Slow Gods

Late to the party again, as the only other book I've read from Claire North was "84K", a "1984" meets "Black Mirror" dystopia. Now "Slow Gods" is something else entirely: A space opera in deep time with extraterrestrials, god-like AI, supernovae, fascist regimes, immortals, and many many genders.

The narrator approaches a similar divine status being reborn many times by advanced technology (?), trying to save civilizations, memory, and love (yes love). So despite the immense scale and levels of strangeness this is down to earth (well, down to way-beyond-earth), in details I liked a lot.

If you put space opera on a scale where "Ender's Game" occupies one pole, then "Slow Gods" is far remote on the other side. Not the least due to considerations of philosophy, class, suffering, and diversity. Even the god-like characters are somewhat empathic and almost believable.

I found out about this book because I saw mcc talking about it.

Slow Gods is a weird little book. It's about space politics, focusing around an impending supernova event that is going to wipe out many planets. It's from the perspective of Mawukana, who is just a pilot and seemingly exists more on the edges of the story, and yet is also ultimately at the heart of things.

I wonder whether it is possible to exist as a person at all without measuring yourself against others. I wish sometimes that I was strong enough to be myself in company without company turning me into something else. I wonder who that person would be, and am sometimes grateful never to find out.

Maw is also an odd, monstrous protagonist. He is not particularly driven, and is affected strongly by the expectations of others. It's not that he doesn't have feelings, but more that many times he needs to be gently nudged into action by the people around him.

As a narrator, Maw also likes to periodically intersperse some anthropological digressions on the nature of ritual, or arcspace pilots, or gender across various societies. It can be a blunt instrument for worldbuilding, but it's in character for Maw as a curious academic. It's also always just long and infrequent enough to fill in some details or whet my own curiosity, and this style works for me.

Ultimately, this is a story about grief and death and connection. It's a caricature of capitalism and the ineffectiveness of ways that countries (fail to) confront capitalist empires. I was gripped by it the whole way through and quite enjoyed it.