Slow Gods is a story of the struggles and deaths that occur
after a superintelligent entity sends a message to all the human
and alien civilizations within 80 light-years of a binary star, telling
them that in 100 years the binary will collapse into a black hole, and
all of you people are in the fatal blast radius.
One of the affected civilizations is a dystopian capitalist Empire that
soothes its populace into believing that everything is fine. Of course
its elites also plan to save themselves, mainly by expanding their
Empire into neighbors outside the danger zone. The Empire resists the
scolding of less dystopian civilizations by virtue of having a fleet of
hidden blackships that are poised to destroy the planets of overzealous
scolds at a moment's notice.
This scenario is clearly an examination of the present world with the
serial numbers filed off, and North does some strange and subtle things
with it. The book begins with "My name is Mawukana na-Vdnaze, and I am a
very poor copy of myself." The protagonist, nicknamed Maw, is a
neurodiverse human who died during an arcspace jump that went wrong.
Arcspace is a hyperspace with some inexplicable eldritch horror in its
fabric. Some part of this eldritch arcspace is apparently curious about
the outer realm of "normal" physics, and it chose to explore this by
creating a nearly exact copy of the Maw who died in arcspace.
Maw seems to have merely human neurodivergent thoughts. He does not have
any clear connection to the arcspace's mind or intentions, if it even
has such things. But he does have a distressing tendency to become
somewhat eldritch when the lights are out. Despite this additional
hindrance to interpersonal relationships, Maw does find comfort in odd
companions along his individual path through civilization-ending events.
Wikipedia mentions that the author North is autistic, and this aspect of
Maw reads as authentic. I don't have enough experience with eldritch
horrors to evaluate the other aspect of Maw. Still, it's clear that
North is playfully using the two types of otherness to illuminate each
other.
One of North's earlier novels,
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014) has an author's
note that apologizes that all the characters are men, which is a
consequence of the specific early-20th-century history that the story
explores. Slow Gods is an exuberant overcorrection. Every
distinct civilization has some neopronouns in the common language. The
Empire is still strictly binary with "he" and "she", but it also has
"hé" and "shé", which are reserved for those elites who embody the
ideals of masculinity and femininity.
Beside the comparative ethnology, space opera, and allegory, the book
asks things like: what is a god, and what is love. The answer may
surprise you.