James Nicoll Reviews

Claire North’s 2025 Slow Gods is a stand-alone space opera.

The United Social Venture, AKA the Shine, promises its people prosperity in return for hard work. What the masses get is mounting debt and ruthless exploitation at the hands of entrenched oligarchs, who cheerfully lie while blatantly cheating.

Mawukana na Vdnaze (“Maw”) should have had an unremarkable if unpleasant life. Maw did not. Thank the apocalypse.

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When 2015’s Touch begins, things are not going well for protagonist Kepler, who has just been shot twice by a complete stranger. Things are worse for Kepler’s host, Josephine Cebula, She is trapped in her own dying body; Kepler can escape into any living body within arm’s reach.

Kepler has no idea why the stranger attacked. The body-hopper does know that, for some reason, killing Josephine appeared to be as or more important than killing Kepler. Possessing the killer is easy enough, which gives Kepler the killer’s effects to rummage through for clues but that turns out to be just the first and least step on the way to finding Kepler’s real enemy.

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