{"id":2969,"date":"2026-04-12T17:18:18","date_gmt":"2026-04-12T16:18:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/?p=2969"},"modified":"2026-04-12T17:18:18","modified_gmt":"2026-04-12T16:18:18","slug":"the-slow-the-shine-and-the-darkness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/?p=2969","title":{"rendered":"The Slow, The Shine and The Darkness"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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This review originally appeared in the April issue of Brum Group News, the newsletter of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group and is reproduced here (with light editing) by kind permission<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few years ago<\/a> the historian Adam Tooze said the following about the times we are living in:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you’ve been feeling confused and as though everything is impacting on you at the same time, this is not a personal, private experience. This is actually a collective experience.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The word he came up with for this experience was “polycrisis”. It described the interplay of the Covid pandemic, Ukraine war and the energy, cost-of-living and climate crises. To that we could now add Trump 2nd term, war in Gaza and now the Gulf.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am reviewing this book while I have Covid, which has certainly facilitated the kind of inner focus which I think the book is asking for. Because Slow Gods<\/em> is polycrisis in the form of space opera, but a curiously interior-monologuey kind of space opera, more psychological than boom-boom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The premise, as Claire North set out for us at the Birmingham Science Fiction Group<\/a><\/em> last June, is that a binary star system is due to collapse which will obliterate all life within an 83 light-year blast radius. Unusually, the populations in the vicinity are warned of this precisely 100 years in advance by a perfect black sphere moving through space at sub-light-speed and known by everyone as the Slow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Slow listens to everything, remembers it and will consider it.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We follow the story through the eyes of Maw, who has been killed and has recovered in such a way as to be very difficult to kill after that. Making Maw an ideal candidate for Pilot, the organic sentient needed in the pilot’s seat of any ship wishing to enter arcspace which lets it travel across the universe faster than light, at huge personal cost. Pilots die frequently and each planetary system has its own way of choosing and rewarding its Pilots. Only Maw appears to be able to act as Pilot again and again, which makes the people around Maw nervous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The main thing about Maw which makes people nervous is Maw’s relationship with “the darkness” which reaches into any ship in arcspace, in many cases sending people mad. Maw, instead, becomes “curious”, exploiting a changing relationship and perception of matter in the darkness to do monstrous things. But, despite all this, Maw is still required to keep running missions, although usually with a mechanical assistant to keep Maw from getting “dysregulated”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This unusual set up turns out to be a way of observing the psychology of the polycrisis with some clarity. The United Social Venture is an empire where its subjects acquired debt just from being born (measured in Glint):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everything the Venture gave us – the air we breathed, the roads we walked down, the schools we learned in – had been sweated for, bled for, and our debts were a marker of the needful labour we would give back in return.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This economic system was referred to as Shine. The Shine were one of the few systems which used prisoners for Pilot work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the joys of the book is the exploration of difference, lots of details about avoiding giving offence when the Xi of Xihanna ask Maw to pilot a ship to Adjumir to bring out historical artefacts and Maw meets Gebre of the Haalo Institute. Maw finds that Normspeak is regarded as a very crude way of communicating and starts, haltingly, to learn Adjumiri (which is at least in part a click language). So begins a very moving love story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gender differences between systems are very striking. The Shine have only two genders – “he” and “she” – although the elite also have h\u00e9 and sh\u00e9. The most manly and the most feminine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are four genders in Xihanna, but they are not regarded as particularly important characteristics of a person and dispensed with once you know someone well. On Adjumir, there are eight, with very few Adjumiris remaining the same gender all their lives. These differences are picked out by the brilliant use of pronouns, a useful technique in a book full of characters. Even mechanicals, who have no particular interest in gender, are referred to as qe\/qis as a mark of respect as “they do not wish to be put in the same category as a bowl of soup or a broken chair”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We join Maw towards the end of the 100 year programme to evacuate the populations of Adjumir and Hadda to relative safety, with 800 million still on the planets and increasingly desperate. The Slow has effectively taken on a role as God through its massive databases, calculation capacity and sheer longevity. It seeks out Maw as it has plans for him. The Slow has been around so long that qe sees everything in the very long run. Which means that the emotional turmoil and intense highs and lows of individual lives are all averaged out to nothing. Qe calculates in terms of galaxy-level populations on the basis of what qe has come to think of as love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What calculation would the Slow make about our world, with all our nation states and their often tiny differences blown up to justify war aims? Donald Trump certainly has to have the most Shine of any US President for some time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Slow Gods<\/em> moves slowly but relentlessly towards a showdown between Maw and Theodosius Rhode, the Executor of the Shine and executioner of his mother. There is much tragedy along the way and the ending is not straightforward but ultimately very satisfying. It’s an uplifting ride.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This review originally appeared in the April issue of Brum Group News, the newsletter of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group and is reproduced here (with light editing) by kind permission A few years ago the historian Adam Tooze said the following about the times we are living in: If you’ve been feeling confused and as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,15,16,8,22,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birmingham","category-climate-change","category-covid-19","category-economics","category-media-politics","category-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2969"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2969\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3038,"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2969\/revisions\/3038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}