Slow Gods
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4.1 • 134 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel!
Best of the Year at Gizmodo, Library Journal, and more!
"An astonishing, thought-provoking and above all touching story of found meaning and lost humanity.” —Adrian Tchaikovsky, Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author of Children of Time
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, perfect for fans of A Memory Called Empire and The Vanished Birds.
My name is Mawukana na-Vdnaze, and I am a very poor copy of myself.
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 truth: 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?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This epic and enthralling galactic adventure from Campbell Award winner North (The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August) introduces an endearing monster as its hero. Mawukana "Maw" na-Vdnaze's "otherness" revives him each time he dies. He uses this longevity to pilot sentient ships, work that would cause many humans to go mad. Maw spends decades navigating dangerous star systems while intergalactic factions including the sinister Shine, the hive-minded Consensus, the enigmatic Accord, and the mysterious Slow jockey for universal domination. Now a binary star is about to go supernova and destroy the planet Adjumir, home of Maw's lost love, Gebre. Unwilling to abandon his dying planet, Gebre sends Maw away, but not before entrusting him with an artifact that may save the universe. North's worldbuilding is dizzying and dazzling, full of fascinating and convincing characters (human, AI, and other), and thought-provoking meditations on destiny, duty, and power. Add in a doomed romance and stirring action, and this immersive, inventive space opera proves a sheer delight.
Customer Reviews
Fascinating read
This was a fascinating and very well written book. I really enjoyed the way it explored morality and decisions made on a daily basis and how that affects society in much larger ways. Highly recommend this book to anybody who loves science fiction.
Begins epic in scale but quickly fizzles
It’s a little frustrating when a book begins epic in scale but then fizzles to melodrama and uninteresting interpersonal relationships. If the book had ended at the first 100 pages, it would have left me begging for more. What a great opening to a book! And then the rest happened.
For some reason, each planetary body has its own pronouns and the explanations drag on terminally. The pronoun distinctions also are not terribly imaginative. For example, the Quan’s have a unique pronoun: it’s qe instead of he and qis instead of his and qim. And then on a different planet, it’s ter instead of her. And so on…and at some point, why bother? It just becomes this constant nagging, not particularly clever or useful. Unless the only point of it all, is that pronouns don’t matter. Which they don’t. So why bother? It’s a very one dimensional social issue to invest so much energy into.
Of course, then there’s the good stuff: a living, floral spaceship, a binary supernova irradiating all living planets one by one, a massively scaled planetary evacuation detailed to an impressive degree, a reincarnating child and a mysterious darkness that seeps into our world with every use of faster than light travel — a technology that humans have created but don’t fully understand. We get to take part in the ecological breakdown of an entire planet as the radiation from the nova reaches Adjumir. It’s a fascinating element that North brings to the story with detailed scientific reality.
There are endearing characters also, like Rencki the fox-shaped AI with three blaster-weapon tails. But for some reason, the love story, a centerpiece of the novel, is about as tedious and flat as you’ll ever read. In other words, it is clear North knows how to write compelling fiction, but it seems like we had a much shorter fantastic story where lots of filler was added later just to make it longer. A book that at times is epic poetry, but at too many other (long) segments, is social didacticism to a depleting degree.
Annoying
Talk about a dump of exposition. And the incessant use of different pronouns is just one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read