Slow Gods is Claire North's "science fiction" allegorical novel set in a far future space. I use "science fiction" in quotes because there's really very little science in this novel. It's more like a fantasy novel with science fictional trappings. The premise here is that the FTL travel requires pilots to confront a Lovecraftian type horror during the traverse, to the point where most pilots go insane after just one or two trips.
The protagonist is a special case, coming from a hyper-capitalistic society ("The Shine") where you accrue debts starting from birth, and have to work to pay it off. Everything's run by corporations, and what matters is how "shiny" you are, which is mostly about money, but also about being an influencer.
The novel has lots of allegories, obviously, to modern American society, and brings in allegories about global warming (in the form of a supernova that will sterilize all planets within a few hundred light years of the supernova, but with the worlds given several hundred years of warning in advance). There's also more allegories about the Palestinian Israeli conflict. By the time you're done reading this you're kinda burned out on allegories, which makes this book very weak. Pile on huge numbers of new pronounces being invented by the author for various space-faring races, and you've got a super-woke novel that probably will not age well.
The part about being slow gods is where there's an advanced machine sentience in the story that's been providing all space faring races with predictions of 99% accuracy, and the protagonist of the novel is manipulated by this advanced machine intelligence in order to bring down the Shine. This is awesome wish fulfillment, but as good fiction it failed for me even though I agree with most of the politics behind the novel.
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