'Persephone Station' Aims For The Stars — And Almost Makes It
Stina Leicht's new sci-fi novel has a lot of moving parts: Space opera, rough-and-tumble mercenaries, corporate intrigue, alien first contact — and to her credit, she almost pulls it all off.
Persephone Station is many things. It's a samurai story told in shades of horse opera space-western. It's a rough-and-tumble mercs-in-trouble story that tries (really hard) to give almost everyone a redeeming heart of gold. It's an overclocked action novel with a lot of pudge in the middle and a political novel wearing the shirt and pants of an old-fashioned pew-pew shoot-em-up. There are dogfights and bar fights, battle mechs and assassins. It has first contact, rogue AI, shapeshifting aliens, a dropship named Kurosawa, space marines, murder bears and an ambush gambit straight-up lifted from the Ewok playbook.
And also, the cast is almost entirely female,, but still somehow doesn't manage to come together into a greater-than-the-sum-of .