Slow River [Paperback]

Nicola Griffith (Author)

Book Description

Release date: August 20, 1996

She awoke in an alley to the splash of rain. She was naked, a foot-long gash in her back was still bleeding, and her identity implant was gone. Lore Van Oesterling had been the daughter of one of the world's most powerful families...and now she was nobody, and she had to hide.

Then out of the rain walked Spanner, predator and thief, who took her in, cared for her wound, and taught her how to reinvent herself again and again. No one could find Lore now: not the police, not her family, and not the kidnappers who had left her in that alley to die. She had escaped...but the cost of her newfound freedom was crime and deception, and she paid it over and over again, until she had become someone she loathed.

Lore had a choice: She could stay in the shadows, stay with Spanner...and risk losing herself forever. Or she could leave Spanner and find herself again by becoming someone else: stealing the identity implant of a dead woman, taking over her life, and creating a new future.

But to start again, Lore required Spanner's talents--Spanner, who needed her and hated her, and who always had a price. And even as Lore agreed to play Spanner's game one final time, she found that there was still the price of being a Van Oesterling to be paid. Only by confronting her family, her past, and her own demons could Lore meld together who she had once been, who she had become, and the person she intended to be...

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Slow River won both the Nebula Award and the Lambda Literary Award for author Nicola Griffith. The book's near-future setting and devices place it firmly on the science fiction shelves, and the characters' matter-of-fact sexuality further label it as lesbian SF. But make no mistake, Slow River is no subgenre throwaway. Griffith's skill at weaving temporal threads through the plot bring protagonist Lore van de Oest to tragic life, and you will genuinely care about her in the end.

Born into a bioengineering family made wealthy by cleaning up after humanity, Lore leads a life of privilege and power. Riches don't bring happiness, though, and the van de Oest family hides its share of dark secrets. Lore is kidnapped, but escapes from her captors when she realizes her family isn't going to pay the ransom. Naked, alone, and wounded, she is saved by the brutally street-smart Spanner, who teaches Lore to survive by exploiting the Net (and human) weaknesses. To learn to trust, though, Lore must face her demons, one by one, until she can begin again.

Griffith's biotech-science details are accurate, and she fits them smoothly into the story in the manner of a cyberpunk master. This novel's real strength is its characters, though. The van de Oest family, Spanner, even characters who appear only briefly, are all distinct and consistent--not to mention very human. Lore herself seems so personal that Griffith's note about the story's disturbing aspects not being autobiographical was probably wise. Slow River is more than good enough to transcend genre and appeal to both queer SF readers and a more broad audience looking for an excellent character-driven SF story. --Therese Littleton

From Publishers Weekly

Set in a dystopian future, Griffith's second novel involves a woman's search for identity.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books; Reissue edition (August 20, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345395379
• ISBN-13: 978-0345395375
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.8 x 7.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (51 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #756,665 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Top notch SF January 25, 2005

By Cavan Terrill

Format:Paperback

I was surprised at some of the poor reviews given this book and have an idea that these stem from those picking up books from a list of Nebula Award winners. This book is not at all your typical SF story, indeed it feels much more like a mainstream story with some SF aspects than it does an SF story. I'm an avid reader of both science fiction as well as mainstream fiction, so this holds a good deal of appeal for me.

Griffith's prose is wonderful and showcases a beauty of language seldom seen in science fiction. Her characterization is also near perfect. I won't spend time discussing the plot as that's been handled amply by the other reviewers, but I will echo one other person's thoughts: The storyline that has Lore working at a sewage plant is, surprisingly, every bit as engrossing as the ones that deal with her kidnapping and her high society upbringing. To me, that says a good deal about Griffith's talent as a writer.

As for the sex scenes, which some people describe as being nearly constant in the book, there are actually about four or five scenes taking up somewhere around ten pages of the book (not each, but in total). Additionally, they're not placed in the story without purpose.

Overall, an excellent book. Personally, I'm quite glad that it won a Nebula. It's certainly desereving.

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Uneven but Entertaining July 29, 2004

By Daniel H. Bigelow VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

The action in this science fiction novel alternates between three different phases in the life of the protagonist, Lore van de Oest. One phase, told in the third person and present tense, consists of biographical sketches of Lore's privileged upbringing until a kidnapping gone wrong propels her, naked and injured, into a new life on the streets. The second, told in the third person and past tense, tells how she survives for three years on the mean streets with the help of an amoral hustler called Spanner, whom she joins in a life of crime. The third, in which Lore speaks in the first person, is about how Lore, now separated from Spanner, tries to go straight and build a life for herself as a shift worker in a high-tech water purification plant.

Author Nicola Griffith leavens each section with vivid futuristic detail, and she is an evocative writer with a sharp eye for character. As a writer, her choice to switch between first and third person, past and present tense -- her biggest gamble -- is also her greatest failure, as the transition can sometimes be jarring. Other than that, her prose flows as smoothly and deeply as the river of the title.

Two of the three parts of Slow River -- the ones about street life and privileged life in the near future -- are above average examples of basic science fiction themes, most worth reading for Griffith's prose. The third, about Lore's employment at the extremely well-imagined purification facility, is more original. The atmosphere of low-grade tension inherent in the possibility that some malfunction there will cause an ecological catastrophe gives an element of suspense to Griffith's novel that keeps the reader turning pages.

Or, at least, it did me.... It says something, about either Griffith or me, that I read as fast as I could through chapters about surefire topics like high-tech crime and futuristic luxury because I was desperate to find out what happens to the poorly-paid denizens of a water treatment plant. It takes talent to make this sort of topic so absorbing, but Griffith has no shortage of that -- and her peers agree, and awarded Slow River various awards, including the prestigious Nebula. Read more ›

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars One of those stories that stays with you. December 29, 1997

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

"Slow River" is one of those books that I read again and again, wearing my copy to a dog-eared mess, giving other copies to friends, keeping in an easily accessible place so I can re-read a favorite passage or look up a memorable phrase.

This book captivated me on so many levels that I'm hard put to say what I like best about it. Griffith's prose, like the "slow river" she describes in the opening chapter, is smooth and languid on the surface, but has hidden depths that slowly rise as the story continues. The structure of the story is excellent; the use of different tenses and points of view (Lore is always the viewpoint character, but sometimes first-person, sometimes third-person) is smooth and never confusing. Griffith's plot construction is first rate, allowing the characters to breathe and grow.

The story itself is equally tantilizing. The glimpses we get of Lore's family are few, but telling; one senses that she is used to living a life of precision masked by glamour. When she loses these things, she loses her identity.

Griffith's use of symbolism is frequent but never heavy-handed or overstated; it would be easy for the PIDA (a type of personal ID), for example, to become just another tired cliche. The symbols merely serve to underline important things about the characters, who come to the forefront, each an individual.

In fact, it's hard for me to cite anything bad about this book. I suppose I could think of something if I tried, but Griffith has that rare knack of enveloping the reader in her story so completely that every time I read it, I forget about analyzing it and just sit back and enjoy the book.

19 of 23 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't let the "subgenre" label fool you February 12, 2004

By Michael Battaglia

Format:Paperback

In SF, unlike its sister genre fantasy, there has been a history of dealing with issues of homosexuality in an unflinching, honest fashion (instead of fantasy's fey princes and twisted perverts) and while those issues have not really grasped mainstream SF, it's always been there, blatantly stated in Samuel Delany writings and others, lurking in Disch, in Ballard, from the sixties and seventies onward, incorporating sexuality matter of factly, almost explicitly so. There have been subgenres, of course, as there are in any major genre, but for the most part it's not really shocking or scandalous to see homosexuality represented in SF. And so awarding the Nebula to this novel both gladdens and confuses me. Gladdens, because it is a fine, tightly constructed novel, exploring its characters with a depth normally reserved for such masters as Margaret Atwood (when it comes to charactization and studies, at least). Confuses, because there is nothing really explicitly "groundbreaking" about it. The plot, while entertaining and thought provoking, breaks no real new ground, either by busting down nonexistent barriers regarding homosexuality in SF or providing a mindwarping new way of looking at the artiface of Story. The story itself, on the surface, is simple. Lore, a children born into a ridiculously wealthy family is kidnapped and tormented. Eventually she escapes and instead of going back to her family tries to live out among society, where she meets master scammer Scanner, among other people. Eventually she tries to form her own identity, working as the lowest employee on the type of thing her own family patented.... The novel's structure is interesting, in that it jumps between Lore's childhood and her tightly sketched family (even the briefly glimpsed ones feel real, and even small moments resonate), then to her life with Scanner and then to the present day where she finally finishes the journey of finding herself. The fact that Lore is a lesbian is treated astonishingly well, there is no cliched "coming out" moment, she begins the story as a lesbian and that is just the way things are. People turned off by homosexuality probably should avoid this book, while I didn't find the scenes too explicit (certainly nowhere near pornographic, as some reviewers have tried to claim) and frankly they don't take up too many scenes in the novel itself, for some people, one scene may be one scene too many. And those people are entitled to their opinions and shouldn't read things that make them unhappy or uncomfortable. And this is a novel that deals with unpleasant things, and faces them boldly and obliquely, much like we do in real life. Slow River is a good book, perhaps even a great book. Does it deserve to stand up with past Nebula winners such as Dune or Ender's Game or A Time of Changes (and before you think that I'm biased toward SF written by white males, I thoroughly enjoyed Russ' The Female Man, so there) . . . I don't think so, but I also don't know what the competition was that year. It doesn't really matter. If the giant block letters proclaiming it to be a "Nebula Award Winner!" capture your attention enough to entice you to read the book, then that's all well and good. For in the end it's a fine example of SF doing what it does best, reflecting our lives and taking real people and real emotions and putting them in a fantastic setting, so while the background may be unfamiliar, the rest isn't. Read more ›