Slow Gods by Claire North

Published by Orbit on November 18, 2025

The protagonist of Slow Gods is Mawukana na-Vdnaze (known to friends as Maw). He is from Heom, a city on the planet Tu-mdo organized by the Antekeda Venture, a member of the United Social Venture. The Venture colonized “the worlds that would become the Shine.” Maw is of the Mdo, “the peoples who are the Shine.” They are governed by the Executorium, a body that is led by the Executor, who rules with an iron fist. The Accord, an organization of planets outside of Shine space, is deterred from war against the Shine by rumors of Shine blackships, lurking silently at undisclosed locations in space, each capable of destroying a planet.

Most worlds in Slow Gods (at least those important to the story) are inhabited by humans and sentient mechanized beings known as quans that serve their mainframes. Rencki, a quan tasked with guarding Maw, takes the form of a fox with three tails. In addition to acting as security for Maw, quans try to keep him “regulated,” preventing him from losing his grip and going to a dark place.

Nonhuman aliens exist but, with one exception, are unimportant to the story. Maw shares factoids about them from time to time (“The kekekee of B48TCLM1 are born in the clouds and live their entire lives without touching the ground.”) and ponders their varying languages. The offhand explanations of alien cultures are likely meant as worldbuilding, but many of Maw’s observations add to the page count without contributing worthwhile context or atmosphere to the story.

The alien race of significance to the plot is the Slow, having been so named by quans. An ancient race, the Slow doesn’t disclose anything about itself, but it has sent emissaries in the form of impenetrable black spheres and cubes to various worlds in a system that includes Shine planets, warning residents that binary stars in a nearby neighborhood will collide in a hundred years, wiping out life on a number of their populated planets.

We still haven’t arrived at a plot, but bear with me. The Shine practices a totalitarian version of capitalism. Most people are born into debt (they are assessed with something like a tax at birth) and spend their lives working to pay it off. Most cannot afford to pay for an education, so they reduce their debt through manual labor. Like all authoritarians, the Shine do not value education for the masses because “education breeds curiosity. And curiosity is one of the very first qualities that the leaders of the Shine seek to eliminate from the population.”

Nor does the Shine want its people to know that their planets are about to die because autocrats cannot abide any suggestion that the lives they offer their people are less than perfect. We see this whenever autocratic governments deny the existence of any problem (such as climate change) that, if acknowledged, might disturb the serenity of the governed. The term “Shine” also refers to “status, prestige, privilege, charisma, the ability to get people to do things for you,” qualities primarily enjoyed by the few who are not in debt. Parallels to current events give currency to the alien political system that Claire North imagines.

Also in the background is Maw’s backstory. Maw died a rather horrible death. Other horrible deaths followed. The current version of Maw resembles the original but, when he loses control, bad things happen. He begins the novel by telling the reader that he is “a very poor copy of myself.”

How is this possible? Maw is a pilot. Navigating through arcspace requires an organic brain melded with electronic systems. To keep Shine pilots from going mad, “it is standard practice to irradiate parts of a Pilot’s brain, reducing them to a mere organic husk through which navigational protocols may pass.” Maw was sent into space without that mind-destroying treatment. At the journey’s end, everyone on his ship had died a horrible death, including Maw, whose original body was covered in blood. His new body is apparently immortal, although it may take some time to reconstitute after it is destroyed. And he will only come back to life if his body is unobserved — for reasons that are never satisfactorily explained, if other people are thinking about him and are certain he is dead, his return to life is slowed.

So we still haven’t arrived at a plot, which gives you a sense of how the novel proceeds. Slow Gods is bloated by backstories and worldbuilding, all in support of a plot that seems secondary to its context. Much of the worldbuilding is interesting, but much of it could have been omitted without harming the novel.

So finally (and thank you for your patience), let's talk about the plot. Maw takes a job as a pilot who helps transport artifacts from Adjumir, a world that will soon be destroyed by the exploding stars. Other pilots of larger vessels are evacuating people, but an historian named Gebre Nethyu Chatithimska Bajwahra wants to preserve Adjumir culture. Gebre didn’t win a lottery ticket to be evacuated, so she wants to have a fling with Maw, giving North an opportunity to explore cultural attitudes about casual sex. Like me, she's all for it.

Some years after Adjumir is destroyed, an ambassador from the Consensus (humans who have voluntarily joined a hivemind) retains Maw’s services. While hiveminds are not new to science fiction, they are typically portrayed in a negative light (the Borg from Star Trek being a prime example). North uses the Consensus to suggest that people who sacrifice individual identity for a shared consciousness are better equipped to resist tyranny and pursue humane goals. With the help of the Consensus and some quans, and a bit of not-quite-help from the Slow, the plot follows Maw as he takes on the Executor’s embrace of tyranny as the Shine's primary form of governance.

People who complain about unconventional pronouns (and they constitute a very vocal minority of sf fans) might be dumbfounded by the various permutations of he and his that appear in Slow Gods, but people who can’t handle the unconventional have no business reading science fiction. Even sentient robots (for lack of a better term) have their own pronouns. Some pronouns have accent marks. I give North credit for keeping it all straight. The pronouns serve a larger message that may be the story’s purpose: all humans are fundamentally the same despite their individual differences, and all enjoy the same fundamental right to be alive and, in their lives, to be treated with dignity as they define their own identities.

Some of the story seems like padding, although that uncharitable assessment may reflect my lack of interest in, for example, a review of each lover that Gebre had before Maw (apparently to explain Gebre’s greater interest in commitment-free sex than in love) or a list of “types of love that are cruel” or the meaning of various status-determining scars in Shine culture or a description of each statute in an exhibit hall. Worldbuilding is essential in science fiction that takes place on other worlds, but background details can overtake the story. Building the world in the middle of action scenes is annoying. Characters also have an irksome tendency to speechify during chase scenes.

Granted, some of the wordiness is meant to make the story more powerful. Maw feels a connection with a self-sacrificing character who dies when her planet is enveloped by radiation, but that scene conveys sufficient power without repeated reminders that Maw feels guilty or empty because he can’t save her. I appreciated the victim’s insistence that Maw save himself to continue his mission, but the chapter would have been stronger if it had been reduced to those elements without needless plumbing of Maw’s internal depths.

Still, the story explores interesting topics of relevance to readers, including authoritarian governance, the division and manipulation of social classes to serve the ends of powerful rulers, and the contempt with which the powerful regard the ordinary. “How strange it is to live a life where you do no harm, achieve no conquests, and die without a monument.” North makes insightful observations about the tendency to “assume that one person’s emotional landscape is less valid than their own” — the attitude that others should not disturb us with their suffering.

Near the novel’s end, we learn that the Slow have a philosophy of life that is surprisingly human-emotion-centric (given that the Slow are not human) and remarkably banal. The Slow explain this philosophy over several ALL CAP paragraphs that amount to (spoiler alert) “love thy neighbor as thyself.” A nice message, but the Slow travel at sub-light speeds across the universe and that’s all they’ve got to say?

I give North credit. Her prose is lovely; there’s just too much of it. The profundity of her ideas is diluted by the number of ideas she packs into the novel. The ending drags, as if North couldn’t bring herself to finish the story. But these flaws and the others I have highlighted are less significant than the novel’s overall worth as a contribution to the literature of authoritarian governance.

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Happy Thanksgiving!

Revenge of Odessa by Tony Kent and Frederick Forsyth

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on November 18, 2025

Frederick Forsyth’s first published novel, The Day of the Jackal, remains one of my all-time favorite thrillers, perhaps because I read it when I was still young and impressionable. I recall thinking that I had never read anything like it. I was not quite as impressed with his second novel, The Odessa File, but I nevertheless recall being riveted by it.

Forsyth died earlier this year. His name, along with co-author Tony Kent, appears on the cover of Revenge of Odessa, but that doesn’t mean much. Robert Ludlum’s name regularly appears on new books and he’s been dead for more than twenty years. Forsyth apparently suggested the sequel’s plot, or at least the premise (presumably something more than “the Odessa returns”), but Kent was responsible for crafting the content. Unsurprisingly — and meaning no disrespect to Tony Kent — the sequel is less captivating than The Odessa File. My overall reaction to Revenge of Odessa is that Forsyth already told this story, but told it better. Still, it compares favorably to (or at least is no worse than) contemporary action thrillers.

Odessa is a continuation of the Nazi party that positions itself to rise again by infiltrating government offices and other positions of power. It was thwarted in the first novel and the organization was suppressed. Now Odessa is back because you just can’t keep a good conspiracy down.

Georg Miller is the son of Horst Miller, who father worked for the BDN, Germany’s foreign intelligence service. Georg’s grandfather is Peter Miller, a reporter who was the protagonist in The Odessa File.

Following in his grandfather’s footsteps, Georg is a journalist/podcaster. He understands that Germany has become a “tinderbox, primed to explode in a direction Georg found unthinkable.” Anti-Nazi sentiment has given way to rising nationalism, a political philosophy that didn’t work out well for Germany in the last century. Now Alternative for Germany (AfD), characterizing itself as a populist party, is convincing voters to embrace its neo-Nazi rhetoric. The party defines immigrants as “the enemy,” particularly if they don’t share the belief that white Christians are a superior form of life.

The story begins with the death of Senator Jack Johnson, whose home burns while he is trying to deflect the sexual attentions of an intern. A few months later, a terrorist attack in Stuttgart includes gun violence against children. Islamic terrorists are blamed, but Miller thinks the true perpetrators staged the incident to stoke fear and hatred. He heads to a Stuttgart hospital to interview survivors, where he encounters Carl Ackermann, a demented old guy who mistakes Georg for his father. Ackermann is a bit confused because he remembers killing Horst and snapping the neck of his “dirty Jew wife.” This comes as news to Georg.

Georg breaks into the hospital records office and rather improbably comes across an entry that refers to Odessa. He makes a nuisance of himself while inquiring about Ackermann and soon finds himself being chased through the hospital by killers who serve Odessa. In various forms, that chase continues as Georg strives to prevent a catastrophic event that will advance Odessa’s scheme to gain control of the US government.

The story is based on familiar elements. The senator’s death is connected to a larger Odessa plot. A young Black woman who works for a political campaign learns some details of the plot, placing her life in peril when she falls into the clutches of Nazi villains. Scott Brogan, an action hero who is also Georg’s godfather, resurfaces in Georg’s life and keeps him alive while he drifts from action scene to action scene. Near the end, Georg learns uncomfortable truths about his family and friends.

Forsyth’s novel was based on intrigue, while Kent leans heavily on action to carry the story. The action scenes are lively, making Revenge of Odessa easy to recommend to action thriller fans. Little about the novel is intriguing, particularly in comparison to Forsyth’s original, but it serves as a reasonably entertaining reminder of the horrors that await the world if nationalist extremism is allowed to flourish.

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The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie

Published by Random House on November 4, 2025

The Eleventh Hour collects five stories, three of novella length and two that are shorter. The most entertaining novella in the collection is “The Musician of Kahani.” It is, in part, the story of a man who loses his way and the daughter who guides his return. The man finds false meaning in life when he abandons his family to join a cult leader’s community as a preparer and ladler of soup. The daughter is a musical prodigy who marries into wealth and develops a sort of superpower that allows her to project her music to her distant father’s ears. It is also the story of a mother whose “brilliant husband falls for a stupid fraud” and whose “brilliant daughter falls for a stupid playboy,” leaving her “alone in our home without the two people who were my whole world.” The story touches on familiar themes in fiction that focuses on India: the dominance of men, parental control of children throughout their lives, the disparity of wealth, the misplaced importance given to high social status (recast as “brand identity”). Satirical observations lighten the mood, but the reconciliation of a family, decent people who stray from their paths before reuniting, is moving.

“Late” tells the story of a gay British professor who achieved fame with the only novel he ever wrote — a classic work set in India. He lived a reclusive life in an “ivory tower of infirm old men” until he woke up one morning to discover that he had died. Only one person, a student from India studying the history of religion and its intersection with the state, can see his ghost. She volunteers to act as a guide to the professor’s rooms, left untouched as a tribute by the university that employed him. Contrary to his solitary nature, the professor is displeased that nobody ever visits his rooms, but he is also unhappy to discover that his spirit will disintegrate if he leaves the campus. He views death as “proof of the pointlessness of life,” particularly his own not-quite-death that has him dwelling in a literal fog (perhaps a soup made from the remains of other souls) as what’s left of him decays. Death focuses his mind on revenge against the College Provost, who gave him a choice between sexual freedom and a place at the College, but how can he pursue that goal without a body?

The theme of disappearance also animates “Oklahoma,” purportedly an unfinished manuscript that tells a story of ambiguous meaning, building on Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika, a novel whose central character will never find peace, having been abandoned by his creator. The story includes an extended riff about Francisco Goya, told from his unhappy point of view. The writer-narrator has a writer uncle who, though presumed dead, has apparently continued writing. Or is the narrator carrying on his dead uncle’s work? By the time the story generates an “apparition, this sci-fi incarnation of beauty,” who “was not real, she was a phantom I had brought into being to express my need for love,” I lost interest. “Oklahoma” showcases Rushdie’s astonishing prose but, sad to say, its full meaning escaped me. My fault more than Rushdie’s, I’m sure.

The two short stories address the problem of aging — a problem that eventually vexes everyone who survives youth and middle age. The characters in “In the South,” though known as Senior and Junior, are both 81. Senior’s other friends have died, along with his “kindly” wife. He used a broker to find a new one, a woman with a wooden leg who is unkind, perhaps in response to his own unkindness. “Instead of unhappy solitude they found themselves trapped in unhappy togetherness.” Senior feels like a shadow: “The old move through the world of the young like shades, unseen, of no concern.” Particularly in the story’s last pages, Senior would rather be dead, but as he comes to understand: “Death and life were just adjacent verandas.”

The more interesting short story, “The Old Man in the Piazza,” makes the argument that soaring prose depends on conditions of dissent. In times of agreement, language is muted. Language is a character in the story, sitting in a corner of the piazza during a time when the word “no” was outlawed (although rejection was not, as an old man learned: “The old man was younger then, and his heart ached a lot, thanks to the repeated rejections of its sincerely offered emotions by young women with hair of different colors.”). It was forbidden to debunk even the most risible propositions: “the nocturnal metamorphosis of the immigrant population into drooling sex monsters, the benefits of raising the taxes paid by the poor.” Finally fed up, Language screams and the age of argumentation begins. What takes center stage is an outpouring of unattractive words, “not our language’s beautiful and justly celebrated poetry,” but “Go fuck yourself” and similar expressions.

“The Old Man in the Piazza” explodes the myth (less prevalent in the US than other nations) that aging inevitably bestows wisdom upon those who survive it. Language favors nuance over the simplistic certainties that pass for wisdom: “She cares only for words of many-layered beauty, for fineness of expression, for the subtlety of what is spoken and the resonance of what is better left unspoken, for the meanings between the words, and the illumination of those meanings that only her greatest disciples can provide.”

Readers expect insightful observations about society from Rushdie. Each entry in this volume delivers. Characters contemplate the tension between liberty and goodness (does the ideal of freedom include freedom to be bad?), between individualism and social norms, between definitions of morality that benefit the ruling class and those that are more objective. Rushdie illustrates the conflict that people raised in the conservative political climate feel when they experience the freedoms that are taken for granted in most of western Europe, including sexual freedom and the ability to make choices that are not restricted by family traditions. He explores generational change, contrasts the old and the young, and compares the fear of death to the fear of living.

Chattering characters explore questions of philosophy, sometimes by accident. Some of their theories border on lunacy (stars are just the sun shining through a colander that covers the city at night) but should rational people correct them or listen patiently? “Are mistaken notions harmful to the brain, to the community, to the health of the body politic, or are they simply errors to be tolerated as the product of simple minds?” That question gains currency when applied to climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers.

Religion, art, madness, war and evil, culture and religion, the language of poetry and prose, and the nature of reality are just a few of the topics Rushdie tackles. While the stories are uneven, I give Rushdie credit for trying to do something new in each one. As a writer who marries striking prose to intriguing ideas, Rushdie always gives readers something to enjoy as they try to get at his meaning.

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False Witness by Phillip Margolin

Published by Minotaur Books on November 11, 2025

Karen Wyatt was a respected criminal defense lawyer until she was convicted of a drug crime and sentenced to prison. Although the drugs were planted, a dealer testified that he sold them to Wyatt and a crime lab technician falsified a report that claimed her fingerprints were on the drugs.

Wyatt was set up in retaliation for proving that a biker charged with assaulting a cop during a raid on the biker gang clubhouse was actually the victim of the cop’s assault. A video showed that the cops who set up the raid were stealing drugs and cash from the bikers. The cops were also taking payoffs from a rival gang. They were more than a bit irked that Wyatt exposed their illegal actions.

The crooked crime lab tech is caught stealing cocaine and makes a deal that requires him to tell the truth about Wyatt. That fortuitous circumstance leads to Wyatt’s release from prison. Most of that backstory is told in flashbacks.

Having settled a civil rights claim for wrongful imprisonment, Wyatt has become a wealthy lawyer who can pick and choose her cases. She knows that a prosecutor in the DA’s office was in on the scheme that sent her to prison but she doesn’t know that person’s identity. People who might know the whole story, including the the cop who coerced the crime lab technician and the drug dealer who testified against Wyatt, are soon murdered. Wyatt’s attempt to find the truth about the scheme to send her to prison drives the plot.

A wealthy guy named Terrance Corgen is another murder victim. His body is discovered after someone reports his Jaguar missing. Police pull over Jack Blackburn while he’s driving the car. Blackburn claims Corgen’s chauffeur, Billy Kramer, met him in a bar and asked him to drive his girlfriend home in the Jaguar. Blackburn swears he never went inside the residence but the police found a glass with his fingerprints in the room where they found Corgen’s body. Blackburn seems to be on a path to a murder conviction. The story threads weave together when Wyatt agrees to represent Blackburn.

Two Portland homicide detectives, Chad Remington and Audrey Packer, investigate Corgen’s death. Another suspect is Thomas Horan, a Congressman who believes he was abducted by space aliens after expressing skepticism about alien visitors during UFO hearings. There is evidence that Horan may have been in Corgen’s home and his only alibi witnesses are space aliens. They won’t be coming to court.

Phillip Margolin ties these disparate storylines together in a way that is entertaining if implausible. The explanation for the alien abduction tested my willingness to accept unlikely plot developments. I also found it hard to believe that the sadistic leader of a motorcycle gang is also a Mensa member, but I suppose bright people can be sadistic. Motorcycle gang members are easy targets, but corruption within a legal system that depends on honest cops and prosecutors adds a bit of depth to the story.

The corrupt prosecutor’s identity requires Wyatt to discern the meaning of “Starlight,” the word uttered in a dying breath by another murder victim. Why did the dying man utter the word “Starlight” rather than simply naming the prosecutor? Because the novel wouldn’t have gone on for another fifty pages if he’d given a straightforward answer. When writers substitute “for the sake of the plot” in place of realistic actions, the story suffers. Even with that plot device, the corrupt DA’s identity is easy enough to guess.

Setting aside my reservations about plot elements that come across as forced, I appreciated the trial scenes and the effort Margolin made to give Wyatt a personality. False Witness isn’t among the best legal thrillers of recent vintage, but it is far from the worst.

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