How you react to a given situation says a lot about who you are as a person.
In Stina Leicht’s evocatively intense novel, Persephone Station, set in the future when humanity has colonised the stars to good and bad effect, depending on where you stand in society or if you’re an alien race whose planet has been usurped by corporate greed, this is explored in ways that illustrate not much has changed when it comes to the way people exploit the world, or worlds, around them.
In this case how they treat the planet Persephone, first owned by the Catholic Church and now the Serrao-Orlov corporation, where the original inhabitants are being exploited, unknown to most settlers on the planet sheltering in the one human population centre of Brynner, for technological secrets that their capitalistic bosses are determined to make their own come what may.
What the corporation sees as a resource to be sucked dry, others see, quite rightly, as a civilisation of sentient beings who have secreted themselves away in the hope they can be left to determine their own destiny, something that has evaded them almost since the start of their existence.
Two women who play pivotal roles in Persephone Station, Rosie, who heads a criminal enterprise behind the reasonably respectable front of Monk’s Bar, and Vissia, ambitious wannabe head of the Serrao-Orlov corporation, both undergo the same experience on the planet, with one emerging empathetically eager to help those who rendered her assistance, and the other tenaciously ready to do what she can to advance herself at their expense.
They placed a hand on the dead woman’s head and closed her eyes. ‘May an angel watch over you.’ Then they began a prayer for the dead.
All in all, it’d been am average workday at Monk’s. That is … until they received the message from Vissia Corsini. Then things got interesting. (P. 18)
It is a marked study in contrasts, and it provides a great deal of narrative fuel for Persephone Station which asks some pretty tough questions about who we are and we want to be.
In some ways, the questions aren’t that new since science fiction has been asking us to gaze inwards since its earliest days, but the way Leicht sets about answering those ruminative queries establishes her novel as something highly original and very much of the progressive moment.
The central thrust of Persephone Station, which takes many well-established sci-fi tropes and has a refreshingly interesting field day with them – tough but thoughtful ex-soldiers looking to make amends, greedy corporations, wild west mentalities, AI lifeforms discovering their latent humanity – is one of anti-colonialism and anti-corporate greed, framed not as some insufferably exhausting diatribe but as some arrestingly thoughtful musing on how people who have experienced life-changing events can either choose to enforce that heartless status quo or can work hard to make a difference and whiten the black soul of humanity just a little.
Rosie choose to embrace the better angels of our nature, and while she is far squeaky clean in a legal sense, she has a lot going on for morally and ethically, determined to ensure that the self-serving hell that the corporation wants to unleash on the indigenous people of Persephone is stopped in its tracks.
That means, of course, that she has to stand in the way of Vissia who heads the corporations work on the planet, and she is a formidable foe indeed, driven by some twisted devotion ton one solitary life that is heartwarming on one level until you discover that she is willing to feed everything, and we mean everything, to satisfy her horrific ambition.
The narcissism on display is terrifying and it emboldens not just Rosie but the crew she hires to fight with her, headed by Angel, an ex-mercenary who has died and been brought back to life multiple times and who is well past fighting just because she is told to.
With her cosily bickering family of Enid, Lou and bestie Sukyi, and their AI sentient ship Kurosawa, who is every bit as much a member of the crew as anyone else, Angel wants and needs to make a difference and it soon becomes apparent that Persephone is the planet on which she will do it.
How things play out for Rosie and Vissia, one time shared recipients of a lifesaving turn of events who now stand on opposite side of the moral divide, powers the brilliantly incisive thoughtfulness and emotionality of Persephone Station which is always alive with what the enthralling and appalling ideas of what it means to be human, in its all contrary uplifting and bestially horrible glory.
Driven by magnificently good world-building which draws on established idea about what an interstellar human civilisation would look like and then remakes it in ways excitingly new and different, Persephone Station is one of those sci-fi novels that grabs you and does not let you go, its characters, its action sequences and its moral core, all palpably compelling reasons why you’ll want to keep reading.
The ship made a sudden move upward. Angel again felt heavier as inertia sunk her deeper into her cushioned seat. Then the ship banked to the left. More explosions burst into the air–a little too close for Angel’s comfort. Suddenly, Kurosawa rocked to the left and the right, and then dropped several feet before righting itself. Several treetops vanished in a cloud of flaming splinters.
Just as abruptly as the ship had flown up into the sky, it dropped. (P. 349)
The great heart of Persephone Station beats around the idea that just because terrible things have been done, and continue to be done, that it must always be so.
Part of the United Republic of Worlds, which actually does have a strong moral centre but much like our modern society, corporations willing to dance around that to their own benefit, Persephone and the battle for its very soul, is proof positive that good things are always worth fighting for and indeed, must be fought for because lovely as ideas of self-determination, love for others and the right of every culture to be valued and respected, they simply don’t happen if we simply sit by and think good things.
That’s most evident at multiple places across our glove today where activists are realising that you can’t simply bask in the glow of glowingly good morality, you must also take a stand against those who have no care or concern for; good and worthwhile ideas, compellingly good though they may be, won’t simply triumph of their own accord, no matter how good you think they are.
That’s because, as the divergent responses of Rosie and Vissia show all too graphically, you can taste the milk of human, or in this case alien, kindness, and still choose to disregard it; how it is possible, you wonder, since surely something that good and life-changing must soak into the soul and change it for the better forever, but it happens and Persephone Station is proof positive that there are those who will choose to feather their own nests in preference to helping others no matter how good the ideas they have encountered may be.
So, Persephone Station is a rallying cry of sorts, replete with vibrantly alive and verdantly dialogue-rich characters, a story that is as meditative as it is action-packed and a moral core that will be denied but which must be fought for every step of the way if its superlatively call to the very best of humanity is to be answered in the affirmative, and the world, one alien one on particular, is to be changed for the better.