“Physics is the antagonist” in Claire North’s space opera Slow Gods

The New Scientist Book Club has been reading Claire North’s space opera Slow Gods, in which a civilisation has to work out how to deal with a supernova that will kill everyone on a planet – but not for 100 years. Claire joined us to dig into the details of the book, chatting about everything from how their hero “is the protagonist you write when you are an adult diagnosed with autism late in your life” to the parallels between the climate crisis and the book’s world-ending supernova (“subtle metaphor it is not”). We also get into their terrifying version of faster-than-light travel – and how even the “science-iest” science fiction can need a little magic.