From one of the most original and dazzling voices in speculative fiction comes an intergalactic tale of conspiracy, war and the fall of empires.

My name is Mawukana na-Vdnaze, and I am a very poor copy of myself.

In telling my story, there are certain things I should perhaps lie about. I should make myself a hero. Pretend I was not used by strangers and gods, did not leave people behind.

Here is one out there in deep-space, in the pilot’s chair, I died. And then, I was reborn. I became something not quite human, something that could speak to the infinite dark. And I vowed to become the scourge of the world that wronged me.

This is the story of the supernova event that burned planets and felled civilizations. This is also the story of the many lives I’ve lived since I died for the first time.

Are you listening?

Discover this thrilling and breathtakingly imaginative space opera from the multi-award-winning Claire North, perfect for fans of Ann Leckie, Adrian Tchaikovsky and Arkady Martine.

This is a gloriously inventive story with a protagonist as unique and compelling as Martha Wells Murderbot or Anne Leckie’s Justice of Torrens, in a first-person narrative that spans centuries and covers star systems scattered by hundreds of light years. Yet at the same time this sprawling setting, and diverse peoples offer many resonances with our own small threatened contemporary world.

From the outset North gives us a distinctive and intriguing protagonist:

“My name is Mawukana na-Vdnaze, and I am a very poor copy of myself…”

In Mawukana – or Maw as his close companions call him – North manages to capture that blend of ‘not quite human – a little bit alien, but also quite scary’ and use that to shine a light on what ‘being human’ actually means.

Authors using the vast emptiness of interstellar space as their setting face a number of challenges. There is the envisioning of political systems, of alien ways of living, of somehow telescoping the travel time between the stars to facilitate a temporally contiguous narrative. However, in the hands of a skilled author like North those challenges become opportunities.

Star Trek has its warp drive, Murderbot has its stable wormhole technology, Hyperion and Hyperion Falls have their farcaster network, Ancillary Justice has its gates. North’s approach to the problem reminded me of Dune’s navigators and Embassytown’s immersers.

In Slow Gods interstellar space travel is facilitated by moving through arcspace – the dark. Navigating this strange mentally-toxic environment requires organic human pilots to interface with the ship’s systems, but even a handful of journeys will drive a pilot mad and most will retire after doing just a couple of journeys. Arcspace is a dark place – like the immer – full of unseen scrabbling noises and creatures that will prey on human minds more terrifyingly than any unseen monster under a childhood bed.

Maw’s gift is that he can navigate the dark any number of times, with great precision and without any harmful effects or intrusive auditory hallucinations for him or his passengers. Which makes him very much in demand as a freelance pilot and puts him at the centre of various instances of interstellar political action, conflict and environmental disaster.

A staple trope of space operas is the systemic societal antagonist of the authoritarian interstellar corporate entity projecting capitalist values (er… exploitation of people & resources) across light years of space. Many works (not just Blake’s 7 and Star Wars) set up a binary of evil government against doughty rebels. In Slow Gods North gives us a more diverse and nuanced range of polities – a veritable united nations (or Accord) of different ways of being and governing. Each polity controls a number of star systems where they have terraformed planets.

The end-stage authoritarian capitalist role is taken by ‘The Shine’ where the original Maw hailed from and found himself immediately in debt for medical expenses incurred in being born. However, other cultures and creatures that Maw interacts with include the artificially intelligent Quan who insert (download?!) themselves from their mainframes into different cybernetic receptacles including a simple hovering sphere and a convincingly rendered three tailed fox. There is also the consensus  – a gloriously interconnected hive mind of shared experiences and existence represented by the physical person of Cuxil and the multiplicity of minds she shares her consciousness with. And there are a range of human and non-human cultures from the Xian where Maw finds refuge, through the Adjumiris whose artefacts Maw transports, to Emmi the organic spaceship that is Maw’s favourite piloting assignment.

North captures the differentness of these civilisations in the ticks of body language, of etiquette, of rituals and even in the vast spectrum of genders and gender fluidity that they express. For the Quan, a sentient AI deserves a pronoun other than ‘it/its/it’ to distinguish it from a kettle or a table, so we get ‘qe/qis/qim’. The Adjumiri archivist Gebre is ‘te/tes/ter’ at the time that Maw knows ter, although Hadja – Maw’s Quan companion at the time – has qis concerns about their relationship. And as you can see, and as North makes clear, different pronouns are not that hard to get used to! Maw tries to explain to Gebre the importance of The Shine’s genders of perfected masculinity and femininity represented by the pronouns of hé and shé

“So…the important thing is your genitals?” Gebre blurted, when I explained this. “As in … even if you can’t see someone’s genitals, they are the first thing on your mind when you meet someone? It is their defining characteristic, above ethics, work, aptitudes, hobbies, hopes, loves et cetera?”

The event that drives the story is the warning delivered by the emissaries of a strange godlike interstellar entity called the Slow. The Slow simultaneously warns all civilisations that a supernova event in a 100 year’s time will send out a blast wave that will destroy all planetary life within a radius of 83 light years. This handily gives the different polities time (between 100 and 183 years – depending on distance from the event) to adapt or evacuate those of their worlds that the disaster will impact upon. To my mind this makes Slow Gods a climate change novel (in the same way that Don’t Look Up was really a climate change film). There is the scientific certainty of disaster and the range of responses from diligent rationality to absurd denial. At one point North mentions an interstellar conference “The Second Conference on Supernova Event Eighteen” that seemed horribly like the increasingly impotent and fossil fuel subverted IPCC gatherings.  Those at the conference who think they will be able to evade the consequences of the disaster (western nations) frankly don’t give a shit, while those who will inevitably suffer the most (Tuvalu) clamour for action.

It is the impending disaster of the supernova event that brings Maw and Gebre into contact as Maw and Emmi try to transport the artefacts of Adjumir – a mere seven light years from the soon to explode stars – away to safety, while the planet’s government try to organize the century long process of evacuating their entire population.

North interrogates the consequences of this diaspora – the fracturing of identity, the sense of being strangers in a foreign land – and the halting too-little-too-late efforts of even the most compassionate polities to address their moral obligation to accept refugees.

Looming over all of this is the hideous authoritarian polity of the Shine, that enslaves its people with debt, and elevates some higher managers to god-like status with its pronouns of distinction that marks hé as a superior person to a mere he.

The Shine is a labour-intensive society because automata that could do menial jobs require skilled people to build and maintain them. The Shine eschews the investment in education that would produce those skilled people because

Teach someone how to come up with new ideas, new concepts in the realms of engineering, design, industry and what if they came up with new ideas for something else? What if they turned and said, “But isn’t there another way of looking at this…?”

It had not always been this way with the Shine – there had been a time when learning was our sacred trust. That time had passed, ground down by powerful, comfortable men.

Deliberate poverty and ignorance have always been how the tiny but powerful elite manipulate and control the far more numerous masses.

The Shine hides the danger of the Supernova from its own people and finds it not ‘cost effective’ to try and shield its vulnerable planets. Its offer to the people of Adjumir is nothing but indentured servitude.

Naturally everyone of morals hates the Shine. Slavery is forbidden throughout the Accord and its members should have taken action against the Shine before, but the different polities are held in the grip of a kind of nuclear mutually assured destruction. ‘Blackships’ lurking on the edge of the arcspace like ICBM carrying nuclear submarines ensure no-one dares to confront the overweening arrogance of a political system that has taken an original ‘pioneer spirit’ and twisted it into a mantra and ‘those who have wealth/power deserve it, while those who have not – well it’s their own fault.’ (Mentioning no names but does any political party in a country between say, Canada and Mexico recognise something of themselves in that description!). The Shine’s defacto enslavement of its people is hedged around by those who should condemn it.

Thus: “Low waged debt-forgiveness labour” was how the debtor’s collar tended to be written up in Accord reports as scholars and diplomats swallowed their ethics in the face of a cruelty they dared not admit they were powerless to oppose.

Throughout this captivating example of universe-building, North peppers the narrative with science references that give the novel a lovely textured authenticity, for example in the nano-engineered telomeres that are significant in slowing the aging process of the Shine’s enhanced uber-males.

Maw’s story, birthed in near poverty in the Shine, is entangled in the fate of Adjumir, the Shine and the whole Accord in an entertaining and deliciously different tale. In Translation State Leckie gave us Qven – the human-looking, alien-being Presger Translator. Although Maw was born human, the Maw that tells us the story of Slow Gods is something different. Right upfront Maw promises to tell

“the story of the many lives I’ve lived since I died for the first time.”

Some years ago I greatly enjoyed one of North’s most celebrated books The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August which also features a character who dies multiple times. In Harry August’s case, he was reborn at the same starting point reliving a life through parallel time-lines with the opportunity to make different decisions and do his bit to save the multiverse.

Maw’s experience of ‘reincarnation’ is more along the lines of Captain Jack Harkness from Dr Who. But whereas Jack Harkness stayed and remained human, Maw is something different – the clue being in the phrase ‘a very poor copy of myself’. In Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) there is a character called Ilia who is destructively scanned by an Artificially intelligent hostile entity and then the entity inserts a copy of her as a probe to interface and help it understand the human crew of the Enterprise.

In some way, during Maw’s first journey as an enslaved Shine pilot, a copy of him was created replete with all that person’s memories – but with some frightening skills and abilities, that mean those around him live in fear of him becoming ‘dysregulated.’

Maw (the copy) was discovered – rescued – by the Xian. After some initial hiccoughs the Xian accommodated him (in-between piloting assignments) on a nice island with a garden and a revolving assignment of Quan as his companions whose job it is to monitor Maw and ‘keep him regulated.’

North’s fascinating range of characters, include Maw’s different Quan companions such as the officiously curious Hadja and the vulpine but empathic Rencki, However, it is the relationship with Adjumiri archivist Gebre that is the spine of the narrative, from Maw’s first stumbling attempts to master Adjumiri protocols through Gebre’s blunt approach and beyond

“Are you interested in sharing skin with me?”

“I… What?”

“Are you interested in sharing skin?” te repeated. “It is a simple question.”

Hadja hissed behind me… “It is a sexual advance,” qe explained, “which we covered in your Adjumiri language course section 7.2; clearly you were not paying attention.”

“Oh”

“The polite form of the decline is ‘My voice must rest, though I shall often speak of you.”

“I see.”

“Do you require further help with the translation?”

“I’m wondering… what is the polite way in which people say yes?”

North’s prose is both fluid and sharply observational, not just about the kind of environmental and societal issues that cumber the Accord just as much as our own world, but also about people.

“I don’t know how you’re meant to be this small in a universe this big, this insignificant in a galaxy where every decision matters, where every life is precious. I don’t know how to feel so loud and huge inside, and so small and quiet before the dark.”

Gebre didn’t answer, and we were tiny, and the vastness around us was so impossibly vast, so unfathomable in its blackness, that suddenly being tiny felt OK, like a very normal thing to be.

Maw’s life is not simply one of love and piloting, nor even of personal tragedy. There is action and danger aplenty with many tense moments around high stakes events. Just because death is nor permanent for Maw (he makes a kind of Schrodinger’s corpse, only dead as long as he is observed and believed to be so) doesn’t mean every eventuality is escapable. And, curiosity drives him into danger, as not everyone bows down to the Shine and Maw finds himself in a war of sorts with allies who have to be very angry.

I did not fully understand, until much later, when it occurred to me that the thing that was forbidden – the thing that is always forbidden in all wars, especially the longest – is thinking of your enemy as people.

In that war, North gives a chilling account of a town bombed out of existence for being a hot bed of rebellion. A day’s warning to leave via a single road that the enemy had blocked, then indiscriminate carpet bombing from a foe armed with precision weaponry, and anyone who hid in tunnels underground condemned as a rebel, because only rebels use tunnels, while those staying above ground were blasted to smithereens. It is nearly 90 years since Guernica, but it seems the terrorization of civilian populations is still a feature of the present moment and indeed the far future.

When the Shine’s leader (a man who uses a semi-staged assassination attempt to brandish his wounds and bolster his popularity!) is offered aid for one of the Shine’s threatened planets he knocks it back.

“Thank you for your offer of assistance,” The Executorium replied to the Accord as the Edge washed closer to Cha-mdo, burning everything in its path. “But our scientists say the people of Cha-mdo will be absolutely fine.”

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

That is a feeling that many of us feel as we … er… look around ourselves.

In any sweeping tale of social disaster and political crisis, there is a challenge for the author of making the big, small, of clothing tragedies that affect millions, in the skin of a single relatable life. As readers – as humans – we empathise with individuals not nations.

In Slow Gods, North gives us a wide-ranging enthralling, resonant and cathartic fable of our own world’s predicament but anchors it with individual characters, both participants and witnesses to events, that we can connect with.

As Gebre says in one of ter many thought provoking moments

“Intimacy, shared trust and joy – these should be powerful, important acts, acts that are celebrated When you leave, you will remember his, no? Our connection creates it, the ritual seals the memory in, and you will be a little bit different, perhaps, when you return to the stars. I will have made you different, do you see? What greater meaning can there be in life than to touch another?”

Slow Gods is due for release 18th November 2025 – you can pre-order your copy on Bookshop.org