Claire North has been publishing genre fiction since 2002, beginning as Catherine Webb and then Kate Griffin. I have enjoyed books under all of those names, and had no idea they were the same person. Claire North’s novel, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August won a John W Campbell Award in 2014, and The Sudden Appearance of Hope won a World Fantasy Award in 2017. These most recent novels don’t entirely fit into the SF/F genre, but they are beautifully written and feature intensely personal characterization.

Slow Gods is mostly science fiction, since there are spaceships and intergalactic civilizations and one supernova. But all of those things are secondary to the life of Mawukana na-Vidnaze, who dies in the first chapter thus becoming more or less immortal. Mawukana becomes a witness to the final centuries of the human civilizations on the planets Adjumar and Cha-mdo after a nearby binary star system Lhonoja, also called the Lovers, goes nova.

Mawukana insists that its preferred pronoun is ‘it,’ because the (many) pronouns commonly used by humans and AIs no longer really apply. Since the story is narrated in first person, this is mentioned only once, and Mawukana’s biological gender never becomes important. Nor does that of most of the other characters.

Mawukana is a starship pilot, able to cross the galaxy through “arcspace” without going mad from the Dark. Most pilots lose their sanity after just a few jumps, but Mawukana is not effected. This may or may not be the reason for its continued existence. The expanding wave of heat and radiation created by the Supernova Lhonoja takes centuries to arrive. Immortal Mawukana does not set out to be any sort of participant, but seems not unwilling to be a witness to the destruction.

But this is not the story of an intrepid scientist or hero fighting to prevent the end of their world. It is not really even a story of the collapse of two civilizations. It is the story of the people Mawukana meets, whose lives are altered by overwhelming destruction. It is the story of a person who dies and then lives and loves and learns while watching humanity from a distance of not-quite-human anymore.

God is not love, or at least not in the way we usually speak of love. God is curiousity. And Mawukana na-Vidnaze is curious.