Slow Gods was another recent Sword and Laser Book Club pick that I read recently, and is definitely an interesting book, but is also very different from what you’d consider “normal” space opera.
Slow Gods follows Mawukana na-Vdnaze (or Maw). He’s born and raised in the hyper-capitalist Objectivist stellar nation of The Shine, which (among other nations) is confronted with a crisis when the computerized intelligent construct known as The Slow notifies the worlds of The Shine, and several other worlds, that the stars in a binary star system are going to collide in a few hundred years and send a cataclysmic wave of destruction out and they’ll need to take measures to evacuate their people on the endangered worlds. The Shine’s government tries to ignore it and claim it’s a lie, leading to uprisings of the people on some worlds, leading to Maw getting caught up in the crackdowns on one of those worlds.
Maw’s ultimate punishment is to become a sentient pilot for one of the Shine’s ships – which requires them to mentally commune with The Dark – the… Something that exists in hyperspace to move ships faster than light. This leads to his spectacularly messy death, along with the also spectacularly messy deaths of everyone on the Shine ship he was enslaved on. Except Maw’s death doesn’t stick. This leads to Maw getting caught up with several other different interstellar polities as things come to a head with the stellar collision, and ultimately a confrontation with the Shine.
That said, Maw isn’t directing the confrontation. Not to get all Boss Baby, but he’s like if Shinji Ikari was Chainsaw Man. If the force in him that led to the deaths of the crew on the initial ship that he was enslaved on were unleashed, he could be a powerful destructive force. But he doesn’t want to do that, and a lot of people find him more useful as a reliable pilot, and like Shinji he’s happy people have found a place for him, and when he finds someone who he thinks he can belong with later in the story, he’s happy with that. However, he doesn’t seek to flex any kind of narrative agency for most of the story.
It’s not that he doesn’t participate. It’s just he’s not a Luke Skywalker who is thick in the story. He’s not a Johnny Rico who is involved in the major engagements but doesn’t turn the tide. He’s happy to sit on the sidelines and generally not be involved, with larger cosmic events sometimes swinging his way.
This can make the novel seem aimless, but I think it works well. It puts the emphasis on Maw’s interiority, and takes someone who could have been alienating as a protagonist, and gave me as a reader something I could get my hooks into.
This is not a book that is likely to get a sequel, nor does it need one. Maw’s story feels complete. He didn’t lead armies into battle. He’s not a Kamina or a Noriko who will save the universe. He’s just this guy who got phenomenal cosmic power, and didn’t feel like he needed to change the universe with it, and that’s okay.
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