Nicola Griffith

#2

2004

Edited by world-renowned lesbian speculative fiction author Nicola Griffith and science fiction and fantasy publisher Stephen Pagel, this groundbreaking anthology of all-original science fiction stories brings together some of mainstream's and science fiction's most notable and daring writers - gay and straight - creating worlds where time and place and sexuality are alternative to the empirical environment. Keith Hartman's "Sex, Guns, and Baptists" presents a disturbing view of how the world could end up if the Christian fundamentalists continue gaining political ground; Ellen Klages takes a 90s dyke back forty years to 1950s San Francisco where she discovers her modern sensibilities are utterly alien to the lesbians of the time; multiple award-winning Southern writer, Jim Grimsley, brings us to another world where aliens are all too human. These stories explore physical, emotional and moral landscapes vastly different from the familiar - where nothing is as it seems.

#3

1999

Nicola Griffith, winner of the Tiptree Award and the Lambda Award for her widely acclaimed first novel Ammonite, now turns her attention closer to the present in Slow River, the dark and intensely involving story of a young woman's struggle for survival and independence on the gritty underside of a near-future Europe.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 was the daughter of one of the world's most powerful families...and now she was nobody. Then out of the rain walked Spanner, an expert data pirate who took her in, cared for her wounds, and gave her the freedom to reinvent herself again and again. No one could find Lore if she didn't want to be found: not the police, not her family, and not the kidnappers who had left her in that alley to die. She had escaped...but she paid for her newfound freedom in crime, deception, and degradation--over and over again. 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 inventing her 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 games one final time, she found that there was still the price of being a Van de Oest to be paid. Only by confronting her past, her family, and her own demons could Lore meld together who she had once been, who she had become, and the person she intended to be....In Slow River, Nicola Griffith skillfully takes us deep into the mind and heart of her complex protagonist, where the past must be reconciled with the present if the future is ever to offer solid ground. Slow River poses a question we all hope never to need to answer: Who are you when you have nothing left? From the Hardcover edition.