#slow-river — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #slow-river, aggregated by home.social.
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Today Only! Slow River = $1.99!
Slow River is on sale today for $1.99 (ebook, North America, all platforms). Today only. This is the cheapest it’s been for (literally) decades. You should go buy it.
US: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Apple | Phinney Books
Why should you buy it? Three reasons. But let’s start with two.
First, most obviously: why not? For that price you can’t even get a cup of coffee. Two, less obviously—much less so for those wo haven’t read it but may have seen it described as something like, “The best-ever novel of sewage and abuse”—this the book of mine that’s come closest (so far) to being turned into a film. Why? Because it’s highly cinematic, and in three different modes. This is because the novel itself is told in three different points-of-view and timelines, each with a different but strong visual and emotional focus.
What It’s About
Here’s the back cover copy:
She wakes in an alley to the splash of rain: naked, the foot-long gash in her back still bleeding, and her identity implant gone. Lore Van de Oest, once the daughter of one of the world’s most powerful families, is now…nobody. And she has to hide.
Then out of the rain walks Spanner, predator and thief, who takes her in, cares for her wound, and teaches her how to reinvent herself again and again. No one can find Lore now: not the police, not her family, and not the kidnappers who left her in that alley to die. She has escaped…but the cost of her newfound freedom is crime and deception, and she pays it, over and over, until she starts to loathe who she’s becoming.
Lore has a choice: She can stay in the shadows, stay with Spanner, and risk losing herself forever. Or she can find herself again—but only by becoming someone else, one last time.Bright Young Things
The present-tense layer, Lore from age 5 to 18, is all brightly-lit, hot tropical colours under saturated blue skies. Settings range from a private island in the South Pacific to high-tech luxury playgrounds for the rich (one of my favourite scenes: two women swimming naked in pink perfluorocarbon—basically breathing liquid—and having great sex) to massive engineering projects such as the 60m high heliostats cascading with water and the 100-km long transparent pipelines raised on pylons running over the Aralkum Desert (both designed to remediate pollution) and to the stolid, dark wood interiors with rich fabrics of moneyed-for-generations homes in Amsterdam.
Shadowed Streets
The past-tense third-person layer, which follows Lore from 18 to 21, is much more noirish, stylistically. It is set in a poor northern city (Hull) with an ancient heart. Here in its streets at night Lore has to confront the realities of surviving as part of the anonymous underclass. She moves through the seams of society and does things she is not proud of. The flashing lights of a news tank reflect on rain-wet streets; brittle cocktail-party laughter echoes around shiny, soulless bars while hidden from sight there are drug deals for sex and sex for drugs until as the grey northern skies start to lighten towards dawn and the workers climb into their silent sliding public transport, no one knows anymore which is which. And through it all, that river…
Coming into Focus
The third layer—the main layer, the narrative present—is Lore reassessing everything and deciding to start afresh under a new identity without Spanner, and with honest employment: as a grunt in the kind of water treatment plant even one of her family’s underlings would have found beneath their notice. Except as a source of revenue—because Lore’s family owns the patent not only on the genetically modified microbes that transform sewage into potable water but on the necessary cocktail of nutrients the family deliberately engineered those microbes to need. But what do you suppose happens when some low-level manager at the city waterworks decides he can make a little extra by buying off-brand supplies? And how can a supposedly brand-new nobody of an employee make people believe what’s about to go horribly, disastrously wrong without revealing who she really is?
Hope, Hope, and More Hope
All that, of course, is just the plot. The real story is Lore’s journey, emotional and physical, as she goes through a series of identity changes, some out of necessity, some from choice.
Writing this novel was a challenge—and I’m not talking of the technical poetics of how to blend three same-but-different POVs and timelines (which I address in the bonus essay in the new edition). No. I’m talking about this second and third layer, set in a run-down city in a poor region of a poor country suffering the worst of twentieth-turned-to-twenty-first century decaying infrastructure, weaponised web, massive unemployment, and widening income disparity. How do you infuse that urban and moral blight with joy and hope—joy and hope that isn’t delusional but feels solid and grounded? That was the challenge.
And that, dear reader, is why I think this novel is just as, if not even more, relevant today that it was when I wrote it. Lore—like me and many others here in 2026—finds hope and joy, comfort and delight in the small moments: the sudden sun-yellow weed in an acre of crumbling pavement; the bright fluting of bird on the roof; the simple wonder of watching dried soybean uncurl and expand in boiling water, like watching small worlds being born. It’s the little things that matter, and they’re all around us, no matter how bad things may seem.
Oh, and spoiler alert: this story ends well. Just as I suspect our story will, sooner or later.
Buy
US: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Apple | Phinney Books
#awardWinning #bookReview #bookReviews #books #cliFi #digitalImmigrant #fiction #sale #SFF #slowRiver -
Today Only! Slow River = $1.99!
Slow River is on sale today for $1.99 (ebook, North America, all platforms). Today only. This is the cheapest it’s been for (literally) decades. You should go buy it.
US: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Apple | Phinney Books
Why should you buy it? Three reasons. But let’s start with two.
First, most obviously: why not? For that price you can’t even get a cup of coffee. Two, less obviously—much less so for those wo haven’t read it but may have seen it described as something like, “The best-ever novel of sewage and abuse”—this the book of mine that’s come closest (so far) to being turned into a film. Why? Because it’s highly cinematic, and in three different modes. This is because the novel itself is told in three different points-of-view and timelines, each with a different but strong visual and emotional focus.
What It’s About
Here’s the back cover copy:
She wakes in an alley to the splash of rain: naked, the foot-long gash in her back still bleeding, and her identity implant gone. Lore Van de Oest, once the daughter of one of the world’s most powerful families, is now…nobody. And she has to hide.
Then out of the rain walks Spanner, predator and thief, who takes her in, cares for her wound, and teaches her how to reinvent herself again and again. No one can find Lore now: not the police, not her family, and not the kidnappers who left her in that alley to die. She has escaped…but the cost of her newfound freedom is crime and deception, and she pays it, over and over, until she starts to loathe who she’s becoming.
Lore has a choice: She can stay in the shadows, stay with Spanner, and risk losing herself forever. Or she can find herself again—but only by becoming someone else, one last time.Bright Young Things
The present-tense layer, Lore from age 5 to 18, is all brightly-lit, hot tropical colours under saturated blue skies. Settings range from a private island in the South Pacific to high-tech luxury playgrounds for the rich (one of my favourite scenes: two women swimming naked in pink perfluorocarbon—basically breathing liquid—and having great sex) to massive engineering projects such as the 60m high heliostats cascading with water and the 100-km long transparent pipelines raised on pylons running over the Aralkum Desert (both designed to remediate pollution) and to the stolid, dark wood interiors with rich fabrics of moneyed-for-generations homes in Amsterdam.
Shadowed Streets
The past-tense third-person layer, which follows Lore from 18 to 21, is much more noirish, stylistically. It is set in a poor northern city (Hull) with an ancient heart. Here in its streets at night Lore has to confront the realities of surviving as part of the anonymous underclass. She moves through the seams of society and does things she is not proud of. The flashing lights of a news tank reflect on rain-wet streets; brittle cocktail-party laughter echoes around shiny, soulless bars while hidden from sight there are drug deals for sex and sex for drugs until as the grey northern skies start to lighten towards dawn and the workers climb into their silent sliding public transport, no one knows anymore which is which. And through it all, that river…
Coming into Focus
The third layer—the main layer, the narrative present—is Lore reassessing everything and deciding to start afresh under a new identity without Spanner, and with honest employment: as a grunt in the kind of water treatment plant even one of her family’s underlings would have found beneath their notice. Except as a source of revenue—because Lore’s family owns the patent not only on the genetically modified microbes that transform sewage into potable water but on the necessary cocktail of nutrients the family deliberately engineered those microbes to need. But what do you suppose happens when some low-level manager at the city waterworks decides he can make a little extra by buying off-brand supplies? And how can a supposedly brand-new nobody of an employee make people believe what’s about to go horribly, disastrously wrong without revealing who she really is?
Hope, Hope, and More Hope
All that, of course, is just the plot. The real story is Lore’s journey, emotional and physical, as she goes through a series of identity changes, some out of necessity, some from choice.
Writing this novel was a challenge—and I’m not talking of the technical poetics of how to blend three same-but-different POVs and timelines (which I address in the bonus essay in the new edition). No. I’m talking about this second and third layer, set in a run-down city in a poor region of a poor country suffering the worst of twentieth-turned-to-twenty-first century decaying infrastructure, weaponised web, massive unemployment, and widening income disparity. How do you infuse that urban and moral blight with joy and hope—joy and hope that isn’t delusional but feels solid and grounded? That was the challenge.
And that, dear reader, is why I think this novel is just as, if not even more, relevant today that it was when I wrote it. Lore—like me and many others here in 2026—finds hope and joy, comfort and delight in the small moments: the sudden sun-yellow weed in an acre of crumbling pavement; the bright fluting of bird on the roof; the simple wonder of watching dried soybean uncurl and expand in boiling water, like watching small worlds being born. It’s the little things that matter, and they’re all around us, no matter how bad things may seem.
Oh, and spoiler alert: this story ends well. Just as I suspect our story will, sooner or later.
Buy
US: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Apple | Phinney Books
#awardWinning #bookReview #bookReviews #books #cliFi #digitalImmigrant #fiction #sale #SFF #slowRiver -
Today Only! Slow River = $1.99!
Slow River is on sale today for $1.99 (ebook, North America, all platforms). Today only. This is the cheapest it’s been for (literally) decades. You should go buy it.
US: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Apple | Phinney Books
Why should you buy it? Three reasons. But let’s start with two.
First, most obviously: why not? For that price you can’t even get a cup of coffee. Two, less obviously—much less so for those wo haven’t read it but may have seen it described as something like, “The best-ever novel of sewage and abuse”—this the book of mine that’s come closest (so far) to being turned into a film. Why? Because it’s highly cinematic, and in three different modes. This is because the novel itself is told in three different points-of-view and timelines, each with a different but strong visual and emotional focus.
What It’s About
Here’s the back cover copy:
She wakes in an alley to the splash of rain: naked, the foot-long gash in her back still bleeding, and her identity implant gone. Lore Van de Oest, once the daughter of one of the world’s most powerful families, is now…nobody. And she has to hide.
Then out of the rain walks Spanner, predator and thief, who takes her in, cares for her wound, and teaches her how to reinvent herself again and again. No one can find Lore now: not the police, not her family, and not the kidnappers who left her in that alley to die. She has escaped…but the cost of her newfound freedom is crime and deception, and she pays it, over and over, until she starts to loathe who she’s becoming.
Lore has a choice: She can stay in the shadows, stay with Spanner, and risk losing herself forever. Or she can find herself again—but only by becoming someone else, one last time.Bright Young Things
The present-tense layer, Lore from age 5 to 18, is all brightly-lit, hot tropical colours under saturated blue skies. Settings range from a private island in the South Pacific to high-tech luxury playgrounds for the rich (one of my favourite scenes: two women swimming naked in pink perfluorocarbon—basically breathing liquid—and having great sex) to massive engineering projects such as the 60m high heliostats cascading with water and the 100-km long transparent pipelines raised on pylons running over the Aralkum Desert (both designed to remediate pollution) and to the stolid, dark wood interiors with rich fabrics of moneyed-for-generations homes in Amsterdam.
Shadowed Streets
The past-tense third-person layer, which follows Lore from 18 to 21, is much more noirish, stylistically. It is set in a poor northern city (Hull) with an ancient heart. Here in its streets at night Lore has to confront the realities of surviving as part of the anonymous underclass. She moves through the seams of society and does things she is not proud of. The flashing lights of a news tank reflect on rain-wet streets; brittle cocktail-party laughter echoes around shiny, soulless bars while hidden from sight there are drug deals for sex and sex for drugs until as the grey northern skies start to lighten towards dawn and the workers climb into their silent sliding public transport, no one knows anymore which is which. And through it all, that river…
Coming into Focus
The third layer—the main layer, the narrative present—is Lore reassessing everything and deciding to start afresh under a new identity without Spanner, and with honest employment: as a grunt in the kind of water treatment plant even one of her family’s underlings would have found beneath their notice. Except as a source of revenue—because Lore’s family owns the patent not only on the genetically modified microbes that transform sewage into potable water but on the necessary cocktail of nutrients the family deliberately engineered those microbes to need. But what do you suppose happens when some low-level manager at the city waterworks decides he can make a little extra by buying off-brand supplies? And how can a supposedly brand-new nobody of an employee make people believe what’s about to go horribly, disastrously wrong without revealing who she really is?
Hope, Hope, and More Hope
All that, of course, is just the plot. The real story is Lore’s journey, emotional and physical, as she goes through a series of identity changes, some out of necessity, some from choice.
Writing this novel was a challenge—and I’m not talking of the technical poetics of how to blend three same-but-different POVs and timelines (which I address in the bonus essay in the new edition). No. I’m talking about this second and third layer, set in a run-down city in a poor region of a poor country suffering the worst of twentieth-turned-to-twenty-first century decaying infrastructure, weaponised web, massive unemployment, and widening income disparity. How do you infuse that urban and moral blight with joy and hope—joy and hope that isn’t delusional but feels solid and grounded? That was the challenge.
And that, dear reader, is why I think this novel is just as, if not even more, relevant today that it was when I wrote it. Lore—like me and many others here in 2026—finds hope and joy, comfort and delight in the small moments: the sudden sun-yellow weed in an acre of crumbling pavement; the bright fluting of bird on the roof; the simple wonder of watching dried soybean uncurl and expand in boiling water, like watching small worlds being born. It’s the little things that matter, and they’re all around us, no matter how bad things may seem.
Oh, and spoiler alert: this story ends well. Just as I suspect our story will, sooner or later.
Buy
US: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Apple | Phinney Books
#awardWinning #bookReview #bookReviews #books #cliFi #digitalImmigrant #fiction #sale #SFF #slowRiver -
Today Only! Slow River = $1.99!
Slow River is on sale today for $1.99 (ebook, North America, all platforms). Today only. This is the cheapest it’s been for (literally) decades. You should go buy it.
US: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Apple | Phinney Books
Why should you buy it? Three reasons. But let’s start with two.
First, most obviously: why not? For that price you can’t even get a cup of coffee. Two, less obviously—much less so for those wo haven’t read it but may have seen it described as something like, “The best-ever novel of sewage and abuse”—this the book of mine that’s come closest (so far) to being turned into a film. Why? Because it’s highly cinematic, and in three different modes. This is because the novel itself is told in three different points-of-view and timelines, each with a different but strong visual and emotional focus.
What It’s About
Here’s the back cover copy:
She wakes in an alley to the splash of rain: naked, the foot-long gash in her back still bleeding, and her identity implant gone. Lore Van de Oest, once the daughter of one of the world’s most powerful families, is now…nobody. And she has to hide.
Then out of the rain walks Spanner, predator and thief, who takes her in, cares for her wound, and teaches her how to reinvent herself again and again. No one can find Lore now: not the police, not her family, and not the kidnappers who left her in that alley to die. She has escaped…but the cost of her newfound freedom is crime and deception, and she pays it, over and over, until she starts to loathe who she’s becoming.
Lore has a choice: She can stay in the shadows, stay with Spanner, and risk losing herself forever. Or she can find herself again—but only by becoming someone else, one last time.Bright Young Things
The present-tense layer, Lore from age 5 to 18, is all brightly-lit, hot tropical colours under saturated blue skies. Settings range from a private island in the South Pacific to high-tech luxury playgrounds for the rich (one of my favourite scenes: two women swimming naked in pink perfluorocarbon—basically breathing liquid—and having great sex) to massive engineering projects such as the 60m high heliostats cascading with water and the 100-km long transparent pipelines raised on pylons running over the Aralkum Desert (both designed to remediate pollution) and to the stolid, dark wood interiors with rich fabrics of moneyed-for-generations homes in Amsterdam.
Shadowed Streets
The past-tense third-person layer, which follows Lore from 18 to 21, is much more noirish, stylistically. It is set in a poor northern city (Hull) with an ancient heart. Here in its streets at night Lore has to confront the realities of surviving as part of the anonymous underclass. She moves through the seams of society and does things she is not proud of. The flashing lights of a news tank reflect on rain-wet streets; brittle cocktail-party laughter echoes around shiny, soulless bars while hidden from sight there are drug deals for sex and sex for drugs until as the grey northern skies start to lighten towards dawn and the workers climb into their silent sliding public transport, no one knows anymore which is which. And through it all, that river…
Coming into Focus
The third layer—the main layer, the narrative present—is Lore reassessing everything and deciding to start afresh under a new identity without Spanner, and with honest employment: as a grunt in the kind of water treatment plant even one of her family’s underlings would have found beneath their notice. Except as a source of revenue—because Lore’s family owns the patent not only on the genetically modified microbes that transform sewage into potable water but on the necessary cocktail of nutrients the family deliberately engineered those microbes to need. But what do you suppose happens when some low-level manager at the city waterworks decides he can make a little extra by buying off-brand supplies? And how can a supposedly brand-new nobody of an employee make people believe what’s about to go horribly, disastrously wrong without revealing who she really is?
Hope, Hope, and More Hope
All that, of course, is just the plot. The real story is Lore’s journey, emotional and physical, as she goes through a series of identity changes, some out of necessity, some from choice.
Writing this novel was a challenge—and I’m not talking of the technical poetics of how to blend three same-but-different POVs and timelines (which I address in the bonus essay in the new edition). No. I’m talking about this second and third layer, set in a run-down city in a poor region of a poor country suffering the worst of twentieth-turned-to-twenty-first century decaying infrastructure, weaponised web, massive unemployment, and widening income disparity. How do you infuse that urban and moral blight with joy and hope—joy and hope that isn’t delusional but feels solid and grounded? That was the challenge.
And that, dear reader, is why I think this novel is just as, if not even more, relevant today that it was when I wrote it. Lore—like me and many others here in 2026—finds hope and joy, comfort and delight in the small moments: the sudden sun-yellow weed in an acre of crumbling pavement; the bright fluting of bird on the roof; the simple wonder of watching dried soybean uncurl and expand in boiling water, like watching small worlds being born. It’s the little things that matter, and they’re all around us, no matter how bad things may seem.
Oh, and spoiler alert: this story ends well. Just as I suspect our story will, sooner or later.
Buy
US: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Apple | Phinney Books
#awardWinning #bookReview #bookReviews #books #cliFi #digitalImmigrant #fiction #sale #SFF #slowRiver -
Today Only! Slow River = $1.99!
Slow River is on sale today for $1.99 (ebook, North America, all platforms). Today only. This is the cheapest it’s been for (literally) decades. You should go buy it.
US: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Apple | Phinney Books
Why should you buy it? Three reasons. But let’s start with two.
First, most obviously: why not? For that price you can’t even get a cup of coffee. Two, less obviously—much less so for those wo haven’t read it but may have seen it described as something like, “The best-ever novel of sewage and abuse”—this the book of mine that’s come closest (so far) to being turned into a film. Why? Because it’s highly cinematic, and in three different modes. This is because the novel itself is told in three different points-of-view and timelines, each with a different but strong visual and emotional focus.
What It’s About
Here’s the back cover copy:
She wakes in an alley to the splash of rain: naked, the foot-long gash in her back still bleeding, and her identity implant gone. Lore Van de Oest, once the daughter of one of the world’s most powerful families, is now…nobody. And she has to hide.
Then out of the rain walks Spanner, predator and thief, who takes her in, cares for her wound, and teaches her how to reinvent herself again and again. No one can find Lore now: not the police, not her family, and not the kidnappers who left her in that alley to die. She has escaped…but the cost of her newfound freedom is crime and deception, and she pays it, over and over, until she starts to loathe who she’s becoming.
Lore has a choice: She can stay in the shadows, stay with Spanner, and risk losing herself forever. Or she can find herself again—but only by becoming someone else, one last time.Bright Young Things
The present-tense layer, Lore from age 5 to 18, is all brightly-lit, hot tropical colours under saturated blue skies. Settings range from a private island in the South Pacific to high-tech luxury playgrounds for the rich (one of my favourite scenes: two women swimming naked in pink perfluorocarbon—basically breathing liquid—and having great sex) to massive engineering projects such as the 60m high heliostats cascading with water and the 100-km long transparent pipelines raised on pylons running over the Aralkum Desert (both designed to remediate pollution) and to the stolid, dark wood interiors with rich fabrics of moneyed-for-generations homes in Amsterdam.
Shadowed Streets
The past-tense third-person layer, which follows Lore from 18 to 21, is much more noirish, stylistically. It is set in a poor northern city (Hull) with an ancient heart. Here in its streets at night Lore has to confront the realities of surviving as part of the anonymous underclass. She moves through the seams of society and does things she is not proud of. The flashing lights of a news tank reflect on rain-wet streets; brittle cocktail-party laughter echoes around shiny, soulless bars while hidden from sight there are drug deals for sex and sex for drugs until as the grey northern skies start to lighten towards dawn and the workers climb into their silent sliding public transport, no one knows anymore which is which. And through it all, that river…
Coming into Focus
The third layer—the main layer, the narrative present—is Lore reassessing everything and deciding to start afresh under a new identity without Spanner, and with honest employment: as a grunt in the kind of water treatment plant even one of her family’s underlings would have found beneath their notice. Except as a source of revenue—because Lore’s family owns the patent not only on the genetically modified microbes that transform sewage into potable water but on the necessary cocktail of nutrients the family deliberately engineered those microbes to need. But what do you suppose happens when some low-level manager at the city waterworks decides he can make a little extra by buying off-brand supplies? And how can a supposedly brand-new nobody of an employee make people believe what’s about to go horribly, disastrously wrong without revealing who she really is?
Hope, Hope, and More Hope
All that, of course, is just the plot. The real story is Lore’s journey, emotional and physical, as she goes through a series of identity changes, some out of necessity, some from choice.
Writing this novel was a challenge—and I’m not talking of the technical poetics of how to blend three same-but-different POVs and timelines (which I address in the bonus essay in the new edition). No. I’m talking about this second and third layer, set in a run-down city in a poor region of a poor country suffering the worst of twentieth-turned-to-twenty-first century decaying infrastructure, weaponised web, massive unemployment, and widening income disparity. How do you infuse that urban and moral blight with joy and hope—joy and hope that isn’t delusional but feels solid and grounded? That was the challenge.
And that, dear reader, is why I think this novel is just as, if not even more, relevant today that it was when I wrote it. Lore—like me and many others here in 2026—finds hope and joy, comfort and delight in the small moments: the sudden sun-yellow weed in an acre of crumbling pavement; the bright fluting of bird on the roof; the simple wonder of watching dried soybean uncurl and expand in boiling water, like watching small worlds being born. It’s the little things that matter, and they’re all around us, no matter how bad things may seem.
Oh, and spoiler alert: this story ends well. Just as I suspect our story will, sooner or later.
Buy
US: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Apple | Phinney Books
#awardWinning #books #cliFi #sale #SFF #slowRiver -
Ammonite & Slow River: New Covers, New Content!
New editions of Ammonite and Slow River, 16 June, 2026. Cover design by Jessie Sayward Bright.
Did you love Ammonite? Then you’ll be delighted to learn that this new edition not only has a lovely new cover but new content. What is the new content? A short story (okay, not that short—just shy of being a novelette). It’s the story of the first meeting between a native of Jeep, a young herder, and two Mirrors. A dangerous situation develops, lives are saved—and lost—and what happens next leads to the arrival, a few years later, of Marghe, whose choices change everything…
BUY*
(*Before you buy, please read the last paragraph of this post)
- US: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Apple | Phinney Books
- UK: Waterstones | Amazon | Apple Books | Kobo
- Worldwide: independent bookstores recommended by readers
If you prefer the high-tech journey-into-self that is Slow River, then you, too, will be pleased with the new edition: not only the evocative new cover, but new content. An essay. An essay about how the story began with me trying to answer some interconnected questions. The first was very personal, about my own life: how come I survived and escaped a certain lifestyle when others I knew did not? The other three are intertwined but less specifically personal: Who are you when you have nothing left? How far will you stray from your essential self to survive? Is there even such a thing as an essential self? I wrote the book to find out. But to write it, I had to invent new narrative techniques…
BUY*
(*Before you buy, please read the last paragraph of this post)
- US: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Apple | Phinney Books
- UK: Waterstones | Amazon | Apple Books | Kobo
- Worldwide: independent bookstores recommended by readers
Astute readers will immediately understand that both novels, though very different, hinge on this notion of change, self, and identity. I’m eager to find out what new readers will make of these books, both published over 30 years ago but both, unfortunately, still very relevant today—Slow River perhaps even more so now than when it was first published.
* Before you rush off and order the books, I suggest you buy from your local independent bookstore because they are guaranteed to have the new editions. If you do have to buy from an online platform, do please check that the version you’re buying is the one you want.
#ammonite #mirrorsAndBurnstone #newContent #newCover #newEdition #slowRiver -
Ammonite & Slow River: New Covers, New Content!
New editions of Ammonite and Slow River, 16 June, 2026. Cover design by Jessie Sayward Bright.
Did you love Ammonite? Then you’ll be delighted to learn that this new edition not only has a lovely new cover but new content. What is the new content? A short story (okay, not that short—just shy of being a novelette). It’s the story of the first meeting between a native of Jeep, a young herder, and two Mirrors. A dangerous situation develops, lives are saved—and lost—and what happens next leads to the arrival, a few years later, of Marghe, whose choices change everything…
BUY*
(*Before you buy, please read the last paragraph of this post)
- US: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Apple | Phinney Books
- UK: Waterstones | Amazon | Apple Books | Kobo
- Worldwide: independent bookstores recommended by readers
If you prefer the high-tech journey-into-self that is Slow River, then you, too, will be pleased with the new edition: not only the evocative new cover, but new content. An essay. An essay about how the story began with me trying to answer some interconnected questions. The first was very personal, about my own life: how come I survived and escaped a certain lifestyle when others I knew did not? The other three are intertwined but less specifically personal: Who are you when you have nothing left? How far will you stray from your essential self to survive? Is there even such a thing as an essential self? I wrote the book to find out. But to write it, I had to invent new narrative techniques…
BUY*
(*Before you buy, please read the last paragraph of this post)
- US: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Apple | Phinney Books
- UK: Waterstones | Amazon | Apple Books | Kobo
- Worldwide: independent bookstores recommended by readers
Astute readers will immediately understand that both novels, though very different, hinge on this notion of change, self, and identity. I’m eager to find out what new readers will make of these books, both published over 30 years ago but both, unfortunately, still very relevant today—Slow River perhaps even more so now than when it was first published.
* Before you rush off and order the books, I suggest you buy from your local independent bookstore because they are guaranteed to have the new editions. If you do have to buy from an online platform, do please check that the version you’re buying is the one you want.
#ammonite #mirrorsAndBurnstone #newContent #newCover #newEdition #slowRiver -
Old News: Slow River Won the Lambda Literary Award
This post exists as something to point to the next time someone argues that my second novel, Slow River (1995), did not win the Lesbian Gay Science Fiction/Fantasy Lambda Literary Award in 1996. Yes, I know that several databases—including Wikipedia1 and the Lambda Literary Foundation itself2—are confused on this point. Yes, Melissa Scott is listed as very deservedly winning the same award in the same year for Shadow Man; she did; it was a tie.
Why are so many databases wrong? No idea. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database is right, and my website is right; the paperback reprint covers of Slow River are right, and the Amazon page is right.
Anyway, as proof and for future reference, here is the lump of lucite I was presented in 1996. The object itself has deteriorated a little—lots of bubbling—which in some light makes it difficult to read, so I too a few different shots. Image descriptions below.3
ID: Four photos from different angles—one held, two upright on a table, one propped on a reading stand—of a literary award in the form of a book-shaped chunk of lucite, inside which is embedded a bronze medallion with the Greek letter Lambda centred inside palm leaves over an open book, and engraved with “Lambda Literary Awards.” Below that, printed in black, float the words “Lesbian Gay Science Fiction/Fantasy, 1995. Slow River, Nicola Griffith, DelRay”
So there you go. For the record, in terms of the Lambda Literary Foundation I’ve won the award six (6) times and been a finalist five (5) times, in a variety of categories, and in 2013 was presented with the Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize.
- Any Wikipedia editors out there: feel free to jump in and fix this. The Powers That Be frown on authors editing info about themselves. ↩︎
- Yes, they’ve been notified. Like all nonprofits, things move slowly, and sometimes details slip through the cracks. EDIT TO ADD: Woo-hoo, fixed even before I posted this! ↩︎
- Yes, they misspelled Del Rey as DelRay. If I had a dollar for every time… ↩︎
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Old News: Slow River Won the Lambda Literary Award
This post exists as something to point to the next time someone argues that my second novel, Slow River (1995), did not win the Lesbian Gay Science Fiction/Fantasy Lambda Literary Award in 1996. Yes, I know that several databases—including Wikipedia1 and the Lambda Literary Foundation itself2—are confused on this point. Yes, Melissa Scott is listed as very deservedly winning the same award in the same year for Shadow Man; she did; it was a tie.
Why are so many databases wrong? No idea. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database is right, and my website is right; the paperback reprint covers of Slow River are right, and the Amazon page is right.
Anyway, as proof and for future reference, here is the lump of lucite I was presented in 1996. The object itself has deteriorated a little—lots of bubbling—which in some light makes it difficult to read, so I too a few different shots. Image descriptions below.3
ID: Four photos from different angles—one held, two upright on a table, one propped on a reading stand—of a literary award in the form of a book-shaped chunk of lucite, inside which is embedded a bronze medallion with the Greek letter Lambda centred inside palm leaves over an open book, and engraved with “Lambda Literary Awards.” Below that, printed in black, float the words “Lesbian Gay Science Fiction/Fantasy, 1995. Slow River, Nicola Griffith, DelRay”
So there you go. For the record, in terms of the Lambda Literary Foundation I’ve won the award six (6) times and been a finalist five (5) times, in a variety of categories, and in 2013 was presented with the Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize.
- Any Wikipedia editors out there: feel free to jump in and fix this. The Powers That Be frown on authors editing info about themselves. ↩︎
- Yes, they’ve been notified. Like all nonprofits, things move slowly, and sometimes details slip through the cracks. EDIT TO ADD: Woo-hoo, fixed even before I posted this! ↩︎
- Yes, they misspelled Del Rey as DelRay. If I had a dollar for every time… ↩︎
-
Rivers and Dragons and Cats and Books
For the Solstice—which here in Seattle is 7:03 am tomorrow—I’ve made a special fiction bundle, three stories downloadable as either a PDF or epub. Two of the stories are snowy, one is not; one is grim, two are not; and there’s a dragon. That bundle will be available to Patrons, a special thank you for helping fund publicity efforts in the US reissue of Aud, the UK first publication of Aud, and up-coming She Is Here.
Speaking of which, a couple of the February events may have to be rescheduled. I can tell you more about that after the holidays but for now I’ll just say it’s not bad news. In fact it’s gobsmackingly, knock-me-down-with-a-feather, amazing news. Chortle.
Our tree is up and decorated—but not yet destroyed. Mainly because I haven’t had time to figure out any kind of new SFX. This year I may have to resort to a old favourite—maybe that dragon…
The cats are well, though very fighty. I think it’s partly the weather (endless drenching rain of atmospheric rivers, one after another) and partly the latest trio of raccoons who have been trundling fatly around our neighbourhood at night, trying to get into everything, including our house. George, sensibly, hides under the bed, but Charlie takes exception. He desperately—desperately!—wants to get out there and take them on and gets very cross when we won’t let him (pound for pound he’d be outweighed six to one). So he takes it out on George.
And speaking of rivers, Slow River and Ammonite will be reissued with spiffy new covers and bonus content in June next year—just in time for pride. I’m pretty pleased about that.
I have other news, too, some of it very pleasing—but that, too, can wait for January. Meanwhile, for the holiday season, I’m changing my website avatar to a winter wren. I love these little birds: like tiny feathery brown truffles I could pop in my mouth. It’s based on one I created for my black and white zoomorphics series. I really do have an outrageous number of those things now. One day I’ll figure out what to do with them. For now, back to stopping Charlie murdering George because he can’t murder the raccoons…
#ammonite #CharlieAndGeorge #christmas #sheIsHere #shortStories #slowRiver #solstice
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Rivers and Dragons and Cats and Books
For the Solstice—which here in Seattle is 7:03 am tomorrow—I’ve made a special fiction bundle, three stories downloadable as either a PDF or epub. Two of the stories are snowy, one is not; one is grim, two are not; and there’s a dragon. That bundle will be available to Patrons, a special thank you for helping fund publicity efforts in the US reissue of Aud, the UK first publication of Aud, and up-coming She Is Here.
Speaking of which, a couple of the February events may have to be rescheduled. I can tell you more about that after the holidays but for now I’ll just say it’s not bad news. In fact it’s gobsmackingly, knock-me-down-with-a-feather, amazing news. Chortle.
Our tree is up and decorated—but not yet destroyed. Mainly because I haven’t had time to figure out any kind of new SFX. This year I may have to resort to a old favourite—maybe that dragon…
The cats are well, though very fighty. I think it’s partly the weather (endless drenching rain of atmospheric rivers, one after another) and partly the latest trio of raccoons who have been trundling fatly around our neighbourhood at night, trying to get into everything, including our house. George, sensibly, hides under the bed, but Charlie takes exception. He desperately—desperately!—wants to get out there and take them on and gets very cross when we won’t let him (pound for pound he’d be outweighed six to one). So he takes it out on George.
And speaking of rivers, Slow River and Ammonite will be reissued with spiffy new covers and bonus content in June next year—just in time for pride. I’m pretty pleased about that.
I have other news, too, some of it very pleasing—but that, too, can wait for January. Meanwhile, for the holiday season, I’m changing my website avatar to a winter wren. I love these little birds: like tiny feathery brown truffles I could pop in my mouth. It’s based on one I created for my black and white zoomorphics series. I really do have an outrageous number of those things now. One day I’ll figure out what to do with them. For now, back to stopping Charlie murdering George because he can’t murder the raccoons…
#ammonite #CharlieAndGeorge #christmas #sheIsHere #shortStories #slowRiver #solstice