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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN num: 9780345395375
ISBN number: 0345395379
Label: Ballantine Books
Manufacturer: Ballantine Books
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 352
Printing Date: August 20, 1996
Publishing house: Ballantine Books
Release Date: August 20, 1996
Sale Popularity Level: 319909
Studio: Ballantine Books
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Product Description:
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...
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
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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How to review this book? For starters, it is far beyond my ken. The protagonist was brought up in riches and luxury. The protagonist is a lesbian. She is kidnapped and must adapt to a life on the lam. Being a heterosexual middle-class man, none of these things applies to me, and perhaps that's why, no matter how much I enjoyed reading the book at the time, did I find it so easy to put down and walk away. To reiterate: this book is extremely interesting and well written, but for whatever reason, I found no particular urge to read "just one more chapter before I go to sleep," which is, of course, the hallmark of a great book.
The family of Lore van de Oest has made a fortune in the biotechnology of water remediation/purification. The story jumps around three time-frames: young Lore growing up and not understanding the family dynamics of her parents' frosty marriage and sexual abuse; Lore living on the streets after killing a kidnapper and being helped by the tech-savvy criminal and drug addict Spanner, eventually becoming her lover; and the "present day" Lore, complete with stolen identity, trying to go straight with a drudge job in a sewage treatment plant. Of the three threads, I enjoyed the treatment plant the best - the executive politics, the speculative but plausible biotech, etc.
To me, the book is not a "lesbian" nor even a "homosexual" book. It is somewhat suspicious that everyone Lore meets is homosexual - if this is what the future holds, there will never be another child conceived naturally! Further, it is somewhat sexually graphic. But it doesn't matter - these people just happen to be lesbians, so I would reject the notion that this book should be labelled "homosexual."
There are some neat plot twists (and they never cheat - the twists are fully consistent with the story). As I said above, the biotech stuff is quite interesting, as is the envisioned future communication technology. The characters are not particularly likeable, but are interesting and fully realised and consistent. So why does it only get three stars? Honestly, I don't know. But this is a book I just didn't care enough about to tear through, so I can only give it a "good" rating, not a "great" one.
Rated by buyers 
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Oh boy, am I happy to have read this book. I've read good things about Nicola Griffith, and I'm not sure why I bought this one first. It's science fiction as opposed to a mystery series she has that would, just by genre, be more up my alley. But I'm so glad I didn't dismiss this.
It's tells the story of Lore in the not so distant future in a world different but not so different from ours. There's a lot of technology, but it all seems like only a little more technology than we have now (that's scary, actually) and a lot of Big Brother going on. Homosexuality is not a big deal, in fact, there are a bunch of scenes in which people say things like 'your boyfriend or girlfriend', so it seems just as accepted as being straight. Refreshing that this is just the way it is and not further commented on. In fact, that's the style of the whole book. It starts toward the end of the story and there are three narrative elements. The very first person narrator, Lore, who talks about the present and the not so distant past and a third person narrative that talks about Lore's childhood. These three time levels work together to unravel the mystery of who Lore is and solve a crime in the present.
It's not a pretty story. The gap between being the rich and the poor seems wider, the world for the poor seems very grey and poor and the things Lore has to do to survive aren't pretty.
The writing is exceptional. The characters are described beautifully, not quite focusing on their dark side to the extent that it denies a good side, but never denying it's there. She doesn't make excuses for bad deeds. The story has a nice flow to it, the balance between the different times worked for me.
I'm off now to check what else she has written.
Rated by buyers -
This is a novel about Lore, the daughter of a family that has become spectacularly rich patenting genetically engineered microbes that are used to reduce pollution, who has been kidnapped and chooses not to go back to her family, because she believes she may have been molested by her father.
Without her famous name or any real identity, Lore is left scraping out a way to survive among the outcasts and impoverished of her society. Lore is a lesbian, as are an improbable number of the women she encounters along the way, and there is a good deal of sex in this book, but this story is really about class identity more than gender identity.
Lore very first spend some years with Spanner, a small time grifter who helps her when she is injured. She later uses the expert skills in chemistry, microbiology, and waste disposal she was taught as a prospective leader in the family business to get a grunt position in a sewage treatment facility. The new job leaves Lore torn between her awareness that the poor management of the plant is a potential threat to both employees and the public, and her attempts to maintain her identity as an uneducated employee who wouldn't understand the potential dangers.
One very important thing: Griffith is unusually gifted, and the book is beautifully written. The story on its own would have been a good book, but it's the quality of Griffith's prose that really raises it to the level of outstanding.
Rated by buyers -
Slow River is a masterful exploration of the difference between the rich and the poor. The language is beautiful, the scenery is immersive, tangible and fragrant, and the characters are painted fully into life. I must compliment the author on her language skill, a quality so very rare in modern literature. Although there are quite a few lesbians in the novel, this is mostly irrelevant to the storyline, despite what other reviewers seem to think. The novel is not about sex, it's about character and self-discovery. It's about the contrast between patrician Lore and the poor people around her, like Spanner and Magyar; the contrast between their character and view of life, between their occupations and their goals, and between their moral codes. It's about why and how the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor, and why Lore couldn't stay in the gutter where she was cast, while Spanner couldn't leave it. If you like books that make you think, you should like this one.
Rated by buyers 
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Slow River is set maybe 100 years in the future - everyone has an identity chip, the environment is shot, genetics can be manipulated and apparently most of the population looks and acts like new wave punk rockers. So far, it sounds pretty good, right? The themes of this story are compelling - human connection, desperation, identity lost and found - but none of these are given enough depth to fulfill their potential.
The concept of a young girl kidnapped, tortured in front of millions, left for dying in an alley - her family uncaring, harboring damning family secrets we are anxious to discover is a great one. But we never really believe that she would be so guilty from killing her KIDNAPPER that she would hide from the law. We never really believe that she would be so horrified by these secrets that she would give up BILLIONS for a life of prostitution and drug abuse. The revenge her psychotic ex takes on her is no revenge at all - not at all worthy of what we have been led to expect of the character. The author literally seems to wimp out at the end, cobbling together a conspiracy of idiotic conception. Even the gruesome childhood memory that could have been a real dramatic climax instead leads us weakly to a too slick happy-ending with none of the power it could have.
Slow River leaves the impression that the author got lazy - unwilling to give the extra 100 pages these themes really needed. Or that large sections of the book was cut in editing - but why they wouldn't cut the endless descriptions of water treatment techniques instead is baffling.
What could have been a hard-hitting, excellent piece of fiction told from the view of a species almost NEVER found in sci-fi - the young, independent lesbian - unfortunately disappoints. I want so much for Griffith to re-write this novel, giving it the attention it deserves.
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