Slow Gods

People have said elsewhere that science fiction is dying, and if you take a look in your local Waterstones you can see why. But lack of books on shelves does not mean lack of books being written, it just means that current fashions in retail have changed. And when you have books as good as Claire North’s Slow Gods, how can a genre possibly be dying?

Mawukana na-Vnadze lives in the interstellar empire known as the Shine. It is called that because of its fascination with celebrity and power. People who have both are said to have Shine. Those who don’t are a waste of oxygen.

We should all accept now that, regardless of when they are set, speculative fiction books are a product of the era in which they are written. That is particularly true of Slow Gods, which is firmly rooted in the ruthless Capitalism of Donald Trump’s America. The only thing it misses is the obsession with Large Language Models as a means of doing away with the need for workers, and that’s presumably because all books take time in the writing. And also because the book is space opera and so deals with actual silicon intelligences.

The entity known as the Slow is one such being. It is unimaginably old and deeply ineffable, which leads many people, especially its fellow silicon intelligences, the quans, to regard it as a god of some sort. Like most gods, it rarely actually says anything. Which means it is a major event when it does. In warning the galaxy of an impending supernova, it most definitely indicated a status as a benevolent divinity. Human, quan and alien astronomers quickly confirmed the danger. Thankfully the warning had come in good time. There were decades to make plans to save the planets that would be in the blast zone. And so plans were made, except in the Shine where such activities were deemed a waste of resources.

Yes, Slow Gods is, amongst other things, a book about climate change.

Every space opera has to deal in some way with the unimaginable distances between stars. Some used ‘jump gates’ providing an instantaneous means of travel from one part of the galaxy to another, and also a potential economic bottleneck that can drive the plot. Others assume that there is travel through ‘hyperspace’, which can be a very weird place. North has opted for this solution, calling it arcspace, and it is a deeply strange and disturbing environment.

Arcship pilots are a breed unto themselves. Most do not survive long in the job. They have no ‘spice’ to ease their work. In some civilisations pilots are well-trained elite workers given generous retirement packages when their minds can no longer cope. Not so in the Shine, where retirement is not an option. There are always plenty of excess humans who fall into debt and cannot earn their way out of it. Shine pilots fly one mission, almost certainly die on it, and are quickly and cheaply replaced.

This was the fate of Mawukana na-Vnadze, except that Maw did not exactly die. Like Schrödinger’s cat he became both dead and not dead. A version of his ship was found, prior to its flight, in another part of the galaxy. There was no body, but copious amounts of blood that matched Maw’s DNA. Another copy of the ship was found elsewhere, with something alive on it that both was and was not Maw.

This person became known as Mawanuka-from-the-Dark. Two things were obvious about him. Firstly he was by far the best arcspace pilot in the galaxy, seemingly suffering no ill effects from his flights. And secondly he was impossible to kill. Or rather, if you did kill him, he would come back to life again as soon as his corpse was not being actively observed.

This new version of Maw both terrified and obsessed everyone. Logically he was too dangerous to let live. Practically he seemed impossible to kill. And also he might soon be very useful. Because war was coming. The Shine’s solution to the supernova was quite simple: they would just conquer neighbouring star systems that were outside of the blast zone and move there.

This will be a concept that is familiar to the people of Greenland and Canada.

For the civilisations of the galaxy, war is a problem, because peace relies on Mutually Assured Destruction. The more powerful civilisations rely for survival on the space opera equivalent of nuclear submarines. Blackships lurk in the vast emptiness of space, armed with planet-killing missiles that are virtually undetectable. A blackship war would mean the end of most of galactic civilisation.

The Shine therefore embarks on conventional warfare, picking on smaller, mostly defenceless civilisations, and daring the rest of the galaxy to risk escalation by opposing it. Fearing their own destruction, they do nothing.

It is all horribly familiar, isn’t it. Here’s one character’s view of the behaviour of the Shine:

Cuxil had not been raised to understand Shine, but many minds were now whispering to hers who had been born to it, bred to it, and they knew nothing was Shinier then boldly breaking all the rules, then making one tiny concession to those who are meant to enforce them, who say thank you, oh but thank you for doing that one little, little thing.

Which is exactly how Trump & co. get away with most of their outrages.

Or consider this:

What do you do when someone lies to your face so calmly, so repeatedly, so blithely?

Slow Gods, then, is a book about the fight against Fascism. It being space opera, there is no guarantee that the solution it provides would work for us. After all, there are no analogues to the Slow and Mawanuka-from-the-Dark in our world. But the book also addresses two existential issues of our time.

The first concerns the powerlessness that we all feel in the face of an advancing far-right war machine. Can we do anything worthwhile to oppose it? Should we even try? Is despair the only option?

The second concerns the consequences of taking action. If we fight, people will die. We might have to kill. Most of the population of the Shine are innocent of the crimes of their leaders, save only that they are too ignorant and powerless to resist. Civilians die in wars. How can we claim to be moral if we are killers of innocents too?

These are deep questions. It is significant, I think, that two of my favourite books from 2025—Slow Gods and The Everlasting—are both about resisting Fascism, albeit in different ways. I’d be happy for either of them to walk off with major awards. Both science fiction and fantasy are still very much relevant, and very much engaging with the issues of the day.

Title: Slow Gods
By: Claire North
Publisher: Orbit
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
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