2023 book #42. 2023. Loki's Ring is a ringworld with a habitable inside but apparently no sentients. Everybody wants a piece of it but the world is not sharing. Good hard sci-fi and a good read. Most of the characters are either women or ambiguous as to gender plus a lot of AIs. ( )

Gita Chithra takes her small crew of space salvager's to rescue the older of the two AI daughters she hosted in her mind while they became people. Important to the plot is a strong political entity denying rights of AI people and prohibiting employing them. This is a reasonably well paced interesting space opera with about the technical credibility of Flash Gordan, I mean, system transits in hours, more like long car trips. Most of the cast is some variety of queer, but there aren't any interesting male characters and a couple of bullies. ( )

Of the 500 odd pages, plot only happens in the last 150. Leicht has way of writing interesting worlds which is what kept me hooked, but this book was a drawn out road trip back and forth across the universe with no real stakes because everything gets wrapped up quickly. As a reader I struggled to connect to the many cliche POV characters; the AI character, who arguably had the most interesting plot line of being stranded on a alien planet, had one chapter and when we finally come back to her all the interesting stuff has to be told to us through monologue. ( )

Leicht, Stina. Loki’s Ring. Saga Press, 2023.
My only complaint about Stina Leicht’s Persephone Station was that it gave short shrift to its AI characters. Loki’s Ring fixes that problem. And excuse me, they are not AIs; they are artificial persons that must be implanted in a human brain when they are young and then reared like children. They leave home, get in trouble, and provide joy and heartache for their human parents. Once again, Leicht makes creative use of familiar genre tropes: a ringworld, competing interstellar empires, and starships with ragtag work-family crews that reminded me of those in the Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers. The artificial members of the crew take center stage and are so numerous that it is sometimes difficult to remember which characters are meat people. The story has plenty of action and individualized characters we care about and root for. As a bonus, a clever set of acknowledgments should not be missed at the end. 4 stars. ( )