Paperback
English language
Published Nov. 18, 2025 by Orbit.
My name is Mawukana na-Vdnaze, and I am a very poor copy of myself.
Slow Gods is the galaxy-spanning tale of one man's impossible life charted against the fate of humanity amongst the stars—a powerfully imaginative space opera from multi-award-winning author Claire North.
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 …
My name is Mawukana na-Vdnaze, and I am a very poor copy of myself.
Slow Gods is the galaxy-spanning tale of one man's impossible life charted against the fate of humanity amongst the stars—a powerfully imaginative space opera from multi-award-winning author Claire North.
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?
Space opera, imperial repression, regret, impunity and inevitability somehow leaving room for mystery and uncomfortable uncertainty. Perhaps too much war, though not out of place, the depth here is elsewhere.
North gives you a detailed vocab but not really glossary. The Shine, arcspace, the Slow. You end up working it out, but it’s more disorienting than usual and it helps with world building.
The technology gets the same treatment and I think that’s where many readers will give up on this. What the Slow actually is, what happened to the narrator at the moments that determined the course his life, etc.; none of it is really ever explained. The narrator never really understands it either. He’s telling you what he remembers, which is less than I'd expected.
The revenge takes centuries and comes to nothing much. He lives long enough that the vengeance accounting stops making sense. There’s just nobody left it all means anything to.
I enjoyed this quite a lot. It’s more literary than genre in its aspirations.
North gives you a detailed vocab but not really glossary. The Shine, arcspace, the Slow. You end up working it out, but it’s more disorienting than usual and it helps with world building.
The technology gets the same treatment and I think that’s where many readers will give up on this. What the Slow actually is, what happened to the narrator at the moments that determined the course his life, etc.; none of it is really ever explained. The narrator never really understands it either. He’s telling you what he remembers, which is less than I'd expected.
The revenge takes centuries and comes to nothing much. He lives long enough that the vengeance accounting stops making sense. There’s just nobody left it all means anything to.
I enjoyed this quite a lot. It’s more literary than genre in its aspirations.
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 …
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.
