Slow Gods - Claire North

Although she is known for her work is the SF/Fantasy genre (and has lately taken to Greek mythology), Slow Gods is the Claire North's first genuine work in the space-opera SF genre. Her approach however is familiar, drawing from the world around us now, finding a different perspective or way to express all the things humanity is getting wrong and where it might lead. 84K, an updating of 1984, was a good example of that. Similarly, the concerns in Slow Gods can be seen to critique authoritarianism and the failure of capitalism, as well as contemporary concerns and attitudes towards nationality, racism, gender politics and asylum seekers. In space of course. Unfortunately, while its heart is in the right place, this time the treatment feels rather heavy-handed and mired in tired prose and invented SF terminology that never seems to get to grips with the scope and scale of the issues that the novel attempts to raise.

The characteristics and experiences of the central figure in the novel, Mawukana na-Vdnaze, should make them a compelling figure to follow, but somehow he fails to make that connection between the reader and the universe we are being introduced into. Some aspects however don't need a great deal of explanation. Maw is born into a system known as the Shine under the authority of the United Social Venture. It's like an extreme (only slight more extreme really) version of capitalism or neoliberalism run by corporate states. For most ordinary people, like Maw on Glastya Row, that means a life of working off debt with no possibility of clearing it.

The planets colonised by the USV through a voyage of 400 years across the stars have been built on values of labour and ambition. What they don't want to hear is that the Shine system is about to face extinction. An ancient Slow craft has warned however that the collision of a binary star system seventy-nine light years away will obliterate many worlds in its destruction. Those in the vicinity - which covers many worlds light years apart - need to prepare, and on Maw's world, they have one hundred years. Instead the Shine reacts with denial and a ruthless put down of any attempts of inhabitants of the endangered worlds to act on the warning.

In the resultant chaos Mawukana na-Vdnaze dies and becomes a Pilot - in that order, I think, although for most becoming a Pilot through arcspace usually results in death anyway. Arcspace travel requires an organic component, although no one is sure why. It obviously involves a certain bodily integrity compromise because in essence, the pilot has the dangerous job that involves folding space in order to make huge trips that would be impossible for regular slow travel. Some people have strange reactions in arcspace, but the Pilot is left to deal with 'the dark' and they rarely live, or least rarely retain their sanity. Maw, known to some as the ghost of Hasha-to has already been lost to the dark and, in a way, carries it with them. Which is a terrifying thought to others, but already being dead and unable to remain dead is a useful ability for a Pilot. It also has downsides of course...

I would like to say that Slow Gods doesn't get preachy, that it just gives you a familiar but expansive view of pertinent real-life issues in a SF context. But in the process, and at length, it does become preachy. With Maw, the novel seems to fail to get the human level across well, and instead we have what feels - for the most part - like a high level detached perspective on the wrongness of things. The parallels to our own social issues and political concerns are often a little obvious; the fear of foreign aliens, gender fluidity and alternative pronouns, asylum seekers and extreme capitalism all come under the macroscope. The USV are the embodiment of the evils of capitalism, while the Shine tactics in war sound very similar to the war waged by Israel in Gaza.

For someone touched by the dark, Maw comes across as surprisingly bland and sentimental. His experiences are a rather grim plod through these 'issues', obscured in vague indefinable prose. The encounters he makes are filled with incredibly tedious exchanges of cultural communication, alien customs and polite manners in local traditions. At every opportunity we are bombarded with pointless random lists of cultural observations about alien traditions that are made once and never referred to again, having no relevance whatsoever to the development of any ideas or plot, other than perhaps to 'celebrate' fictional made-up diversity. As for the use of personal pronouns to reflect the diversity of alien gender types and sentient machines, it's extremely irritating after a while with the he, she, his and her pointlessly replaced by the unpronounceable and unreadable qe, te, qis, qim, aer, ter, ze and zyr. And others.

If you like you could see Slow Gods as a kind of a melancholic tone poem for a civilisation that has lost its way, a reflective look at where we are today, where we have gone wrong and the prospect of a future of promise being taken away, the rich wonder of the past cultures and identities about to be destroyed forever. This philosophical view dominates the novel, which ultimately asks "Is it enough to merely witness? Is it needful to do more? And what is the meaning of our actions, when the consequences fade as quickly as the setting sun?" It’s a valid way to consider how we ought to respond to the crises we face today and as such perhaps necessary to take this out into a SF universe in order to take a broader perspective on the question. Unfortunately, the answer of the Slow Gods strikes me as somewhat platitudinous and doesn't seem like it has much to offer as a practical way of a God or Consensus dealing with or responding to challenges we face today in the real world. It's perhaps a bit much to expect a SF author to give us the meaning of life and the universe, but I think I'd settle here for a little more character and plot.

Reading notes: Slow Gods by Claire North is published by Orbit on the 18th November 2025. I read an eBook preview on Kindle provided by the publisher through NetGalley.