Rick Riordan's Reviews > Slow Gods

It's difficult to make a god-like main character sympathetic, but Slow Gods made me feel compassion and understanding for not one but two godlike characters making their way through the science fiction world of this fascinating novel.

We follow the life of Mawukana na-Vdnaze (Maw for short) who is born into the Shine, an ultra-capitalist hellscape of planets where you are born into debt, charged for your own birth, every breath you take, every bit of sustenance you consume, and are expected to rise by your own merits or sink into debt labor, a euphemism for slavery. Maw is just trying to make do, struggling to survive, when a world-shattering event occurs: a mysterious AI entity known as the Slow enters the Shine's region of space and announces that in less than two centuries, a nearby set of twin stars will implode, wiping out all life in that part of the galaxy.

The Shine's response is to suppress the news, disappear any scientists who try to raise the alarm, and carry on with business as usual. This leads to revolts and unrest, and Maw is unwittingly caught up in these events. Through a series of misadventures and bad luck, he is eventually conscripted to be a Pilot on an arc-space ship, which is normally a death sentence, as arcspace is a dark, quasi-sentient reality, the stuff of nightmares and monsters, that drives Pilots insane and sometimes makes entire ships disappear.

During his first jump . . . something happens to Maw. He is changed. Replaced? Badly copied? No one understands exactly what has occurred or why, but Maw's humanity has become fluid and unstable. At times, he seems to be part of the Dark, able to fly through arc space with never a problem, but not always able to maintain his grip of what it is to be human. Physical laws bend around him, especially when it is dark. He cannot die -- at least not permanently -- and he does not age. Is he a monster? A cursed man? A god? No one knows, and everyone fears him. Even scarier: Maw's nature changes depending on how people see him. If they believe he is a monster, he tends to become one. If they believe he is a good man, he acts like one. And he will only die if they believe he can be killed, but as soon as they forget about him, he rises again.

From here, we follow Maw across several centuries, through the explosion of the twin stars and beyond, as he is drawn into a strange long-range series of intrigues that involve his old home the Shine, the worlds of the Accord, and the god-machine known as the Slow. There is sufficient mystery and action to keep the pages turning, but the real force driving the narrative is Maw's voice, and his journey to understand who is he, who he has become, and what it means for himself and for the galaxy. Can he love? Can he find happiness? Is he even allowed to be human? The author balances the character's human frailties with his godlike powers perfectly, and we eventually come to understand that Maw shares more common ground than he realizes with the Slow, another unknowable and super powerful force.

In religion, one of the oldest questions is why God allows suffering, if He is truly good. This book made me see things from the perspective of a godlike creature, and feel sorry for them for the choices they must make that are perceived as cruel, dispassionate, or heartless, though in the very long run -- eons -- they may in fact be the choices most driven by love.

The world-building (galaxy-building) is both complex and believable. One thing the author does to challenge earth-centric thinking is to use a wide variety of pronouns to reflect gender, or lack thereof, in a galaxy full of cultures that don't always have a rigid male-female binary. You will need to get comfortable with xe, xim, que, quim, Hé, hím, and many other demarcations, but I found that after a few chapters, this really wasn't an issue. As Maw tells us in an interlude on the subject of gender:

"Some off-worlders complain (about the many pronouns), say that it’s too complicated, there’s too much here for them to ever understand.

How odd, the Adjumiris reply. You can remember the difference between innumerable different types of sausage or sporting teams, but you cannot hold in your mind a mere half-dozen or so categories
of people? That must make navigating the nuances of human experience extraordinarily taxing for you."

Fair point! One of the reasons I like science fiction is that it forces me to think in new ways about the vast possibilities in the galaxy. It would be quite boring if everything in the galaxy was exactly the same.

That said, the novel explores themes that are very timely and very, shall we day, down-to-earth. How does a society respond to massive disasters? To injustice? To naked aggression? When does one have to act, and what acts are justifiable?

When the Shine tells the Accord that they don't need any assistance because of the imminent star explosion, everything is fine, Maw wonders: "What do you do when someone lies to your face so calmly, so repeatedly, so blithely?" This feels quite relevant to our time and place.

On the subject of other people's suffering, Maw is forced to come to terms with the limits of empathy. When the Shine invades a neutral world, using it as an escape for its elite corporate executives, who know very well that their home planets are doomed, Maw is drawn into the resistance to this planetary occupation, but finds that fear of the Shine's powerful 'black ships' is more potent than the Accord's vows to help those suffering. The Accord is able to turn off their sentiments, look away, and assume that there is nothing they can do. "Fascinating, how easily people will assume that one person’s emotional landscape is less valid than their own."

Maw also struggles with the atrocities committed by the resistance in response to the atrocities committed by the oppressors. What is justified? He finds that he gets little sympathy when he tries to see things from the occupiers' and collaborators' point of view: "that the thing that was forbidden – the thing that is always forbidden in all wars, especially the longest – is thinking of your enemy as people." This, again, is an issue both timely and eternal.

On a more personal level, Maw's struggles are incredibly relatable, even for those of us without godlike powers. Maw is affected, changed depending on how people see him and think of him. Aren't we all? As he says, "I wonder whether it is possible to exist as a person at all without measuring yourself against others. I wish sometimes that I was strong enough to be myself in company without company turning me into something else. I wonder who that person would be, and am sometimes grateful never to find out." I also love his occasional rants about how hard small talk is, and how easy it is to make errors with social niceties and be labeled as 'other.' I can definitely sympathize, and I don't have the excuse of being a re-made being from the arc space.

All in all, a fascinating and mind-blowing adventure that will scratch your itch for great space opera, but also asks important questions and explores the humanity of our characters while challenging readers to think about their own nature and morals. Like the Dark of arc-space, this is a book that whispers to you, is voraciously curious, and may haunt your dreams.