There Nashara's fate will intersect those of a plucky teenager named Kara and her brother, Jared.

But hot on Nashara's tail is a man named Etsudo, who's one of the Hongguo. The Hongguo are humans who serve as enforcers for the Satraps. The Hongguo imagine that by cooperating with the Satraps they're saving our species from a worse fate than mere servitude, but they're essentially quislings. Estudo at least has the decency to be conflicted about this. But this doesn't stop him from literally messing with Nashara's mind.

Eventually Nashara, the Hongguo and aliens called the Teotl arrive in a brawling mess at their destination: New Anegada. Which just so happens to be the lost world of Nanagada! John deBrun and Pepper find the resumption of contact with "civilization" to be a life-or-death matter!

Space opera with a Caribbean lilt

Tobias Buckell comes as close as anyone in the opening chapters of this book to reproducing the frissons of one of my favorite novels: Earthblood (1966), by Keith Laumer and Rosel George Brown. The sense of humans downtrodden by aliens, with the lone-wolf protagonist bravely fighting to restore the race's glory—all of that comes across delightfully, and it's grand stuff. Like Laumer and Brown, Buckell also has a keen grasp of sensory detail. His future environments are incredibly rich in smells, tactility and visuals. One gets instantly immersed in the sense of a truly lived-in future.

As the book progresses and more factions intrude, some of this uncommon one-woman's-odyssey feeling gets lost amid the more familiar realpolitik maneuverings we've seen in the realm of postmodern space operas from such figures as M. John Harrison, Alastair Reynolds, Williams & Dix and Colin Greenland, to name just a few. Additionally, leaving Nashara's narrative midway through in order to resume that of deBrun and company, while a strategic necessity if the threads are to intertwine, has the effect of diverting the building emotions down different streambeds. (Also, bringing an end to Nanagada's isolation from the outside in rather than from the inside out has the effect somewhat of trivializing the events of Crystal Rain.)

But Buckell keeps all his plates spinning wildly and entertainingly enough to make the whole scenario ultimately a cohesive, comprehensible and entertaining one. This book is full of wild-eyed action—such as Nashara's mad escape down the axis of the O'Neill colony—feats of bravery, exotic beings and odd ways of thought, startling uses of technology and bold manifestos on freedom. And although it comes to a satisfying conclusion, I expect that this is not the last we'll be seeing of these "duppy conquerors."