Stina Leicht’s Loki’s Ring, second in her Persephone Station ‘verse, uses a Big Dumb Object to explore a story that centers, ultimately, on artificial personhood.
Stina Leicht’s novel Persephone Station introduced Leicht’s writing to a science fictional setting, a narrative and story with strong western roots, and a small group of futuristic mercenaries (none of them men as it so happens) facing off against a large corporation willing to commit genocide against a species. In addition to the aforementioned strong female cast of characters facing off against the corporation, the novel began tentative steps toward exploring not just the personhood of sentient aliens, but artificial intelligences as well.
Now, in Loki’s Ring, time has progressed, things have progressed, but the centering of a strong set of female characters is used to, this time, explore artificial personhood front and center rather than being a secondary topic. In Loki’s Ring, the inciting incident that kicks off a series of characters’ journeys and adventures is an artificial intelligence named Ri on board. Ri and her ship have crashed on a ringworld, the titular Loki’s Ring. The Ring has not been well explored or even well known, in a hinterland between major powers. There are additional wrinkles, including the possibility of an incredibly dangerous virus. Ri’s call for help brings in an old friend, and so a pinball of consequences brings several groups to head toward the Ring. At the same time, the two major polities also have interest in the Ring, as do lots of independent operators. Space is big, really big, but when everyone who’s anyone winds up in local space around the Ring, space suddenly isn’t so big and empty anymore.
One of the lenses I use to look at space opera lately is a video game, specifically, Stellaris. Stellaris is a big, wide 4x (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate) strategy game about exploring and colonizing the galaxy. My gears turned in Stellaris mode as the worldbuilding and plot spooled out of this novel. Loki’s Ring is known, a Ringworld by some technologically advanced species that has resisted all attempts at communication. They are, in Stellaris terms, a Fallen Empire with two other polities right on their border, keeping hands off until they can no longer do so. There are AIs in both of the major polities and they themselves are moving toward trying to get rights and autonomy. And finally, there is space-battle action to be had. The events of the novel would fit very well with a Stellaris “event chain”. While Persephone Station was much more of an “on the planet” sort of story, this story is much more widescreen, in a variety of star systems and settings. This novel shows the larger scale of Leicht’s universe so narrowly seen in the previous book.
Loki’s Ring itself and how it is laid out, once we get to the Ring and explore it a bit, evoked some old time science fiction from me. Not just Ringworld itself (although it is clear that Leicht read and built off of Niven’s work) but the fragmented and delineated nature of the landscape, with different environments “walled off” via mountain ranges, some areas with hydrogen and helium ecosystems, made me think of Jack Chalker’s Well of Souls, although there are no transformations or body-hopping to be had in this novel aside from the artificial intelligences themselves. One of the issues with the scale of a ringworld as a setting is that it is too large to comprehend and you can wind up handwaving enormous distances and never really getting a sense of a ringworld being far more than planet sized1. The partitions help make the world seem more manageable. We don’t explore as much of the Ring as we might, but then getting there is the point of the story. Besides, exploring a Ringworld in detail has been done.
The ring and other settings in the novel really show the side of Leicht’s worldbuilding. Her epic fantasy, particularly, had a great sense of place and environments, and Leicht really shows a variety here that she could not achieve due to the narrower focus of her previous novel. Spaceships of various kinds (with distinct feels), the aforementioned Ring, space stations. The author and series that Leicht’s work reminds me of is the Finder ‘verse by Suzanne Palmer, with the same sort of characters in a well-lived variety of interplanetary and interstellar backgrounds. It feels like a universe one could inhabit and her characters do so ably.
Let’s take a look at those characters. Ri is far from the only artificial intelligence in the novel; we get a variety of these characters in various roles alongside the overwhelmingly female cast of the ships and stations of the novel. Between Loki’s Ring and the previous, Persephone Station, I wonder if Leicht, consciously or not, is exploring personhood, and specifically, personhood that is not the same default white male dudes that are endemic to science fiction even today. Using a majority (nearly totality) of female (and AI) characters in the narrative is noteworthy in that 20 or even 10 years ago, having a narrative with all white male dudes except for a Smurfette or a singular POC would have been the standard. By continuing to flip that script on its head, Leicht helps show the bankruptcy of that lack of diversity, then, and now. And these are women, and AIs that are on all sorts of spectrum when it comes to personality, sexuality, race, and orientation. And, just like Persephone Station, Leicht avoids the cliche of having men be the antagonists the heroes go up against. The additional axis all of her female characters have is agency, politics and position within the narrative. And autonomy.
Let’s look at autonomy for a second. In Persephone Station, the existence of an AI was a radical concept. We’re not given a sense of how far forward we are from that book (although the events get a mention), but the fact that there are a number of AIs now and the questions around their rights as beings is a major evolution of the universe from the first book. I don’t think it’s too subtle (given Leicht’s politics) that she is also aligning the autonomy of AIs with their personhood along with contemporary questions about women’s bodies and their autonomy. If science fiction is once again about the moment and this day, Leicht is commenting on contemporary American politics with her stories about artificial intelligences seeking to do what they wish. The sentiment “We are not things” from “Mad Max: Fury Road” comes to mind here.
It is this question of autonomy and being able to chart one’s destiny, one’s path, one’s future that is the chord in the novel to watch for. Be it the aforementioned AIs, or the Ring itself, the questions of freedom vs. tyranny, control of personhood and one’s future, and, finally, when are you ready to fight for that autonomy, are what the soul of this book is, in the end. The women and the AIs in Loki’s Ring are ultimately willing to fight for their autonomy and the autonomy of their friends and those they care about. This can lead to sacrifice and hard choices, and very dangerous situations, but the point of the novel is that the fight, the struggle, the grapple, is, ultimately, worth it. There is a real passion to the characters when they engage on those terms. I have avoided a spoiler to this point but I will reveal it now. It turns out another character in the novel is, in fact, an alien, and what their motives and purpose are, I will leave for the reader to discover, but their own desire to chart their destiny and future ties in thematically with the women and artificial persons throughout the book.
Since this is a Leicht novel, and I have been reading her since her debut novel Of Blood and Honey, there are definitely some other signature things in Loki’s Ring from Leicht’s toolbox that show up here. There is always a focus on speed, action and adventure in her novels, and that is on display here with some daredevil, pulse-pounding sequences as the local space around the titular Ring gets crowded, and fast, with various factions and powers deciding to intervene and try and take control of the titular ringworld as mentioned above with space combat galore. The final sequence of the book in this regard is rather good rapid-fire action with characters on the edge.
And given some hints here and there seeded throughout the novel, there is plenty of room for more stories of all sorts of kinds set in this ‘verse2. More, please.
1 The Niven novels help show this sense of scale with the “maps” of worlds in the ocean seen in Ringworld Engineers and elsewhere.
2 A throwaway line about generation ships being crewed by artificial persons has me wanting Leicht to write THAT novel.
