Catherine Webb, aka Claire North, has some imagination. Their novels under this particular pen name (they also write young adult fantasy as Webb, and urban fantasy as Kate Griffin) could be classed as pure high-concept. Their often deeply profound output tends to focus on a single idea: from The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014), in which the titular character is reborn time and again on the same date, to The Sudden Appearance of Hope (2016), featuring a character who cannot be remembered, to 84K (2018), which is set in a world where you can pay to do a crime. So I approached Slow Gods with high expectations—and, while it is something a bit different from North, it doesn’t disappoint.
Slow Gods is proper science fiction as opposed to a story set in a recognisable world, something common in much of North’s previous works. Set in the far future and spanning a galaxy, it remains a high-concept effort full of delight and invention. The narrator, “frustrated academic” Mawukana na-Vdnaze (Maw for short), is not to be trusted and yet we know that he has died multiple times—and is, as a result, potentially a god. He is an interesting character to dump into the ultra-capitalistic world of the Shine. Maw was born into debt, and charged for his birth. Every breath taken, every bit of sustenance consumed, in this world has a fee attached. In return, paying citizens are expected to rise by their own merits while working at their maximum capacity, or to sink into debt and work their way out, however unrealistic this achievement might be. People sort of accept this, giving their children middle names such as “Chairman” and “Director.” North isn’t subtly going after our capitalistic and consumerist society here. They’re bashing it with a wrecking ball. Dropped from space.
The story forms around a supernova event that will destroy several inhabited planets and which therefore need evacuating. North spends a lot of the first few chapters on worldbuilding and not so much on the storytelling—so much so, in fact, that Slow Gods reads like a memoir from the future as opposed to a novel. Maw narrates how he felt about growing up and living what was perceived as a normal life, neither particularly happy nor unhappy; North, via Maw, tells, rather than shows. The Slow, for example, is an ancient machine that travels around the galaxy and knows things. It is potentially an AI. North holds back from delving into the science of this science fiction story on a number of occasions, since their future societies create things that are in some ways unknowable to the peoples that inhabit the story. North uses phrases such as “pundits grumbled [it] was ‘some sort’ of ion drive” and talks about the terrifying mysteries of arcspace—this universe’s method of interplanetary travel, dark, unknown, and creepy. Indeed, it is Lovecraftian in some respects. Is there something in the corner just out of perception?
North writes as if it were the easiest thing in the world. Prose and ideas seem to flow as naturally as a river and it’s never a surprise when they throw in a curve-ball or two: numbered points mid-chapter, a chapter that begins by providing a list of a character’s lovers; oddly indented paragraphs, the Slow speaking in capital letters; interlude sections, such as “On Pilots,” which again skip the science bit by addressing this future’s many unproven theories about itself. In other words, giant concepts are readily accepted.
After the Slow arrives into Shine space and informs everyone that a supernova event in which two stars will collide is about to occur in the not-too-distant future, North writes: “and if we look back through the historical data it would appear that they are on a collision course and actually the maths is fairly elementary now we bother to think about it.” What we learn is that, at the point of this discovery, the Ventures—Shine bodies that run the cities—wiped the data. They didn’t want people to panic. They denied there was any problem. Business needed to carry on. But it is now too late: Everyone with a telescope could see, and then come the protests and riots. And everything changes.
As well as the big ideas, North spends time on the small things that affect us all. Time and again, they return to the idea of small talk, social niceties, and cultural misunderstandings—the things that mean something to us as individuals just trying to navigate through life. I particularly enjoyed a passage seemingly referencing Kurt Vonnegut: “Adjumiris hate silence, but when they chose it, it is deliberate, absolute. When there is nothing more to say, there is nothing more to say. And so it goes, and so it goes, and so it goes.”
Another example: North’s various peoples have a variety of pronouns, including the Slow. North themself is non-binary. In the interlude headed “A note on gender,” they explain all the different pronouns in the setting of Slow Gods. One race, the aka-aka, have a single gender and are “we”; another, the aforementioned Adjumir, have eight genders and many pronouns, based on region. The use of a variety of pronouns throughout the novel (xe, xim, que, quim, Hé, hím, and more) normalises gender fluidity and non-binary cultures, and is also used to demonstrate the othering of some of the peoples. One character humorously points out: “You can remember the difference between innumerable different types of sausage or sporting teams, but you cannot hold in your mind a mere half-dozen or so categories of people?” Even machines have different pronouns: Maw has a kind of robotic intelligence as a companion who is known as “qi” (in one of qis guises, qis is a three-tailed fox).
To counterbalance the dominance of the Shine, there is a great diversity in societal structures, too. In Lud, for example, there is what could be seen as socialism, where everyone serves the people as a whole. Elsewhere, houses are bio-formed and spaceships are grown (and are therefore essentially alive), highlighting ways to live and thrive outside of capitalism. Elsewhere, there is a nod to isolationism, with a species called the kekekee who say that “the rest of the galaxy sounded awful.”
But what is all this about Maw dying, and what about any plot? Maw is an arcpilot and during a flight through arcspace is somehow changed: When he is killed, he resurrects, sometimes slowly and painfully, but dying again and again, in space. This proves useful as most pilots can only do one or two flights before they are no longer of use. Maw, however, can keep going indefinitely. This proves of particular use in the evacuation of a planet due to be destroyed by the supernova. But Maw believes himself to have died and therefore to be now a monster, perhaps a bad copy of himself at best.
Is he part of the darkness that is arcspace? He tends to be what people perceive him to be—when he is seen as a good man, he is one. He can also forget to obey the laws of physics, and that can lead to horrendous acts of destruction. During the evacuation, however, Maw falls for historian and curator Gebre, who doesn’t necessarily fall back in return. Gebre is not one of those selected for evacuation: It is impossible to get everyone off the planet in time, but Gebre is tasked with saving antiquities and cultural relics.
Meanwhile, the Shine have moved onto a neutral planet, finally admitting that theirs will be destroyed by the supernova—an occupation, if you will. They also have what are known as “blackships” stationed around the galaxy, ready to attack any resistance. A guerilla movement grows and Maw is drawn into what the Shine don’t call a war against the rebels but a “humanitarian intervention,” as the only person who can reliably use arcships for tactical resistance raids. This eventually results in atrocities as bad as those committed by the Shine, and Maw withdraws as a consequence. There is also a sub-plot here about a communication device used by the blackships, alongside some espionage. The only slight criticism amid all this is that the leader of the Shine, the prime capitalist, is a bit of a cartoon villain in his actions in the way he dismisses all life, says things like “[h]asn’t this all been interesting” as he kills someone and laughs. Worse, despite this there is no real jeopardy from him other than to minor characters.
But Maw is as human as you (though he is also a monster and a god). You believe in him as an individual, and therefore in the importance of the life of an individual; but you also believe there is a way forward in a collective community that exists for the betterment of all and not just its biggest shareholder. This is more than just a space opera, more than just an adventure spanning centuries. There are so many huge ideas and issues addressed in Slow Gods—capitalism, religion, gender, culture, climate migration, othering, war, love, morality, having a meaningful life—but they don’t get in the way of enjoying a well-written and enjoyable novel. Treatises, memoirs, novels, stories don’t need to be subtle to get you thinking, nor to work. And North’s Slow Gods simply works.