Slow Gods by Claire North

Published by Orbit on November 18, 2025

The protagonist of Slow Gods is Mawukana na-Vdnaze (known to friends as Maw). He is from Heom, a city on the planet Tu-mdo organized by the Antekeda Venture, a member of the United Social Venture. The Venture colonized “the worlds that would become the Shine.” Maw is of the Mdo, “the peoples who are the Shine.” They are governed by the Executorium, a body that is led by the Executor, who rules with an iron fist. The Accord, an organization of planets outside of Shine space, is deterred from war against the Shine by rumors of Shine blackships, lurking silently at undisclosed locations in space, each capable of destroying a planet.

Most worlds in Slow Gods (at least those important to the story) are inhabited by humans and sentient mechanized beings known as quans that serve their mainframes. Rencki, a quan tasked with guarding Maw, takes the form of a fox with three tails. In addition to acting as security for Maw, quans try to keep him “regulated,” preventing him from losing his grip and going to a dark place.

Nonhuman aliens exist but, with one exception, are unimportant to the story. Maw shares factoids about them from time to time (“The kekekee of B48TCLM1 are born in the clouds and live their entire lives without touching the ground.”) and ponders their varying languages. The offhand explanations of alien cultures are likely meant as worldbuilding, but many of Maw’s observations add to the page count without contributing worthwhile context or atmosphere to the story.

The alien race of significance to the plot is the Slow, having been so named by quans. An ancient race, the Slow doesn’t disclose anything about itself, but it has sent emissaries in the form of impenetrable black spheres and cubes to various worlds in a system that includes Shine planets, warning residents that binary stars in a nearby neighborhood will collide in a hundred years, wiping out life on a number of their populated planets.

We still haven’t arrived at a plot, but bear with me. The Shine practices a totalitarian version of capitalism. Most people are born into debt (they are assessed with something like a tax at birth) and spend their lives working to pay it off. Most cannot afford to pay for an education, so they reduce their debt through manual labor. Like all authoritarians, the Shine do not value education for the masses because “education breeds curiosity. And curiosity is one of the very first qualities that the leaders of the Shine seek to eliminate from the population.”

Nor does the Shine want its people to know that their planets are about to die because autocrats cannot abide any suggestion that the lives they offer their people are less than perfect. We see this whenever autocratic governments deny the existence of any problem (such as climate change) that, if acknowledged, might disturb the serenity of the governed. The term “Shine” also refers to “status, prestige, privilege, charisma, the ability to get people to do things for you,” qualities primarily enjoyed by the few who are not in debt. Parallels to current events give currency to the alien political system that Claire North imagines.

Also in the background is Maw’s backstory. Maw died a rather horrible death. Other horrible deaths followed. The current version of Maw resembles the original but, when he loses control, bad things happen. He begins the novel by telling the reader that he is “a very poor copy of myself.”

How is this possible? Maw is a pilot. Navigating through arcspace requires an organic brain melded with electronic systems. To keep Shine pilots from going mad, “it is standard practice to irradiate parts of a Pilot’s brain, reducing them to a mere organic husk through which navigational protocols may pass.” Maw was sent into space without that mind-destroying treatment. At the journey’s end, everyone on his ship had died a horrible death, including Maw, whose original body was covered in blood. His new body is apparently immortal, although it may take some time to reconstitute after it is destroyed. And he will only come back to life if his body is unobserved — for reasons that are never satisfactorily explained, if other people are thinking about him and are certain he is dead, his return to life is slowed.

So we still haven’t arrived at a plot, which gives you a sense of how the novel proceeds. Slow Gods is bloated by backstories and worldbuilding, all in support of a plot that seems secondary to its context. Much of the worldbuilding is interesting, but much of it could have been omitted without harming the novel.

So finally (and thank you for your patience), let's talk about the plot. Maw takes a job as a pilot who helps transport artifacts from Adjumir, a world that will soon be destroyed by the exploding stars. Other pilots of larger vessels are evacuating people, but an historian named Gebre Nethyu Chatithimska Bajwahra wants to preserve Adjumir culture. Gebre didn’t win a lottery ticket to be evacuated, so she wants to have a fling with Maw, giving North an opportunity to explore cultural attitudes about casual sex. Like me, she's all for it.

Some years after Adjumir is destroyed, an ambassador from the Consensus (humans who have voluntarily joined a hivemind) retains Maw’s services. While hiveminds are not new to science fiction, they are typically portrayed in a negative light (the Borg from Star Trek being a prime example). North uses the Consensus to suggest that people who sacrifice individual identity for a shared consciousness are better equipped to resist tyranny and pursue humane goals. With the help of the Consensus and some quans, and a bit of not-quite-help from the Slow, the plot follows Maw as he takes on the Executor’s embrace of tyranny as the Shine's primary form of governance.

People who complain about unconventional pronouns (and they constitute a very vocal minority of sf fans) might be dumbfounded by the various permutations of he and his that appear in Slow Gods, but people who can’t handle the unconventional have no business reading science fiction. Even sentient robots (for lack of a better term) have their own pronouns. Some pronouns have accent marks. I give North credit for keeping it all straight. The pronouns serve a larger message that may be the story’s purpose: all humans are fundamentally the same despite their individual differences, and all enjoy the same fundamental right to be alive and, in their lives, to be treated with dignity as they define their own identities.

Some of the story seems like padding, although that uncharitable assessment may reflect my lack of interest in, for example, a review of each lover that Gebre had before Maw (apparently to explain Gebre’s greater interest in commitment-free sex than in love) or a list of “types of love that are cruel” or the meaning of various status-determining scars in Shine culture or a description of each statute in an exhibit hall. Worldbuilding is essential in science fiction that takes place on other worlds, but background details can overtake the story. Building the world in the middle of action scenes is annoying. Characters also have an irksome tendency to speechify during chase scenes.

Granted, some of the wordiness is meant to make the story more powerful. Maw feels a connection with a self-sacrificing character who dies when her planet is enveloped by radiation, but that scene conveys sufficient power without repeated reminders that Maw feels guilty or empty because he can’t save her. I appreciated the victim’s insistence that Maw save himself to continue his mission, but the chapter would have been stronger if it had been reduced to those elements without needless plumbing of Maw’s internal depths.

Still, the story explores interesting topics of relevance to readers, including authoritarian governance, the division and manipulation of social classes to serve the ends of powerful rulers, and the contempt with which the powerful regard the ordinary. “How strange it is to live a life where you do no harm, achieve no conquests, and die without a monument.” North makes insightful observations about the tendency to “assume that one person’s emotional landscape is less valid than their own” — the attitude that others should not disturb us with their suffering.

Near the novel’s end, we learn that the Slow have a philosophy of life that is surprisingly human-emotion-centric (given that the Slow are not human) and remarkably banal. The Slow explain this philosophy over several ALL CAP paragraphs that amount to (spoiler alert) “love thy neighbor as thyself.” A nice message, but the Slow travel at sub-light speeds across the universe and that’s all they’ve got to say?

I give North credit. Her prose is lovely; there’s just too much of it. The profundity of her ideas is diluted by the number of ideas she packs into the novel. The ending drags, as if North couldn’t bring herself to finish the story. But these flaws and the others I have highlighted are less significant than the novel’s overall worth as a contribution to the literature of authoritarian governance.

RECOMMENDED