SLOW GODS

Lives and how to live them

- By Jonathan Wright

What would it mean to endure beyond one lifetime? How would that change you? These are questions that, albeit sometimes subtly, recur in the fiction of Claire North, the pseudonym Catherine Webb adopted for the The First Fifteen Lives Of Harry August (2014), a novel that, as the title suggests, had more than a hint of Groundhog Day about it.

Back then it seemed as if North was set to become a writer of high-concept slipstream fiction. As things turned out, North has merrily roamed across genres as they’ve seen fit. In the case of Slow Gods, that means the kind of SF associated with the Culture books of Iain M Banks or, latterly, the novels of Ann Leckie and Arkady Martine, a kind of sociological space opera that while never ducking the grandeur of a battle scene, is far more interested in the interplay of peoples from different spacefaring civilisations.

In