Slow River

by Nicola Griffith

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 de Oest 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 new found 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 de Oest 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.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, LGBT, Queer, Lesbian, Cyberpunk, Speculative Fiction

321 pages, Paperback

First published July 4, 1995

About the author

Nicola Griffith has won the Los Angeles Times' Ray Bradbury Prize, the Society of Authors' ADCI Literary Prize, the Washington State Book Award (twice), the Nebula Award, the Otherwise/James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award, the World Fantasy Award, Premio Italia, Lambda Literary Award (6 times), and others. She is also the co-editor of the Bending the Landscape series of anthologies. Her newest novels are Hild and So Lucky. Her Aud Torvingen novels are soonn to be rereleased in new editions. She lives in Seattle with her wife, writer Kelley Eskridge, where she's working on the sequel to Hild, Menewood.

Series:
* Aud Torvingen

Reviews

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oh, where to begin with this one. I liked this book a lot, but I don't think it was good. Which is fine. Except I think the author was probably much more interested in the book being good versus enjoyable.

Two summers ago, I think, I read Solitaire by Kelley Eskridge. I told several people about how the book was enjoyable but kind of ridiculously self-indulgent. It's a book that's supposed to be about virtual reality prisons that is actually about how awesome it is to have your super power be PROJECT MANAGEMENT. Here's the thing: Kelley Eskridge and Nicola Griffin are partners and Slow River is basically the exact same book. (In all fairness: Slow River was published about a decade before Solitaire, so if there was any filing of the serial numbers, it was on the part of Eskridge).

So anyway, young woman from a globally affluent background and well-known family suffers a tragedy and is CAST OUT and relegated to a life among the plebes, but she is so brilliant and special and comes from such good breeding that she cannot help but shine, a diamond in the rough. In this book, the super power is being prodigiously good at sewage treatment management.

Seriously, I'm not kidding. This is a book that is allegedly about stolen electronic identities but long, long passages are devoted to how to be a really bad-ass sewage treatment plant manager. I don't even know.

But the structure of the book (three narratives happening at three different times in the main character's life, written in two POV and three tenses, which was a little much, but let's move on) provided suspense and I do give Eskridge and Griffin credit for one thing which keeps me reading their books -- they use speculative fiction to write lesbian characters in a theoretical near-future speculative world where sexual identity is a complete non-issue. The main character of Slow River is a lesbian, but it's the least complicated, non-angsty aspect of her personality. More time is spent angsting about her hair color.

(Seriously. SEWAGE TREATMENT.)

[Lex Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a tough book to read. Really hard subjects: sexually abused children, sexually abused adults, kidnapping, suicide, this is not an easy read at all. But I do have to point out that Griffith, really is a brilliant writer. Every book I have read by her, make me think and feel. And while I can't say that I actually liked this book, I can appreciate it, if that makes any sense. I didn't like a lot of the subject matter, but it's a well written, well imagined book.
This book take place in the future. And I have to comment on how close Griffith guessed some of our current technology. This book was written in the mid 90's and she basically knew we would all be running around with tablets.
I did like that the book had a lot of twists and turns. I was totally wrong about one thing, and did not see another coming a mile away. The ending I have mixed feelings about, I liked how things seemed to be wrapping up; but it also ended abruptly and we don't get to see how everything played out.
This is definitely not a book for everyone. There is a lot of science in parts, and extremely tough subjects. It will make you uncomfortable. But it is a well written, well thought out, book.

[Nicky · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't think I read the summary of Slow River when I bought it. It wasn't familiar at all when I started reading it, anyway. And I... kind of liked that. Everything was a surprise. I loved the careful unfolding of the threefold narrative, the careful bringing to light of secrets you begin to feel you should've known all along. And I loved that LGBT relationships were normal, just taken for granted. I loved that the main character learns all sorts of things about privilege and the lack of it.

I even loved the slow plot. I never thought I'd find a book focused on a water remediation plant and the family that own the technology surrounding it so fascinating, but it really was. I love it when someone takes something so necessary but unseen to our modern lives and just expands it a little, showing how vital it is and could be.

Very much looking forward to the other Nicola Griffith books I have, now.

[Charlotte Kersten]

“Kittens should be round.”

CW for child sexual abuse.

So What’s It About?

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…

What I Thought

When I say that this book is unique, I don’t mean it in that condescending critical-but-not-critical way that people often mean it. I do truly think it’s genuinely unique! Three narratives from the main character Lore’s life interweave to create a story about broken families, broken partnerships, and, finally, healing. I think the book’s ultimate message is the quote I chose to start my review with: “kittens should be round.” It means that children should be cherished and nurtured rather than abused or used as pawns in their parents’ fights or trained to be miniature adults without experiencing the things that make childhood special. I really appreciate Lore’s journey of working towards this realization, during which she gardens, takes care of a cat, carves out an independent life for herself and slowly makes friends. She gradually becomes her own person after so long spent caught up in her family’s business, privilege and secrets, the pain and fear of her kidnapping and her toxic relationship with Spanner.

Spanner is definitely an interesting character - she’s magnetic and hurt and volatile and cruel, brilliant and full of a self-loathing and cynicism that keep her trapped in a life of crime. She also works as a sex worker using an aphrodisiacal drug and lies to Lore about the reasons why she has them keep doing this work. I wonder if she was intentionally written to be bipolar, but there were definitely scenes where it seemed like she was struggling with the highs of mania and the lows of depression that are familiar to me due to family diagnoses.

I mentioned child abuse previously, and while I generally think the book has some good things to say about this topic, it’s somewhat disheartening that the villain who orchestrated Lore’s kidnapping and is more or less responsible for everything bad happening at her family’s company is revealed to be her sister Greta, who was sexually abused by their mother as a child. The reason she did all that bad stuff? The CSA “made her crazy.” It’s a disappointingly cheap reliance on stereotype for a book that otherwise manages its themes pretty well.

There are many pages of descriptions of how water purification plants work. All of this went entirely above my head, and while it’s impressive that Griffith has such a base of scientific knowledge and/or did so much research, I have to say that it was extremely boring to me and I really wanted to skim those parts. Then again, I also had no idea what was happening with all of the PIDA hacking that Spanner and Lore were doing…this might just be why I tend to like fantasy more than sci-fi.

Finally, while I’m happy that Lore ended the book reunited with her family and entering a positive new romantic relationship, I kind of think that the romance with Magyar developed out of nowhere; it felt like Magyar really disliked her until the very end and they mostly just talked about water plant business until *poof* romance happened! Overall I say 3.5 stars and I’ll definitely be interested in reading more by Nicola Griffith.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very likely the only SF novel set in a sewage-treatment plant. Lots of cool sanitary-engineering details. I liked it a lot. Held up to a reread.

For a real review, read Nicky's: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
She liked it, too.

[Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those very rare science fiction books that I actually enjoyed (and yes, I love fantasy. If you think they are interchangeable, we need to talk). And there’s a lot of science here – futuristic eco-friendly wastewater treatment is a major part of the plot – but the real story is about character growth, coping with and recovering from trauma, and relationships.

Slow River has a fairly complicated structure, following its protagonist, Lore, through three different parts of her life in alternating threads. One storyline is about Lore’s privileged upbringing. Another follows her after surviving a kidnapping and near murder, as she hooks up with a scam artist who takes her in. And in the third story – none of this is a spoiler because in the book it all happens simultaneously – Lore has left the scam artist and is finally rebuilding her life, beginning with an entry-level job at a wastewater treatment plant. As it happens, Lore knows all about wastewater treatment, which is good because things at the plant are about to go wrong.

Alternating between all these threads may sound chaotic, but it works well: there’s enough we don’t know to keep each story involving, and the distinct emotional arcs harmonize with one another. While there’s some technobabble, the focus stays on the characters, who are interesting and believable, and Griffith’s version of the near future doesn’t feel too far off. It is a positive version of the future in some ways – same-sex marriages are accepted, and the fact that Lore is attracted to women is a non-issue for her and everyone else in the book. There are some dystopian elements, mostly in the behavior of corporations, but Griffith comes down on the side of realism in these portrayals rather than going the over-the-top EvilCorp™ route.

So I enjoyed this, and consider it a good book, though it wants to be literary fiction as well as sci-fi and I’m not convinced it quite achieves that; there is some depth to the characters, particularly Lore and her primary love interest, Spanner, but Griffith doesn’t take it to the next level. Also, Lore’s leaps of logic regarding the identity of the book’s “true villain” prove troubling. She never confronts this person, but concludes that s/he must be responsible for certain dastardly deeds because: 1) s/he, along with over a hundred other people, was a major contributor to a fake charity connected, through a chain of other people and corporations, to someone who may be a saboteur and 2) s/he is said to have been sexually abused as a child, and therefore must have control issues. QED.

Oh well, I’m unlikely to go out of my way to recommend this to people, but I liked it and do think it deserves more attention than it has received. Three and a half stars.

[Bandit · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an author I've been meaning to try out and an award winning book seemed like a good place to start. What I've come away with from this reading experience is sort of a mixed bag, but generally somewhat underwhelmed. Specifically...I enjoyed the quality of writing, it's always nice to see a strong heroine, especially one so young, but then there were detractors. For a scifi story it wasn't particularly immersive as far as world building goes, the novel is set some time in the future, although written in the past 1995 and in a fairly timeless fashion has to do with one of our most precious commodities, water, and it's purification. This is the business which has made the protagonist's family their billions, but then all the things money can't buy reared their uglies. And so it left their youngest daughter alone and desperate on the streets, free to make her own way, free to become her own person. Ok, that's great for character building. But the technical aspect of the novel was heavily overdone, almost like a manual on water purification at times. Absolutely unnecessary amount of details, distracting. The timelines skipped around like nobody's business, but that's minor. This is a lesbian novel, lesbian scifi if that's a thing. While it shouldn't be marginalized as subgenre, there is a lot of it in the book, graphic and otherwise and not so much romantic as lurid and disturbing at times. So that was interesting. The book itself really was interesting if going by the pure plotline, the writing was strong, it's just the overdone technicalities and underdone presence of engaging side characters that dragged it down. Semi auspicious introduction to the author, but not a turn off. Quick read too.

[Kara Babcock · Rating 4 out of 5]

On one hand, I love science fiction that examines how new technology can completely disrupt society. Few people, two centuries ago, could envision the way we live today, so many of us spending our time punching buttons on the side of a flat box so that words show up on a screen a few centimetres away. Technological advancement is driven by and drives changes in society. On the other hand, it’s always nice to see books that dial back the disruption to focus on what doesn’ change. In the case of Slow River, Nicola Griffith asserts that wireless payment and other near-future advancements will hail neither a post-scarcity utopia nor a totalitarian dystopia in which children fight to the death (aww). Instead, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and those caught in between continue to do what it takes to survive.

Slow River has an interesting dual structure. Throughout each chapter, Griffith alternates between a third-person Lore, set a few years to months in the past, and a present-day, first-person Lore. The former story follows Lore as she recovers from an horrific kidnapping. Heiress to one of the wealthiest families in the world, Lore is a child of privilege. She was raised with the best education and experiences that money can buy. After learning, or thinking she has learned, certain secrets about her family, Lore decides she cannot return after she escapes from her abductors. She goes underground instead, meeting Spanner, a small-time criminal and hacker who takes pity on her. The latter story focuses on Lore’s attempts to get a “normal” life after leaving Spanner and striking out on her own. Armed with a false identity chip and her own knowledge of water purification processes, Lore gets a job at the local plant, only to find herself in the deep end. Occasionally, Griffith adds a third perspective: Lore as a child, growing up and navigating the waters of adolescence.

The title says it all: this is not a book that takes things lightly, nor does it move at a breezy pace. Griffith lingers over events, tracing and re-tracing them throughout the book. She is particularly keen on taste and smell, senses too often neglected at the expense of the more easily imagined sight, sound, and even touch. The result is writing raw and energetic yet also relaxed, almost effortless. It almost has the quality of a stage play rather than a novel. Beyond the small core cast, Griffith doesn’t both making the supporting characters feel very real. But this works, because ultimately Slow River is a character-driven piece, Lore’s journey from self-exile to some kind of understanding, if not acceptance, of her past and her identity.

I won’t go into too much detail and spoil anything, but it’s apparent from very close to the beginning that someone close to Lore sexually abuses her as a child. There is a scene involving a “monster” and putting a lock on her bedroom door. Lore’s sister Stella, the wandering child of the family, commits suicide just prior to Lore’s kidnapping. So on one level, Lore should have it all: riches, power, an interesting career as one of the heads of a company specializing in biological solutions to purification problems. Yet her family is riven by mistrust, by mutual dislike, by the dark secrets and the monsters that no one is willing to speak of aloud. Lore’s kidnapping and escape are also traumatic enough that, by the time she emerges onto the streets shivering and injured, she has no desire to face her family and try to work things out.

Griffith plays with ideas that Lore is both a victim as well as a perpetrator. As a victim, she has suffered at the hands of those who wronged her. Then, however, she falls in with Spanner, who claims that her petty slate theft is “victimless crime”, even though it soon becomes apparent it is anything but. The Lore who recovers under Spanner’s watch is a much more jaded, more cynical Lore than the one who came before. There’s a very memorable scene where Lore dyes her hair for the first time. She has grey hair, a sign of her wealth. (It goes like this: pigmentless hair leaves people prone to skin cancer, so the hair is a sign that Lore’s family can afford the medical nanotechnology required to prevent such an ailment.) This would be a dead giveaway in someone Lore’s age, so she must dye it. Spanner rejects her first choice, brown, because it looks too good on her. She is still too perfect, not broken enough to mix and mingle with the rest of this seedy world. Lore has to go with red, brutally alter her physical appearance in a way that affects her psychologically. From then on, she is broken, and it feels like she has much less agency.

In effect, there are two Lores in this book. Past!Lore goes along with Spanner’s schemes, caught up in the latter’s wake, craving her love and attention and, for once, relieved not to have any responsibility. Present!Lore is desperate to sort out her life, to start acting like someone normal, to forget how being with Spanner made her feel powerless and guilty. I love this parallel story and the arc Griffith forges with it. The end result is a powerful and moving book. Though set nominally in the future and featuring certain technologies we don’t quite have, Slow River is science-fiction in setting only. It eminently represents the best use of science fiction as a psychological tool for interrogating the ways we create and interpret our own and others’ identities. It’s not a book that many people might casually pick up—all the more the loss for them.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

...Slow River is one of those novels that left me unable to pick up another book for several days after I finished it. It is a very impressive work of science fiction. Lore's trials are not easy on the reader. For most of the novel she is searching for herself, grasping to understand the relationships within her family and the complexity of their company. It would seem that she is more at ease with systems design than with the infinitely complex structures of human relationships. She learns though. At the end of the novel a much more mature Lore emerges. Slow River is both technically and emotionally a very strong novel. I consider it a must read.

Full Random Comments review

[Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazing blend of genres and ideas. I love sci-fi that doesn't make a big deal about straight vs. queer. Nicola Griffith can even make water treatment plant science interesting. So glad I went to the effort to get this book.

[Sarah (is clearing her shelves) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for the 2017 POPSUGAR Challenge prompt Bestseller from a Genre You Don't Normally Read

6/2 - The main character in this book is a SEWERAGE TREATMENT PLANT SPECIALIST. How many other books can say that?! My dad designs and builds sewerage treatment plants (although he tells me that the industry refuses to use the word 'sewerage' in any way because it puts people off drinking the perfectly clean water that comes from a sewerage treatment plant, his title is Principal Engineer specialising in Water Treatment).

After realising what Lore's working background was I told my dad and tried to explain some of the details of the story (he has also never heard of a book with a main character who works in water treatment and was very excited when I told him about this character's unique career choice), unfortunately most of the technical details went over my head and just left me with glazed over eyes. In the end I stopped trying to explain exactly what Lore's job was and just read him large passages of the text. Most of the information was technically correct, but everything was highly exaggerated. You don't need anywhere near as many people working in a water treatment plant as Griffith has working at Hedon Road (and before anyone suggests that this book was written in 1995 and my dad is talking about how a plant is run in 2017, I asked exactly that question and he said that water treatment plants have been run this way with a staff of that size since the early 1900s, things have hardly changed in the last 20 years). Dad says that some of the plants that he's visited just have a single guy doing the monitoring on a bi-weekly rotation and simply check in at the plant for a few minutes before moving on to the next one on the schedule. The idea of having so many people working at the plant and the need for shifts is ridiculous and something only someone who's never actually visited a plant would assume (either that or Griffith wrote it that way to make everything more dramatic - higher possible body count = higher excitement). The other part of the plot that was over done to an even sillier extent was the possible consequences of a spill into the city water pipes. There's no way anyone would experience any immediate symptoms from drinking/bathing in water that's contaminated with anything. It's all very scary sounding, but you just couldn't get enough of the contaminant into the system to counteract how much it's diluted before it actually comes out of your taps. The only real fear of poisoning from your drinking water comes from long term exposure, for example if there is lead leaching into a city's water over 20 years. That would lead to some of the disastrous consequences that Griffith predicts, but nothing would happen immediately.

So, while I enjoyed the story of Lore and Spanner and her quest to find out what really happened to her and appreciated what might be the only water treatment plant specialist main character, I did find Griffith's exaggeration of the inner workings of water treatment plants irritating.

[Paul Ataua · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was quite difficult to get into the story with its three intertwining narratives taking in place in three different time periods in Lore’s, life, and it was complicated further by the fact that two of these were from a first person point of view while the third was from a third person point of view, which was also confusing. I kept reading, hanging in there, spurred on by my interest in the story taking place in the sewage cleaning plant, and was finally rewarded as the three parts came together in the end. Yes, I guess it has been touted as a SF lesbian story, but that really doesn’t capture what is important about it. It is a thriller and a mystery and a very impressive novel.

[Comrade Anka · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wow, never thought I would hate a book so much. The plot is pretty simple - a spoiled rich girl gets kidnapped, manages to escape, believes that she has killed one of the kidnappers and decides to hide from her family since she's afraid of being charged for a murder and believes that her father is behind the kidnapping and had previously molested her older sister (who committed suicide). She got rescued by a stranger women who later on becomes her lover and her pimp. Gets tired of prostituting herself and gets a job at a sewage plant.
I decided to read this one after recommendations from many female booktubers who consider themselves feminists. Griffith portrays Lore as a beautiful talented woman, who could work as Assistant Manager on her parents' plant from age 15. And how did she decide to start her new life? Yep, by having sex with her pimp in front of some perverts for money and by prostitution. She makes such a big deal about being humiliated while being kept naked and filmed by her kidnappers, yet she drugs her friends and films hard-core porn with them without their consent. She constantly mentions that she believes her father has made an attempt to molest her as a kid, but she turns the blind eye on her girlfriend/pimp's business with child molesters and the so called 'daisy chain' - monsters who sell toddlers for sex. The only human thing she does - is her guilt driven attempt to save Pablo's job. And that's it.
Trying to run away from monsters she has become a monster herself.
I'm sick and utterly disgusted by this book.

[Lit Bug (Foram) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nicola Griffith’s Nebula Award and Lambda Award-winning second novel Slow River is a very near-future SF lesbian story focusing on a young woman’s journey to self-discovery and establishing her own identity, told across three time-frames, spanning from her privileged childhood as the potential heiress of the van Oest family who controls waterworks that provide clean drinking water in an age where untreated water is no longer drinkable, to her abduction and her family’s unexplained silence and refusal to pay her ransom, going on where Lore must find a way to survive in a world that no longer recognizes her.

The novel begins at the last of the three stages of her life – where she begins a quest of self-sufficiency, finally pushing away the past that held her captive – Spanner, who had taken her in when she lay naked and vulnerable, dumped to die by her abductors, and the disturbing facts about her family that dawned upon her gradually as her story progresses in flashbacks from the time she was kidnapped.

Entwined by the past two strands of her life – her life before the abduction and after her abduction, it slowly starts to dawn upon the reader what Lore is doing that night in the present, and how she has attempted twice to rebuild her shattered life.

The heiress of a water-management financial mega-empire, she led a sheltered, privileged life where life was wonderful for her, surrounded by a loving family. When she is kidnapped and a ransom demanded, she is shocked by the sheer silence her family maintains and refuses to pay the ransom. Knowing that nobody would save her, she valiantly escapes her tormentors, left naked in the night, crouching in the shadows, when Spanner, a young woman hears her pleas for help and hesitantly picks her up and shelters her.

Spanner, the second part of her life, is an amoral thief who thrives on the margins of the society – Lore’s protection is not for free, Lore soon understands – Spanner has a price for everything, and now Lore finds herself having to choose between the devil and the deep sea – to return fatally injured to a family who would not take her back, or to assist Spanner in her data theft and thus be protected from the outer world. Thus begins her new life where she learns how to survive in a crooked world that does not understand her, her privileged status, where she has to shed every scrap of her former life and begin to thrive in the side alleys of an unforgiving world. With her love-hate relationship with Spanner, she and Spanner also become lovers, while simultaneously insulating themselves from each other and refusing to reveal the chinks in their respective armours. All the while, as her story with Spanner progresses, the reader, along with Lore, gain insights into the more troubling facets of the Oest family, and we see Lore maturing from a happy-go-lucky, naïve and frightened-of-monsters kid to a young, sharp, street savvy woman.

In her quest for freedom from Spanner with whom she is forced to thieve in order to gain her protection, she decides courageously to venture out on her own, requiring a last, final assistance from Spanner in order to take on the identity of a dead woman to begin a honest life of her own, working in a water purification plant, with a new lover, Ruth. And then, the Oest family beckons again, after a span of almost three years, beckoning Lore to come back, that everything has been finally sorted out, and Lore learns of her sister Stella’s suicide, driven by her own beloved father. Lore, who had pined for her family till now, now refuses to go back.

Slow River is an amazingly well-written novel, thematically complex and inter-twining various present-day concerns. It is a lesbian romance of Lore and Spanner, a different sort of captive and captor, protector and protected, master and apprentice. It is a story of near-future world where identities can be switched for a price, where ecological dystopias and bio-tech corporations run the world economy, it is a story of survival and self-discovery of a privileged woman thrown out inexplicably by her family to survive on the thresholds of an unforgiving society.

The final strand, of the present time was perhaps the least interesting – the former two strands were far more interesting and thematically complex. The dialogues are subtle, sparse and we are required to read between the lines at every step. The real story lies there – superficially read, it yields little, but there is a treasure below if you know where to dig. Also brilliant technically is the narration of the novel – the three strands are not only chronologically linear though told in flashbacks as is usual, they are inter-woven in a way that they complement the understanding of one strand by a crucial piece of information in another strand. Rather than forming coherence of the present through the past, it is a web where each strand of one section seeks to support and explain the structure of the next section.

Technically and thematically complex, it is one of the most astounding stories of science fiction – a near-future so near, it might come true in a hundred years or so.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Slow River’ is an unusual sci-fi novel that reminded me of China Mountain Zhang. Both focus on the lived experience of a queer main character in a future world, without any grand plot arcs in which civilisation collapses or the universe is in peril. When skilfully done, such quiet tales can be an excellent way to examine the consequences of speculative social and technological changes. While ‘Slow River’ didn’t have the same depth of world-building as China Mountain Zhang, it was just as involving. The narrative jumps back and forth in time, letting the reader slowly piece together the traumatic events that have led the main character to her present situation. It’s a story of recovery and rebuilding, in which futuristic technology plays only a subtle part. Griffith manages the incredible feat of making grunt work at a sewage treatment plant genuinely fascinating and superior to the superficial glamour of petty crime. Lore is an appealing character and her story raises interesting issues of class and privilege. Again much like China Mountain Zhang, ‘Slow River’ is a cautiously, ambiguously hopeful novel. Lore goes through some shattering experiences and gradually puts together a new life for herself. There is no dystopia or utopia here, just a woman trying to move past her troubled childhood and earn enough to pay the rent. A good read, although it bothered me not to know the name or location of the city it was set in.

[Anthony Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hard to believe it's almost two decades since I read this, but Nicola Griffith's coming of age tale remains as relevant today as ever. The socially alienating effects of privilege lie at the heart of this near-future tale of a young woman cast adrift from her wealthy family by a kidnapping gone wrong, finding love, friendship and a sense of social justice in the process. Anyone expecting a post-cyberpunk mish-mash of martial arts and weapon enhanced mercenaries will be disappointed; Griffith presents the future as a not-quite dystopia inhabited by real people, making this one of the more prescient pieces of science fiction to emerge from the 1990s.

[Kathrin Passig · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ich kannte drei andere (neuere) Bücher von Nicola Griffith und hatte deshalb Vertrauen, außerdem versprachen Goodreads-Bewertungen, dass die Arbeit in einer Kläranlage detailliert geschildert wird. Der Kläranlagencontent ist aber leider nur ein eher kleiner Teil, vielleicht ein Viertel des Buchs, und beim Rest funktioniert fast gar nichts. Hölzerne Dialoge, ein Wühltisch-Plot, unglaubhafte Figuren tun unplausible Dinge. Zwei kleine Pluspunkte: Die sexuelle Orientierung der Hauptfigur ist einfach so und wird nicht für Probleme benutzt, und abgesehen von der Benutzung vieler "disks" ist die Zukunftsdarstellung unpeinlich (das Buch ist von 1995).

[Vigasia · Rating 4 out of 5]

IT is a beautiful story about a woman trying to find her purpose in life after dramating experiences. Ot is very well written and the story moves your emotion. The only problem were parts where there were a lot of technical language wchich was a little boring for me. But I liked the book very much.

[Siyang Wei · Rating 4 out of 5]

surprising at every turn. and in the end it's about clawing your way, naked and covered in blood, to a life that is joyful and real and yours.

[Ryan]

Avoiding as it includes sexually abused children, sexually abused adults, kidnapping, and suicide

[Julieta Steyr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Supongo que nadie califica porque Río Lento es una de esas historias que hay que ser muy pragmático o muy tolerante para leerlas ya que hay partes que los lectores ultra sensibles no estarán nada cómodos.
El libro nos quita de la zona de confort. Se lee en primera persona únicamente en tiempo presente, intercalando con la segunda persona en el pasado. Es la historia de Frances Lorien "Lore" Van de Oest, una millonaria en el pasado que ha sido secuestrada y escapa, en medio de truculentos hechos, en el presente. Lore, mientras se oculta en el anonimato, vive la típica vida de los bajos mundos junto a Spanner (alguien a quien los lectores suelen odiar) en una especie de pareja. Spanner no duda a la hora de conseguir dinero de donde sea y siempre al margen de la ley, Lore lo tiene en claro casi desde el momento en el que conoce a la mujer, pero acepta, puesto que no tiene ninguna otra posibilidad de sobrevivir herida, traumatizada y siendo buscada por su familia.
Lo más interesante es que Nicola nos muestra que no necesariamente Lore tiene que ser la pobrecita, es una chica inteligente que posteriormente dirá "sí, he hecho esto". Y Spanner no tiene por qué caerle en gracia al lector, sin embargo, si se piensa desde un punto de vista más racional, ella representaría la primera ley de Newton: colocando el movimiento, de otro modo, Lore no podrá llegar a un punto de escisión donde diga "quiero esto".
Las pistas van dejando que especulemos a lo largo del libro. ¿Será X el culpable de tal cosa? ¿Será Y? Sólo encontré unas 30 o 40 páginas un tanto aburridas, lo demás es interesante, incluyendo la obsesión de su autora con el perfectamente bien explicado sistema de purificación del agua, digno de un nerd o un obsesivo (me inclino por la segunda).
Así, los Van der Oest se convierten en una trampa mortal, un acertijo que Lore debe responder por sí misma aunque no le gusten las respuestas. Y los personajes pasan, la dejan pensando, marcan su vida y, al final de cuentas, la vida sigue. Es muy filosófico por partes y sí, deja una enseñanza si se quiere ver (no, no hablo de los procesos de una planta).
Muy recomendable. Muy. Espero tenerlo pronto en mi biblioteca en libro de papel. Y la estrella faltante es porque deja un final un tanto abierto y nada más.

[Jan Priddy]

This is not a time for me to be reading a novel about sexual and social exploitation. I am not certain if I might have enjoyed it more in a different year? I have no idea how to rate this. I tried giving it 2 stars, but no. I did not enjoy it, did not like it, or find it "okay."

The novel ends well, but to get to that reassuring ending, I had pass through abuse of children (a major theme), the powerful elite (never appealing to me even when they are nice rather than villainous), and semi-explicit sex that is not remotely appealing, but merely humiliating. Tawdry. Griffith's character works in a sewage treatment plant and finds relief in gardening and decorating her apartment. Yes, the symbolism of filth and finery. Oh! Drug abuse, porn (lots), prostitution, guilt, exploitation, misplaced anger—all that.

I liked the converging triple timeline which worked very well, and even the details of the sewage plant were an interesting relief from bad sex.

[Leaves the "size of canoe paddles" did not quite scan for me the first time I found it here but I skipped past. The second time Griffith used the same simile, I went downstairs and asked my husband. Does she mean the blade, which is not so huge, or the overall length of a paddle?]

I read this because I am a fan of Griffith's and she was celebrating the 25th anniversary of publication of this book. This is not a book I would recommend to anyone, though other readers seem to love it. I can still enthusiastically recommend Hild.

Griffith insists in an afterward that this is fiction. Well, obviously. Set in the future, science fiction and all. On the other hand...

[Wealhtheow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Too much cyberpunk is all about the Net and the Virtual World and omg, hackers are so cool! Slow River is definitely cyberpunk, but it's also full of meaty characterization and realistic relationships.

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

An unusual example of a science fiction book where the central plot was very much secondary, in terms of interest, to the setting and, oddly, the detailed portrayal of working in a waste treatment facility...

In theory, it's a book in which the daughter of a super-rich oligarch is kidnapped, held to ransom, escapes, falls in with a 'data pirate' called Spanner and seeks to uncover the truth about her family.
In practice, what actually stuck with me about this book was the way that it tries to get under the skin of what daily life would actually be like for an ordinary low-level grunt living and working in a Bladerunner-esque ustopia.

It is as if Nicola Griffith had heard the line about the contractors working on the Death Star in Clerks and decided to run with it (except, given the dates, probably not, as Clerks was released in 1994, and Slow River was published in 1995, which, given the lead-times involved in getting a book into print, suggests she is unlikely to have been inspired by the Kevin Smith film).

Lore, the book's central character, and the youngest daughter of the stratospherically rich and decidedly dysfunctional Van de Oeste family, finds herself living under a false identity and working in a suitably high-technology sewage treatment facility, responsible for de-toxifying the pollution caused by the cyber-punk world in which they are living. And, surprisingly, it is the scenes set in the sewage plant, and Griffith's depiction of the relations between the plant's employees – the foreperson, Cherry Magyar, the disabled and hard-done-by Paolo, the petty-tyrant boss Hepple, that are the best thing about the book. Perhaps because relatively few novels, and almost no science fiction books, explore in the world of the workplace. Another Goodreads review said (presumably tongue in cheek) that this was 'the best writing about a sewage plant I've ever read' – I assume that they mean the only such writing... I'm not going to pretend that I know enough about biology, or chemistry, to speak with any great authority, but the sections describing how the waste water was treated sounded convincing. They didn't fall into the trap that so much science fiction, and especially cyberpunk, does, of reading like technobabble using superficially 'sciencey' sounding terms to cover for the fact that the writer in fact knows nothing of their subject (or, as I sometimes felt reading Charlie Stross on information technology, that it might not be technobabble, but you had to be an expert to know, leaving the impression he just wasn't that interested in that proportion of his readership who had never worked in IT). And it was good in not falling for the easy cliche of 'big evil corporation' but instead being more nuanced than that.

By contrast, I was less taken with the sections of the book that dealt with Lore's somewhat exploitative, if not outright abusive, relationship with Spanner. Spanner is somewhat sketchily drawn, a kind of cyber-punk cliché, living on the margins of society, making her living from a mix of data piracy, assisting identity theft and drug-enhanced prostitution. For all that I liked some of the details (whether Griffith's insight that identity theft would become more and more of an issue as people migrated onto the net, or the fact that everyone seems to interact with 'the net' using 'slates', which sound to me an awful lot like tablets, putting Griffiths a good couple of decades ahead of Apple's Ipad) I found little in the central relationship between these two to hold my interest. Probably the only remarkable thing about it was the fact that, at that time, it was perhaps still unusual for a lesbian relationship to be presented in a science fiction book as entirely unremarkable and normal. Though of course, it could be argued that the whole point of this relationship is the contrast it is meant to provide with Lore's later and more fulfilling relationship with Magyar.

And the child abuse subplot involving Lore's family didn't convince me either, for reasons I can't quite put a finger on, but perhaps had to do with the rather flimsy basis on which Lore and Magyar work out which member of Lore's family was the true culprit. It all felt a little bit like it had been thrown into the story in order to try to lend depth to the van de Oeste family that I didn't think was needed. It didn't work. I think I might have found Katerine a more interesting character had she simply been a single-minded, monomaniacal businessperson, utterly obsessed with protecting the family business, rather than a single-minded, monomaniacal businessperson who was also sexually abusing her own children. I was also not entirely on-board with the book's structure, which presents three different parts of Lore's life in parallel, switching between her childhood in the van de Oest family, her time living with Spanner and her life under the assumed identity of Sal Bird, working at the sewage plant. Done well, the multiple time-lines approach can work well, but here I was left thinking that the whole story might actually have worked better had it been told in a simple, linear way (though I concede, I didn't read that book and I could be completely wrong – perhaps too much early revelation concerning her childhood would have interfered with the telling of Lore's later story...).

All in all, it's not an essential read, but if you want to see someone do something a bit different with the cyber-punk genre, that hasn't already been done (and usually done better) by such as Neal Stephenson, William Gibson or Bruce Sterling, it's worth a look.

[Phoenixfalls · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a deeply impressive novel. It is exquisitely crafted: the pace is measured, but sure; the metaphors are used delicately; and the control over perspective (shifting between first person, tight third person, and loose present-tense third person for the three different timelines) is both absolute and absolutely necessary to the emotional arc being told. It is a novel to mull over, savor.

It is also an incredibly intense experience, or at least it was for me. I read it slowly partly so that I could admire Griffith's work, but mostly because reading it for more than half an hour at a time left me introspective and melancholy. There is a great deal of pain in the novel, and the carefully distanced prose makes it all the easier for the reader to fill in the blanks. For all the science fiction trappings (and they are many, from the cyberpunk-ish (but mostly irrelevant) identity hacking to the bioremediation science that furnishes much of the plot and much of the imagery) this story is about trauma, and surviving trauma, and then surviving your survival tactics. It's about ethics, and class, and identity, and monsters that come in human shape. It's vaguely dystopian without being political, and it's about corporate espionage while refusing to forget that corporations are anything but faceless.

I can't say I loved the book; it was far too emotionally hard for that. It left me unsettled and totally drained, and I don't know that I would ever read it again. But I will certainly be picking up everything else Griffith ever writes.

[Thom · Rating 4 out of 5]

A layered mystery with strong female characters (well, nearly all the characters are women). The intense history and emotions can stick with you when not reading - and this book demands reading. Won a Nebula and Lambda award, and is a sci-fi Masterwork. Recommended.

Layers seem to be as much structure as theme, and keep recurring in various forms. The story is told from three perspectives, different times within one woman's life. Each is also a coming-of-age story. Relationships (created, broken, reformed) are also a strong aspect of the plot, though I certainly wouldn't tag it as romance. All the characters are well written, with their own motivations and strength.

The SF aspect is the near future setting, with some bioengineered bugs and small advances in tech - "slates" as personal computers and chips replacing wallets and cash. Forward thinking but not unreasonable when written before 1995. This was Griffith's second novel, and the first I have read from her - though I've looked at Hild more than once. I have challenged myself to read more female authors this year, and will definitely seek more from this author in days to come.

[Joanna · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are no men in this book...they're curiously absent and somewhere along the way, this absence becomes disturbing and finally, very, very, unsettling. I'm not ready for a post feminist lesbian world. The writing and the story attempts to rise above and move past this author's weltanschauung but, ultimately, it fails. Too bad, too. Nicola Griffith cannot leave herself behind enough to create a fiction. She only writes about what she knows and the deeper issues of her sexuality. It's supposed to be fiction. Why doesn't it feel like it?

[Kat · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oh boy, I just couldn't wait for this ride to be over. As much as I enjoyed Griffith's latest book, Hild, I disliked this one. A rich girl gets kidnapped, escapes, is pimped out by her girlfriend, gets a job at a sewage plant. That pretty much sums it up. Wait, did I mention that the technology and biotechnology of the sewage plant takes up about a fourth of the book in great detail? Dull, slow, and disappointing.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed this dark, futuristic tale (it's classified as sci-fi and is a Nebula award winner, but definitely no hard SF here) of Lore, a scion of a wealthy family who is kidnapped, then rescued by Spanner. Part love story, part technological thriller, part good novel - there were a few inconsistencies, but none lessened my enjoyment of the story.

[Christina Maria · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't get how this book won so many awards. There was nothing overtly bad about the writing and the plot was okay, but I was expecting more. The lesbian relationship at the end also seemed too easy/lazy, as if all lesbians are single, attracted to every other lesbian and ready to jump into a relationship with any lesbian.