Claire North is the pen-name of Catherine Webb and they also write as Kate Griffin in genres across fantasy and science fiction although Claire says “Obviously I think genre is a lie. It’s a very useful lie, a useful algorithm which allows you to walk into a bookshop and I say, I enjoyed this so I might enjoy that.”

They have kindly joined us at the Hive today to talk about their latest release Slow Gods and other writerly things.

Hi, Claire and thanks very much for agreeing to take a few questions from the Hive. 

Back in 2023 you let your readers know that “in something of a sharp left turn, I’ve finished writing my first ever stab at space opera.  (Pew pew!)  And it was flipping hard.” With Slow Gods release on November 18th, people will get to see the fruits of those labours. Having been lucky enough to get an ARC – I can assure them they are in for a treat.

TO: Can you tell us a bit about what drew you to that genre, the challenges you found and how you met them?

CN: Well, I’ve always enjoyed a good bit of space opera.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s some that’s just bad, some that’s kinda problematic, but there’s plenty that is mind-blowingly brilliant.  The challenge of telling a compelling, human story on a canvas so vast is mind-boggling.  (Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time is a real stand out, just soggy in breathtaking craft.) 

How do you convey the passage of centuries in a relatable way, express emotion over so much distance, establish relationships on a galactic scale?  Every decision has a narrative consequence.  Can you travel faster than light?  If so, the possibilities of huge cultural melting-pots suddenly exist.  Are you limited to sub-light speeds?  If so, thousands of years could pass between each encounter, and those who are left behind are likely dead already.  Keeping hold of the cascade of consequences and tying them into a meaningful narrative… bit of a mind-melt.  You have to pull out every trick in the bucket, and even then odds are you’ll miss something.  One solution is to set clear rules – speed of travel, alien life, political situation, cultural expectations etc. – as rules create boundaries, and boundaries create tension, and can keep you from getting carried away with, frankly, inexplicable nonsense.  But even with rules laid down, the scale of the thing is a delicious and terrifying problem to solve.

That said, I have a minor fear of getting too set in my ways, of refusing to try stuff because it frightens me or missing out on the opportunity to learn or meet people or just generally keep the old noggin squishy at the edges (in a good way) and so… space opera.  Haven’t tried it before; fear fouling it up… let’s give it a go?

Also I’d just done three books set in the world of the Ancient Greeks, and while I’m hugely grateful for the reception they received and had a blast writing them, one of the consequences was getting sucked into the world of Greek retellings.  Though there is a lot of potential in the genre and some great work being done, it is also incredibly restrictive, prone to repetition and there are some aspects that could be… problematic.  Restrictions offer a challenge in themselves, but it was time to move on to the polar opposite, as a sorta palette cleanser of a book.

A great answer and I love that phrase “Soggy in breathtaking craft” a great way to endorse fine writing. And, in a delightful bit of reciprocity, Slow Gods has earned some great praise from other sci-fi authors including Adrian Tchaikovsky who called it “An astonishing, thought provoking and above all touching story of found meaning and lost humanity”. Megan E O’Keefe  found it “Deeply imaginative and achingly human, Slow Gods lures you gently into the dark between the stars”. Part of its fascination for me is the way the galaxy wide tale of multiple civilisations is delivered through the first-person view of a very unique protagonist.

TO: Can you tell us about Mawukana na-Vdnaze, and where you got your inspiration for him from?

CN: With the nuance of a brick, I think it’s fair to say that Maw is me going into a book post-a-fairly-recent autism diagnosis.  There are dangers in writing a character who is seen as fundamentally ‘other’ as a metaphor for the autistic experience, and I hope I didn’t mess it up too disgustingly.  But there is also room to push and poke at that, and have that character poke at the universe, in a way that gives room for the neurodiverse experience, while also, hopefully, cracking on with an enjoyable story. 

Simultaneously, there is the trope of protagonists in SFF already being ‘someone who matters’.  Endless princes, super-powerful wizards, generals and leaders of society.  It makes a lot of sense to focus on these characters, as they are likely to have the most agency to advance the story, but I still have a fascination with all the bit-players who just get caught up in stuff beyond their control, and are doing their absolute best to survive while abstract figures on the edge of their awareness are making Big Decisions with cascading consequences.  Maw sits in an interesting half-way house here – an absolute nobody, but with the potential to mess things up around him, if things go wrong.

Yes Maw is curiously a nobody and yet possessed of a power that puts him at the centre of everything – and there is a lot of everything going on in Slow Gods.

A lot of space operas deliver a kind of binary political landscape (doughty rebels/downtrodden workers on the one side against evil empire/federation/corporation on the other). However, in Slow Gods the different polities and peoples within and beyond the Accord give a much more textured and nuanced political landscape.

TO: Can you tell us a bit about the range of places, people and politics readers can look forward to exploring in Slow Gods?

CN:  Without wanting to spoil too much, there’s a whole bunch of locations that I tried to make a) similar enough that I could justify human life in all of them and massive cultural inter-mingling and also b) different enough that you get the sense of unique cultures and expectations in each.

For example, the Shine, the culture that Maw is from, is a frontier society turned to brutal, oppressive madness.  Standing in stark contrast to that is Xihana, a bio-philic and fairly generous culture full of potential, but perhaps a little prone to caution where maybe action might be more desired.  The Spindle is a space station where good manners are absolutely key to many people surviving in a hugely cramped and potentially dangerous environment; Adjumir is a world tangled up in endless rituals, endless quirks of speech and manner that if you weren’t born to it, you’d probably never understand.  Even within these worlds I tried to do a bit of cultural variation.  Architecture and cultural norms vary from continent to continent, and there is no ‘forest world’ or ‘ocean world’ etc…  Everywhere is diverse within itself, to a degree.

The working hypothesis could best be summed up as this: the universe is vast and humanity is hugely inter-mingled across planets and societies, but for the majority of people if you’re born in one part of one world, odds are you’re gonna stick around that local area, complete with its winter rituals, its funny accent and that weird thing your uncle always does at dinner.  And though humans can cross between worlds, you’re going to struggle with the gravity, the slight changes in oxygen content, the unusual pathogens and hayfever like you cannot believe.  The challenge is and remains integrating the enormous with the parochial, and hopefully the structures of these various worlds help in achieving that?  Perhaps?  Fingers crossed…

Alongside that political pluralism, Slow Gods has a spectrum and fluidity of genders and associated pronouns. I loved Maw’s sentient artificial intelligent companions – particularly Rencki and it seemed right that qe deserved something more than the neutral ‘it’ you would give to a kettle. I also loved the fluidity of Aldarian genders that Gebre discussed in ter conversations with Maw.

TO: When in the writing process did you decide to explore genders and pronouns in this way, and did it make the writing easier or harder?

CN:  In recent years I’ve started using she/they pronouns.  My preference is for ‘they’ but if you get cross at people calling you ‘she’ despite your patient reminders, you’ll have a fairly grumpy old time of things. 

There is one setting also where I don’t mind being ‘she’ – when teaching a martial art.  In that context, being ‘she’ I think is a more empowering form of the gender than the usual stuff associated with the feminine, and also, hopefully, brings a bit of comfort to women who come to train at the club, seeing another woman in a senior position and very comfortable with weapons. 

I’m often mis-gendered in the world at large as ‘he’, being as I am a 5′ 11″ human with a peculiar face, often carrying a set of spanners and wearing steel-capped boots, and though people correct themselves fairly quickly, the awareness that I don’t read as feminine has been with me basically my whole life.  My efforts at performing femininity – clothes with bits for boobs and jewellery and makeup and stuff – have always been bad and made me feel uncomfortable – but the consequence has been decades of people finding yet another reason to ‘other’ me.  I am ‘other’ in my autism.  I don’t say ‘soft’ and ‘sensitive’ things, have no interest in having a baby, like fixing electronics and training with quarterstaff etc…  The human brain is wired to make category predictions – ‘male/female’ ‘threat/friend’ ‘pleasant/unpleasant’ and that’s all gender is – a time-saving, sugar-saving prediction about how people should be, how they will behave, based on their masculine or feminine appearance.  Not conforming to that prediction burns more sugar in the human brain, and the brain… well, it really hates having to burn sugar.  Easier to just send an ‘error’ message and back away, than reconsider a prediction that is so, so ingrained in every aspect of our civilization.

All of which is a long way to say… I’ve been thinking about gender a lot.  I know that the UK courts have recently decreed that it’s all about your genitals, but this isn’t an accurate reflection of how gender works in society.  We are not in fact asking everyone we meet to drop their pants so we can have a good old peer at their nethers and the only people who worry about such things should be you and your gynaecologist.  The rest of us are predicting gender based on outward appearance and expectation and given that… well then, clearly gender is fluid, is in fact a cultural consensus rather than a thing defined by willy/no-willy.

Given all that, having at least one planet where gender was overtly fluid, overtly constructed, and then some… just seemed like a fun and gentle way to muck around with these ideas, and not hugely challenging, since, as I think a character vaguely pointed out, you can keep track of innumerable different kinds of sausage, so remembering a few pronouns really shouldn’t be that much of a stretch.

Thank you for those very eloquent and illuminating observations on gender and social expectations.

In your blog you say “I am aware that this is a blog where I’m meant to talk about writing… but mostly talk about climate change.” And I think it’s fair to say Slow Gods is to – a significant extent – a climate change (cli-fi) novel, in the similar way perhaps to how Don’t Look Up is a climate change film.

TO: Would you like to tell us how far – and how intentionally – the contemporary issue of the climate crisis is explored in Slow Gods?

CN: Again, continuing my theme of being as nuanced as a brick… it was hella intentional, and not a subtle metaphor.  The basic premise (this is not a spoiler) is that in 100 years time, a binary star is going to go supernova.  The resulting shockwave will travel outwards at the speed of light, hitting the first planet in its path about 7 years later, and then more planets further out as it continues to expand.  The nearer you are, the more devastated life will be, but the further away the easier it is to shrug and say ‘well, this is a problem for 160 years time’ or ‘maybe by the time it reaches us, it won’t really be a shockwave at all’ – to tell yourself any story you can by which it’s not a big deal, or at least, not your big deal, right here, right now.

Which is, in other words, basically the climate crisis, but through the means of a slow-travelling supernova.  We know now that the climate crisis is here, it’s getting worse, it’s coming for us all – but the exact timeframe and the details of the consequence are still far enough off (but they’re not) and so big as to be difficult to imagine that it’s in some ways easier to shrug and say, ‘Well, someone else will deal with it later’ or ‘Maybe it won’t be that bad’.  The only real difference between the supernova and the climate crisis, is that the supernova has a predictable deadline.  We know when it will hit, and that’s how long you have to prepare.  It makes action a little more measurable, and decidedly more urgent – but the timeframe in which it happens also leaves room for people to make bad, short-termist and frankly selfish decisions, as we are doing now.  It hopefully raises the question: how do we plan for people who will be born in 100 years time?  What sacrifices do we choose to make today, to secure a better tomorrow?  At its core, the climate crisis demands that we think about these questions, and at its core, currently, we don’t.

Yes exactly. The question of how do we plan for people who will be born in 100 years time should be the key motivator for action, but sadly stock exchange futures aren’t being bought or sold that far in advance so the money doesn’t care!

Back in 2017, talking about a very different book (The End of the Day) you said “I mean, don’t get me wrong – all writers are leeching off their environments all the time, and I have no doubt that I have leeched both from literature and the world.” Around the time you were writing Slow Gods you said “2023 continued to be a geo-political dumpster-fire.  From the ongoing unjustified and barbaric invasion of Ukraine to the brutality of the Israel-Hamas war, with ecological calamities accelerating in number and scale while climate conferences are lead by science-denying oil barons, global news continues to feel like a depressing slog.” 

TO: In writing the hideously exploitative and authoritarian polity of The Shine where Maw was born (into instant debt), how far was it allegory how far was it catharsis for you as an author?

CN: Is allegory allowed to be nuanced?  I suspect not.  I suspect it’s ok that the Shine is, as your correctly identify, neo-capitalism run to its disgusting and logical extreme. 

There is a thing that often happens in politics where people dismiss other people by going ‘yeah, well, that’s just leftie trash’.  However I’d argue that the evolution of capitalism we see at this exact moment of history is exactly as dangerous and threatening as it appears, and we can demonstrate that across a huge range of metrics.  Wealth inequality – the highest since records began.  Extremist politics, both fuelled by the wealth’s domination of the media but also by the scarcity that inequality begins – soaring.  Politicians – frequently incredibly wealthy, consistently passing laws that protect the incredibly wealthy while the poor suffer from slashed welfare and increased taxes.  Our prisons are run for profit rather than to serve society, and increasingly our healthcare is under threat from people who also want to make money out of human suffering.  I cannot understand finding it anything apart from obscene to look at someone going through hell, and rub your hands and go ‘yum yum yum profit’.  As for taking responsibility for long-term gain… while the top 1% of the world own 45% of its wealth, we can see them using that wealth to buy our media, our government and lobby for policies that cripple us in terms of climate action, erode individual rights and champion such god-awful climate disasters as a rapid expansion of AI, while the tech is still utterly unable to do anything but lie, and with no consideration of the consequences.

All of which is to say… we can objectively see the harm that is happening to our society, right now.  And we can objectively say that it is being not insignificantly fuelled by the creation of a new semi-feudal elite of billionaires who are currently untouchable by laws or consequences.

I wish I could say that writing all this was cathartic, but honestly, it mostly just makes me furious.  Ask me again when we have a wealth tax going after 1-2% on fortunes above £10 million, and I’ll let you know how catharsis is going….

Yup – ‘a semi-feudal elite of untouchable billionaire’ feels like a pretty accurate descriptor for those currently holding (and tweaking) the levers of power, wealth and influence in our contemporary society.

But also back in 2017 you were quick to point out that “Technically the first rule of writing is ‘put the story first’. Going into a thing determined to write an epic eulogy about the demise of a political or social idea is… problematic, unless you’ve got a story.” From its disturbing ‘clock striking 13’ kind of opening line Slow Gods draws the reader into the story.

TO: How far did you plan out this story (or indeed any of your stories) in advance (the plotster approach), how far did the story lead you (The pantster approach)?

CN: I sit somewhere in between.  I always have a beginning, a middle and an end.  And there is always a logical flow to narrative.  If person x does action y, this will have consequences to your characters and world and you can logically feel the way such things would unfold.  That said, I also believe that no synopsis survives first contact with the page.  You cannot fully predict which way a character will go or how others will respond, or what exactly might be needed in a situation to turn the narrative in a certain direction – there’s just too many variables.  I am a believer in deletion as the path to editorial bliss – far better to erase words that are getting you in a knot than try and shoehorn them back into shape – but other than that discipline, I am happy in letting things untangle themselves as the words bimble on. 

How true that is can vary a bit between books.  With the Penelope books, Homer had already given quite a firm narrative structure, at least for The Last Song of Penelope, and there were certain things that had to be hit and some choices that had to be made to ensure that they arrived there in a satisfactory manner.  However with the latest thing I worked on, I tied myself in knots trying to reach certain narrative beats and eventually just had to take the whole thing in 10,000 word chunks, stopping at the end of each to check in with how it was going relative to the overall plan, and whether the overall plan still made sense.

I loved the science references within Slow Gods – for example the incidental mention of telomeres on DNA as part of managing the aging process. Your other career is a very technical one in stage lighting for music gigs. 

TO: How far did you use that technical background and wider knowledge to illuminate (forgive the pun!) the universe of Slow Gods?

CN: That’s very kind, but honestly, I think most people doing spacey-wacey stuff have to spend a bit of time thinking about ion drives and solar flares and the tangle between distance and time etc..  If you don’t, odds are you’re going to write an iffy space opera with a universe that doesn’t necessarily hold together – and consistency and having a hand on your craft is essential for maintaining audience trust.  Sure, there is science-fiction-as-magic available to you, and many ways of doing that which are fun.  But if you don’t have established rules, you don’t have jeopardy.  You can just hand-wave a solution to the problem, and readers will absolutely feel disappointment when you do.  In that sense, established science can offer these rules ready-baked for you, plus or minus some jiggery-pokery, so why wouldn’t you take this gift?

I think my technical background has hammered home two essential things: 1.  If in doubt, read the manual.  2.  Anything can be fault-found if you just follow a logical process. I volunteer at a repair café, where I mainly, obviously, fix lights, but am increasingly confident in opening up other broken electronics and having a nose around, because fundamentally, a lot of things can be logicked into submission – or there’ll already be a guide on YouTube to how to open this damn toaster up.  As applies to space opera in particular, spending a little bit of time essentially reading the beginner’s astrophysics manual and thinking about all the ways space wants to kill you will enhance any text, and has the benefit of being more engaging than changing a bulb too.

You have written in other genres too, including fantasy, and a number of fantasy authors have dabbled in Dungeons and Dragons, often as DMs. While the crafting of a story is perhaps similar, there can be a frustration that players can derail the best laid plots of DM in ways that fictional characters don’t.

TO: How far has your own experience of D&D DMing for a group of players (aka herding cats) frustrated or inspired your writing? 

CN: Honestly, if I’ve learned one thing as a DM it’s that the cats are gonna go where they want to go.  When I prep for a session, I write a beginning, an end, and a whole bunch of NPCs and puzzles and combat encounters, with maybe a 40% chance my players will stumble into one.  The game is best when players have freedom as choice, even if it can also sometimes be a nightmare to corral them towards a conclusion.  In that sense, I think DnD has probably made me even more loosey-goosey than I already was, but given that the game is by definition collaborative, and a novel is entirely solo and under my control, I experience them as fairly different things. 

One commonality though – every one of my DnD sessions is geared towards maximum emotional challenge for a character.  If that means convincing a spectre in a haunted basement to let my players file their tax return, I am 100% into it.  Physical jeopardy is just blood effects and bicep-clenching, unless there is emotional jeopardy too.

Ah yes – getting a reaction on an emotional level is such an important part of getting people’s engagement and investment in a story.

Physical jeopardy is just blood effects and bicep-clenching, unless there is emotional jeopardy too.

Your family background is in Germany – with your grandmother being a veteran of the kinder transport and her experience clearly meant a lot to you. Besides more writing and lighting for gigs, you set as a hope for 2025. “I would also like to have more headspace to throw at activism and volunteering, and have the privilege that my writing career should, in theory, enable me to do so.” I was preparing this question the day after Gary Lineker – in accepting the NTA for best presenter – said “I think it demonstrates that perhaps it’s okay sometimes for us to use our platform to speak up on behalf of those who have no voice.” 

TO: How far have you been able to and how far would you like to use your own voice as an author – either through your books or through other means? 

CN: I’m gonna have to answer this in several parts, forgive me!

So I think it’s fair to say that as a scribbler, certainly in the last ten years or so, I’ve got a lot more overtly political.  From misery-slogs like 84K through to climate-fiction like Notes from the Burning Age, through to Slow Gods with its rampant capitalism and supernova-as-climate-metaphor: subtle it ain’t.  That said, the rule always has to be ‘put the story first’.  I may have very strong opinions about empathy and politics, but unless they are invested in a narrative complete with heartache and drama, I may as well just be an angry blogger.  It’s the role of journalism to deliver balanced facts that you experience in your head; it’s the job of fiction to deliver empathetic story that you feel in your heart – therein lies its power.

I may have very strong opinions about empathy and politics, but unless they are invested in a narrative complete with heartache and drama, I may as well just be an angry blogger. 

I would like to be better at communicating via social media.  I switched over to Instagram when Musk turned Twitter into just another right-wing slaughteryard, but Meta is barely any better, especially as it continues to bow and scrape towards the wannabe dictator that is Trump.  (It also illegally stole works, including mine, to train its AI, helping to usher in a world in which the creative arts are in danger of a very real extinction.)

However, a couple of things have slowed me down from more vivid action.  On a trivial level, this year I moved house – to a ruin.  (I knew it was a ruin when I bought it, but still.)  For the last 6 months I have been living out of a suitcase and surviving entirely on peanut butter sandwiches, and my capacity to do much beyond the minimum is at rock bottom.  I’m hoping once properly in the new gaff, with hot running water and sockets on the wall, I’ll be able to re-engage.  But I learned from a few years ago when I was very active in the Green Party that the burnout is real, and once you’ve burned it is an incredibly slow and hard recovery.

I am also scared.  There is no real safety online, and no room for nuance whatsoever even though our world desperately, desperately needs nuance to survive.  99% of the people I interact with are wonderful and generous and kind, but you live in fear of that 1% crawling out of the woodwork who at best, will insult you and diminish you – especially now I favour using gender-neutral pronouns – and at worst will go out of their way to threaten your safety.  Now, objectively, I know that I’m pretty safe.  I teach a martial art, I am careful with my data etc..  But I have also had the experience of living above a man experiencing some problems of his own, who routinely threatened to hurt me until eventually the police were called and we ended up in court.  And even if I knew objectively that I’d probably be ok, I cannot emphasise enough how exhausting it is being on your guard 24/7.  When I have a place to live and space to think, I hope to feel less this way and just crack on – and I admire all the many, many people who do the work already – but until then the online world feels incredibly hostile, and goodness, I’m knackered.

You mentioned my Gran – she was a German Jew who survived the 1930s when every other member of her family was wiped out – and she believed in freedom for Palestine.  I want to honour that, and acknowledge that a genocide has been committed by the government of Netanyahu against innocent civilians on a mind-shattering scale.  But the toxicity around this simple truth is exhausting, and I am exhausted, and that’s also kind of the point.  Exhaustion in and of itself makes people scared – it’s one of the many, many ways in which roaring right-wing media and politicians keeps people down.

Exhaustion in and of itself makes people scared – it’s one of the many, many ways in which roaring right-wing media and politicians keeps people down.

All that said, I do enjoy volunteering at the repair café.  It’s nice to be doing something helpful, and though there is human interaction (my autistic nightmare) it ticks the boxes of being climate-related (the right to repair is a genuinely good movement), community-centred and challenging the technical side of my brain with learning new things.

Barbara Kingsolver wrote Flight Behaviour as a response to the climate change crisis saying in an interview “What can I do but write a novel.” However, novelists trying to offer hope and inspire action face the problem of “protagonismos” where the resolution relies on a single character’s heroic endeavour – like Brad Pitt in the remarkably unfaithful adaptation of Max Brooks World War Z. Your own blog offers some answers and links to the “What can I do?” question that torments ‘ordinary’ people who sense they need to do ‘something’ but feel they and their efforts might be insignificant. ( https://www.wwf.org.uk/ways-to-help-our-world and 350.org, and Friends of the Earth).

TO: In Slow Gods do you see Maw as the pawn (ordinary person) or the queen (Brad Pitt?!) in bringing the story to a successful conclusion?

CN:  Maw is, in my head, 100% a pawn.  A pawn who has disproportionate impact on the world around him, but is still fundamentally and to a large degree being directed by other forces at play.  This does present a writing challenge – there still needs to be motivation and agency – but also I think fairly represents the experience of 99.9% of the world. 

It’s also worth remembering, with my political hat on, that especially in this age, mass movements are nothing more and nothing less than a collection of individuals.  Every time someone says ‘I can’t be bothered to vote, it won’t make a difference’ I want to scream: ‘but there are tens of thousands of people in this borough who think that way, and if you all turned up and voted after all, you would have enormous power!’  One of the tragedies of modern democracy is that we have such low turnout at the polls because people feel – and are being made to feel – like there’s no point participating.  The same with the climate crisis – it all just feels too overwhelming.  But every mass movement is made up of nothing more and nothing less than individuals.  Taking action, having agency, both lowers your stress and feelings of helplessness, while also actually, collectively, making a difference.

You spoke on your blog about your diagnosis of autism as an adult and how that ‘changed everything and nothing’. My son had a similar experience of diagnosis and the kind of light it shone through the foggy past of “Oh! So that’s why…” Although, as you say “To quote the wonderful podcast 1800 Seconds on Autism: if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person.  We are individuals, not just a diagnosis.”

TO: Looking back do you see if or how autism might have played a part in your early writing career, given that you started writing and were successfully published at quite a young age.

CN:  There is a really icky cliché of the ‘autistic savant’ – someone who is limited in certain ways, but excels at others.  It is horrible in its expectations, setting up an unrealistic hierarchy of what ‘acceptable’ autism should look like, and deserves to be kicked into dust.  That said, I’m aware that there are some ways in which this toxic cliché could be applied to my experience – but please don’t take that as meaning there’s “truth” in it.  Everyone has stuff they’re good and bad at, it’s just that the peaks and rather significant troughs of my competences are a little bit more ‘wheeeee’ than expected.

Being published while young was in many ways brilliant, and I owe my parents a great deal for how well they protected me and kept me grounded.  But there were also some icky emotional side-effects.  Everyone kept telling me that I was remarkable at doing the words, so when I failed in other areas it was especially disappointing and hard to fathom.  Surely a novel-writing ‘prodigy’ shouldn’t struggle this hard with learning German, utterly fail to grasp circular mechanics or not understand, let alone care, how grammar works?  (I do not to this day understand grammar.  Words are light and music.  Nouns and sub-clauses and… stuff… are just lumpy, soundless bits that people throw in to ruin the flow.)

(I do not to this day understand grammar.  Words are light and music.  Nouns and sub-clauses and… stuff… are just lumpy, soundless bits that people throw in to ruin the flow.)

All of which is a long way of saying: yes, the autism almost certainly played a part in my writing career.  But the world is full of glorious neuro-typical writers who have achieved stunning things while also battling with demons and failing to achieve basic competencies in other areas, and we are in no hurry to medicalise their experience, and so, to conclude… screw it.

I don’t believe you can be a successful writer without also being a great reader – maybe even a voracious reader. In describing the writing of Slow Gods you said “With every week that passed, I was reminded how much awe I have for the many wonderful of science fiction writers who seem able to churn out so much dazzling imagination – while also being consistent and coherent.” 

TO: Which works of Sci-Fi would you recommend to others as having made the biggest impact on you, and why?

CN: Buckle up for a list….

Iain M. Banks – The Player of Games.  Just a thoroughly tight spacey-wacey thriller that delivers on its promise and keeps on delivering as the scale and stakes steadily, nail-bitingly build.

Adrian Tchaikovsky – Children of Time.  I mean, everything he does basically, there isn’t really a duffer in any of it and always a depth of humanity and intelligence that’s pretty awe-inspiring, but if we’re just picking one, then blimey he knocked it out of the park while doing the literal rise and fall of civilizations in a thrilling, humane, dazzling way.

Anne McCaffrey – The Ship Who Sang.  Shout out to one of the OG’s who paved the way not just for a lot of modern, nuanced and emotional SF, but also helped carve out the path for generations of women yet to come.

Ursula Le Guin – The Left Hand of Darkness.  Again, just having to pick one thing here from an extraordinary backlist, but everything that modern SF writers want to try and explore – gender, society, culture, language – Le Guin has probably already done, but beautifully.

Becky Chambers – A Long Way To A Small Angry Planet.  Sometimes you just want a hug in a book, and Becky Chambers consistently delivers a tender embrace on a galactic scale.

And now to move away from books briefly, ‘cos why not….?

Star Wars – not a book, but everyone ever has now lifted from it, which is ironic, given it was already lifting from everyone, ever, already.  There’s some real trash Star Wars out there, but there’s also Andor, the TV no one thought they wanted and which in fact, we all needed right now.

Farscape – what if your TV aliens were actually, even slightly, alien?  Much of Farscape was bad.  But in an age where ‘alien’ was ‘like me but doesn’t eat apples’, Farscape actually tried to have a bit of fun, and did a surprisingly good job nailing character development over four deeply patchy series.

Stargate (the TV series) – it was, in so many ways, bad.  But it was one of the first bits of TV I ever remember watching where a woman was allowed to be the one building the nuclear reactor, which by the standards of the late 1990s merits a salute.

Dr Who –  technically I’m an Arsenal fan, mostly because I was born near the stadium, and the experience of supporting Arsenal is an emotional rollercoaster.  At the start of a season you think they’re playing brilliantly (with a few dodgy games) then they have an awful run and you feel your heart sinking but you stick with it, then they soar again and climb back towards first, and inevitably finish second or third in the league.  So it is with the recent emotional experience of Dr Who.  That said, at its best it does a similar, very British thing as Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – it nails the mundane, the domestic, the ‘I just want a cup of tea’ spirit, against a background of enormous, inter-galactic consequence.

In your blog you’ve teasingly mentioned a ‘top-secret project’ a ‘non-fiction project’ and a sad 60,000 word collection of dead words (that may yet be resurrected?!).

TO: What will we see next from the pen of Claire North/Catherine Webb/Kate Griffin? Tell us as much as you can! 

CN: Top Secret Project No. 1 is finished, edited, awaiting proof reading.  I am trying to think what I can say that doesn’t spoil too much.  Um… it is hella timey-wimey.  My editor is of the belief that it is sweepingly romantic.  I think it’s a murder mystery spanning some 7000+ years.  She experienced emotions at the travails the characters experience as they try to come to terms with loss and responsibility.  I experienced emotion when someone from the future congratulated a librarian on their excellent cataloguing.  We are very different people, my editor and I, and everything I write is better for her intervention.

Top Secret Project No. 2 is currently at the postit-notes-on-the-wall stage, plus a lot of thinking about stuff while working on Top Secret Project No. 3 over the summer, which was writing for a video game.  Alas, I can tell you almost nothing about the video game, but I can tell you that Top Secret Project No. 2 has best been summed up by my partner with the immortal phrase:  “Darling, fratricide is not cosy.”

I can tell you that Top Secret Project No. 2 has best been summed up by my partner with the immortal phrase:  “Darling, fratricide is not cosy.”

And finally!

TO: Where there any questions you were hoping (or worried) that we might ask, and how would you have answered them?

CN:

1. “But surely non-binary is just like… not a real thing?”

I think we’ve covered some of these already, but to delve a tiny bit deeper… since masculine and feminine are, at their heart, predictive constructs to enable you to guess at a stranger’s likely behaviour (unless, of course, you really are demanding everyone drops their pants when they meet you, in which case… um…?) the question arises: what if you don’t really fancy either identity?  What if you feel that the expectations of the feminine are oppressive and toxic, and though feminism has done some sterling work, we’re still in an era where women are asked if they can really do their jobs while being mothers, and what shoes they wore to collect their Nobel Prize.  Equally, we live in an age where masculinity seems incredibly tied up in shame and capitalism – don’t show vulnerability, do make lots of money, don’t express needs or emotions other than anger because to do so ‘makes you a girl’.

For me – and this is just my experience – non-binary is a rejection of either of these nonsenses, and a space to be… just me.  Neither feminine nor masculine.  That said, if in a few decades I feel that the expectations of ‘feminine’ are no longer about our sweet, sensitive voices and volumnising mascara and being thin with no visible signs of aging, I’ll happily consider jumping back on the female wagon.  Let’s just not hold our breaths.

2. “You can’t be autistic with the associated sleep disorder that’s very common with autism and background chronic pain, you’ve done so much!”

It’s hard to express how disheartening this is to hear.  I know it’s intended as a compliment, meant in the nicest possible way, but it’s just depressing.  Because yes, technically, I have had a lovely old run through life and enjoy 99% of what I do, bar the dread of humans talking to me, of course.  But the price that has been paid has been fairly unrelenting.  Days, weeks of my life lost to being unable to physically speak because I’m so tired and overloaded.  Weeks, months lost to being unable to concentrate because of exhaustion and pain.  I look at people ‘doing things spontaneously’ and I simply cannot comprehend it.  My life is rich and full, because I plan everything out – and then I plan the time required to live with the consequences.  And those days are boring.  Pain is boring.  Exhaustion is boring.  And naturally, I am ashamed.  I’m ashamed because society bombards us with images of people going clubbing and meeting up with their friends and working ridiculous hours in demanding jobs and having hobbies and doing day trips and so on.  I know these images aren’t real, that the drumbeat of shame comes for us all, but that doesn’t stop me feeling it.  I feel it every time I go to a book festival and generous, lovely people ask me to join them for a drink and a bite to eat, and I hesitate before saying yes because I know that the cost will be spending the next day in more pain than paracetamol can dent.  I feel it every time I teach lighting for a week, or work on a project (that’s not writing a novel) for more than a few weeks at a time – that though I can do the work, the exhaustion after means I can’t do any more, and I am a failure, and ashamed.

Look.  I don’t want to create the impression of a misery-story.  I do genuinely live a wonderful life.  But it’s largely wonderful because it is planned down to the millisecond, and that planning lets me write books, and do a martial art, and in a structured and sensible way, see the people I love, which is a joy and a gift.  And I choose, every day, to pay a price for the good things I have, in unseen, non-verbal overload, fatigue and pain.

(That said, shout out to the NHS, which post-autism diagnosis have been really very good about listening and taking what I say seriously and doing their best.  Pre-diagnosis, I was merely an anxious woman, but still, let’s take the win….)

3. “Oh goodness I’m so anxious about the climate crisis, I just feel paralysed with dread and like everything I do is meaningless.”

Doing something – anything – about the climate crisis will a) make you feel better and b) genuinely make a difference.  A friend once complained that there was no point buying shampoo bars and eco-whatsits and environmentally-friendly-thingymebobs, but again, a bit like voting, if everyone does it, then the market will fall in line.  Switching energy supplier to a renewable provider – easy, and these days, affordable.  Insulating a home, choosing to cycle instead of drive on short journeys – you’re right, individually this is nothing – but collectively it changes everything, so why not be a part of the collective?  But above all, voting for change, signing the petitions, getting involved with your local party, or local pressure group or charity, even if just for a few days a year – it all makes a difference, and you’ll feel a lot better for it too.

TO: Thank you so much for joining us today Claire and I can only recommend again that people pick up Slow Gods when it comes out – it is an absolute delight.