Slow Gods is a space opera dealing with the question of how various societies react to certain destruction

📚 Finished reading Slow Gods by Claire North.

I first heard of this from the New Scientist book club, although I don’t seem to be able to make enough time to read to a deadline, so unfortunately I missed the club part of the club.

Nonetheless, this was a great read, even in solitary form. Set in the presumably reasonably distant multi-planetary future, a big strange object is traversing the galaxy extremely slowly warning each civilisation that in around a century a particular binary star system is going to go supernova and destroy the large number of planets in its blast radius.

I always like books that explore how societies may react - or don’t - to huge, devastating disasters that will come to peak fruition only in the long term, way beyond any one (human) political cycle. See also: the actual climate change we face on this planet today.

The book focuses on Maw, who comes from a plenty ruled by the “Shine” regime. It is not a good society. Think an authoritarian dystopian society of the cruel kind that Liz Truss fantasises about. Inequality is rife. The market is everything. The life you face is all predicated on how much “Shine” you have, which is basically a publicly scored matter of your worth and status. The famous “Nosedive” Black Mirror episode. What is on the route to being created in real life China. That kind of thing.

Basically everyone outside of the financial elite ends up riddled with debt, forced into servitude, and shamed for it. But hey, they should have just worked harder, right?

For being perceived as an unworthy political dissenter, Maw is forced to become a starship pilot. Why forced? Because in order to travel faster than light a ship needs an “organic” pilot who has to plug their brain into a computerised system and access “the dark” in order to navigate between distant systems. It’s a traumatic experience. Which has the unfortunate effect of wrecking the pilot’s mind after a few trips, driving them insane, or eventually killing them. Hence some societies, including the Shine, use forced labour for this.

Maw however turns out to be a very unusual pilot, whose special properties make them potentially a critical part of any evacuation effort, to the extent that there is to be one. Just like real life UK, there’s a large number of cruel residents of most planets that are not excited about the prospect of a large number of immigrants. Nonetheless, the alternative is a fiery death for everyone on any affected planets.

What happens when political systems fail when mortal danger is closest? How does one deal with authoritarian systems that can monitor everything in a population very addicted to their phones? And, for Maw, fundamentally what does it mean to be human, if indeed that is what they are. All these are of course questions that we desperately need to ask ourselves today.