Why I started my sci-fi novel with a world-ending supernova
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- Claire North's new space opera "Slow Gods" (Orbit) is the July selection for the New Scientist Book Club, where North lays out the novel's central premise: astronomers warn their civilization centuries in advance that a supernova will end their world.
- The evacuation math is grim: the civilization has roughly 100 years to move 5 billion people using space elevators and motherships, and at peak capacity can lift only about 50 million people per year.
- North frames the triage question starkly — deciding who boards the ships first means choosing whether to leave "the disabled, the vulnerable, the marginalised behind," which she calls "genocide by omission, civilisational eugenics."
- A lottery offers fairness but not powerlessness, with North asking whether ordinary people will simply "die quietly" because of bad luck in the draw.
- Those who escape are scattered into "tiny enclaves across the stars," cut off from one another, watching their language, customs and ideas be "put into a museum" and sold to the highest bidder.
- North sketches an alternative path: a civilization that downplayed the crisis until only the rich had ships, then turned its gunships on vulnerable worlds outside the blast radius, choosing "violence without end" over guaranteed annihilation.
- The novel also gestures at unnamed horrors in deep space — creatures that infest crews with madness, distort biology or swallow ships whole — which North says "defy computation" and remain deliberately unexplained.
Why it matters: North uses the supernova premise not for spectacle but to stress-test collective decision-making: a 500-year warning is still too short to save everyone, and every allocation choice — by skill, fertility, lottery or force — collapses into a moral catastrophe. The book lands as a thought experiment about climate-scale triage, asking readers to sit with the realization that "civilisation" is not the same thing as the sum of the lives you manage to ship.
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