Review - Slow Gods by Claire North

Slow Gods

Claire North
Orbit, 18 November 2025 
Available as: HB, 422pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy 
ISBN(HB): 9780356526188

I'm grateful to Orbit for sending me a copy of Slow Gods  to consider for review.

After three books telling the story of what happens at home while Odysseus is adventuring, Claire North still has something to say about the gods - though here they are not Olympian deities but mighty computer systems, going about their inscrutable business across the galaxy. One, in particular, is referred to as "the Slow" because it eschews faster-than-light "arc travel". But one might equally accuse them of being "slow" to act against injustice and oppression in human affairs, which are illustrated in the opening sections of this book by the sad story of Mawukana na-Vdnaze. 

Maw has the misfortune to be born in the polity known as the Shine, a nakedly exploitative territory that works its common people to the grave to support the small minority who are Shiny - possessed of an indefinable mix of wealth, flair and assertion which gives them a passport to success. 

Maw does not have Shine, and his fate follows from that, leading him to a transformation ("I am a very poor copy of myself") which makes him, in the eyes of some - including himself - a monster, a ghost. 

The focus of the book is, in part, how Maw deals with that monsterdom, and seeks to be, if a monster, then a monster on the side of the angels - whether that means resisting the Shine, or working hard on the crisis of his time, the foretold collapse of a binary star system. When it occurs, this supernova will create an intense expanding shell of radiation and extinguish life for hundreds of lightyears. This will obliterate many of the Shine worlds, but also the planet Adjumir, on which a galaxy-wide rescue effort focusses.

I loved the way that North describes Adjumir and its people - "describe" is perhaps the wrong world, they conjure it up through stories, songs, language and the behaviour of the Adjumiris and especially Gebre, a spiky archivist who Maw meets on his rescue mission. Throughout this book we get snippets of history, turning into laments for what's been lost, for the fractured lives of exiles in the Adjumiri diaspora.

There's also haunting love story between Gebre and Maw, who only meet on two occasions - a fusion of duty, desire, loss and inevitable fate which gives the book its core, and a core of steel.

Entwined about that core are conspiracies, plots, secrets and lies, as well as the reprehensible behaviour of the Shine authorities. They see the threat of the coming supernova and refuse to act, indeed suppressing knowledge of it in their territories. (Thank goodness no nation today would act like that, ignoring a planet-killing threat for their own selfish convenience!) 

Through all this, we see Maw's gradual coming to terms with what he is and what he's done. This is often through the exploration of the myriad languages of the Galaxy and their customs and social structures, particularly a diverse assembly of genders (expect multiple systems of pronouns). It's a slow awakening for him, the dry tones of the editorial Maw writing this at some later point in his life counterpointing the passion of what he did and said in his story (and we're warned, this won't always be a reliable account). He's a character who finds it hard to forgive himself for some terrible things, something that, perhaps, allows him an insight into the otherwise inscrutable minds of the gods. I recall the frequent pleas in the Bible to a mighty God who yet permits suffering. How long, O Lord, how long? How long will the unrighteous prosper? How long will the innocent be oppressed? Rescue your people! Reveal yourself before the nations in your might, and cast down the evildoer!

A question we, in our day, might well ask...

Slow Gods gives a hint, a flavour, of the true complexity of that prayer, and of what it might take to answer it. Because there's always a cost to action - as Maw discovers one awful night on Adjumir. And it does so in a warm, generous narrative where monsters and failed, imperfect beings may contemplate their own very essence and deeds and seek redemption, even if - as suggested in a coda to the story - that seems to obliterate justice. 

Slow Gods is an enthralling, intelligent and absorbing story which revives the genre of space opera and adds North's distinct tone of moral questioning. A brilliant book. Buy this one as a present for the SF nerd in your life, and if that's yourself, just buy it!

For more information about Slow Gods, see the publisher's website here.