Slow Gods by Claire North

 

Slow Gods by Claire North

I have been on a Claire North roll of late, and I have yet to be disappointed. Not all of her books are equally good, but all are good (so far). Slow Gods, however stands out, for a number of reasons. First, unlike most of her output I have read so far, which is in one way or another anchored in our world, and often with added fantastic elements rather than sci-fi per se, Slow Gods is proper interstellar science-fiction. Second, while all I've read of her so far is high concept, Slow Gods is perhaps the most ambitious, and certainly one of the most ambitious bits of contemporary science fiction I've read in a long time. It's set in a far future where the human diaspora has settled the stars, and different cultures, shaped by the conditions of the human exodus, the planets the settlers landed on and the different processes of terraformation that made those planets habitable have emerged. One day, a super advanced artificial intelligence that was known but had never communicated announces a cataclysmic event that will happen a century off and wipe out numerous planets and systems. How these different cultures react to the event is at the heart of the wider narrative here. The story is told from the viewpoint of Mawukana na-Vdnaze, a man born to the culture of the Shine and died prematurely by its hand... except he died while shifting a vessel into hyperspace, and something went wrong. In the end, he's not really dead, but he's not really human either. And he can't age, which gives him a unique vantage point to follow the story of the announced cataclysm all the way through. I adored this book. It does one thing that I have very rarely seen done well (it's one of my sci-fi pet peeves), which is to really drive the point that distinctive cultures (amongst humans, but also amongst aliens) in a far-future science-fiction setting would be so different as to hardly be able to understand each other. Slow Gods has been described as space opera, but I don't think that's the right denomination, neither is hard science. In the end, it's itself so distinctive that it really stands out. I cannot recommend it enough.