Claire North's Slow Gods earns New Scientist Book Club thumbs-up
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- New Scientist Book Club spent July reading Claire North's Slow Gods and rated it a "big thumbs-up," with members calling it among the club's most popular reads so far.
- Slow Gods is set in the far future around a civilization that learns its planet will be destroyed by a supernova in 100 years, with North telling readers it is a deliberate climate-change parallel ("Subtle metaphor it is not").
- The novel doubles as a love story between Maw, a pilot navigating faster-than-light travel who is "a little prone to murdering people," and Gebre, a citizen of the doomed planet Adjumir.
- North described Maw as "the protagonist you write when you are an adult diagnosed with autism late in your life" and discussed the story's use of multiple pronouns tied to the cultures depicted, calling gender "a spectrum."
- Member reactions split on the opening — several found it "stodgy and slow," while others were "totally engrossed" within 50 pages — and science-fiction columnist Emily H. Wilson called the novel "purely delightful."
Why it matters: Slow Gods is now firmly on the New Scientist Book Club's recommended list, giving a climate-allegory space opera — complete with an autistic-coded protagonist and non-binary pronouns woven into the worldbuilding — a rare mainstream science-press endorsement that could broaden its reach beyond genre fans.
