Fiction generally embodies that which a culture knows to be true. In the thirties and forties, American writers knew that the world was getting bigger, brighter, and more reasonable. There was new class mobility, the Depression was over, and a world government of rational, impartial scientists would soon be completely in charge. Future cities imagined in these times, then, were utopic visions of science-based meritocracies: well-fed white people bustling across clean-looking pastel-colored sky bridges with their slide rules sticking out of their pockets.

By the eighties, on the other hand, writers knew everything was falling apart. The economy was fueled by junk bonds and the government was going broke; more and more people were out of work; and homelessness was the new epidemic. More recently imagined Cities of the Future are in decline: rain-wet streets are neon-streaked and full of piles of dirty clothes that turn out to be brain-burned refugees from various corporate wars.

What do we know to be true today? That civilization--art, education, democracy, law--springs from and is of the city. That, paradoxically, "inner city" has become a euphemism for poverty, despair, and injustice. We also know that there are two parts to any city--the physical infrastructure, and the people and their institutions--and that both are changing.

The infrastructure of many cities is essentially Victorian: the sewers and bridges and railways, the street plans and the bureaucracy date from the nineteenth century. They were designed in and for the industrial age. They are collapsing, but because they are literally integral to the functioning city, they cannot be demolished and rebuilt. We cannot live without them. We cannot replace them. We have no real idea of how long they will hold up. In the utopic visions of the thirties and forties these problems were simply magicked away. In eighties cyberpunk dystopias the problems have overwhelmed us.

But people, not sewers and railways and bridges, are what make a city. People and their social institutions--class, language, religion, sexual orientation and so on--are what create the layers of metropolis. My definition of a city: a place with a large enough population to *have* different layers.

No city is homogeneous. Not only is every neighborhood different to every other, but every citizen will know a different layer, will bend before a different social wind. Think of it this way. Four white female students share a house in a university district. One Sunday morning, one gets up bright and early to attend a fundamentalist Christian service. About the same time, one of her room mates is just staggering back, dazed, from a wild night spent at a lesbian club then someone's bed then the beach at dawn. The third student has been at the computer lab all night, running a new program, and won't come home even to shower for another thirty-six hours. The fourth is still asleep, dreaming of all the things she will buy when she inherits the family business. These four do not live in the same city. They have different experiences of law enforcement, transportation, stories, and health-care providers, and at different times of the day and night. The pulse of the city--its food, clothes, religion, politics, art, speech patterns, morals and expectations--is different for each. And these four live in the same house, attend the same university, are the same biological sex and have the same skin color....

But the interesting thing about a city is that layers have a habit of intersecting. Take that lesbian club, for instance: there will be women of different socio-economic class, different race and color, different politics, different tastes. There again, most of them will be in the same 18 - 30 age range. And that woman at the computer lab: she'll be hanging with people of all kinds of backgrounds and mores and attitudes; some will be gay, some straight; some are working three jobs to pay for college, some are being funded for by Daddy. These nexus points are the irrigation arteries of the city. It is from such intersections of different nutrient streams that the energy and the art of a metropolis are born. Prevent this mingling and mixing and there is no hybrid vigor. The whole stagnates. It rots and dies.

This is happening in some cities. Walled enclaves are springing up; suburbs and edge cities are voting en masse to prevent transit lines reaching them from the urban center; inner cities are being abandoned after dark; more people communicate via email than at the water cooler.

So, this is what we know to be true today: in order to remain viable, our cities--whether the human component or the physical infrastructure--must be transformed.

The Cities of the Future being imagined in the nineties reflect this knowledge. For example, in Michaela Roessner's VANISHING POINT ninety percent of the populations disappears. A city is no longer a city when there are too few people to form distinct layers. In Kathy Goonan's QUEEN CITY JAZZ, the transformation of the infrastructure is radical: nanotechnology leads to metamorphosis. Nothing of the old remains. In Egan's PERMUTATION CITY, the virtual city is--as Attebury points out--more real than the decaying actuality. The old is simply escaped from. It seems that what we know to be true today often leads to fiction in which some aspect of The City is destroyed.

However, what each writer knows to be true is slightly different; our experiences are not the same. We each take our truth and bend it to a different purpose.

SLOW RIVER comes from the intersection of two different experiences, both of which changed my perceptions of myself and my place in the world. The first experience was when I was eighteen, the second almost ten years later.

I was born in Leeds which grew to its present size during the textile revolution. It is now a bustling regional financial center. I was raised in a very conventional white middle-class Catholic family, and taught to always obey the rules--stay within the system and the system will protect you. I did not know that there was any other way to live. And then when I was eighteen I ran away from home to live with my girlfriend in another city. I stumbled from three square meals a day in a law-abiding atmosphere of wall-to-wall carpets and central heating into another world.

In this other city--whose economy was failing and whose drains were collapsing--I had no job and no money. No belongings. My lover and I were hanging with bikers and drug-dealers and prostitutes. I submerged myself in this new reality utterly. It was all very exciting. Very adult. Begging for food and selling speed for a living felt like a radical act: I was hardcore. Rules were for other people. I was above all that. I was different. This lasted for a few years, and then one day I woke up and realized that this was no longer a phase, or a game, or a diverting interlude; it was my life. This starving, cynical, uncomfortable and dangerous existence, in a hopeless and declining city, was all I had. So I struggled to climb out of the pit. And as I struggled, I looked around me and wondered why all the other people I knew in similar straits were not struggling, too. I began to wonder: what makes some people want to change, and others not? How come two people who seem to be faced with the same choices, with access to same resources (i.e. apparently none), make two different decisions? People, I understood suddenly, are not all the same.

In 1988 I came to the US for the first time to attend Clarion, a six week writing workshop at Michigan State University. As I flew over the cumulus clouds of the midwest, it occurred to me that there was not a single person on the continent who knew me. The sudden sense of being outside the world, of not being bound by ordinary rules or people's expectations, was exhilarating. I could land and be anyone I liked. No one would know any different. But then I realized that this hiatus in my ordinary life gave me the opportunity to play a much more dangerous and high stakes game. I could find out who I really was. Me. Not me-and-my-family, or me-and-my-education, or even me-and-my-accent, just *Me*. Without the usual identifying cultural markers, my fellow students and teachers would have no choice but to evaluate me on the basis of *now*. And by doing that, they would form a human mirror. For the first time, I would see my essential self, stripped bare.

These two realizations, together with the less-than-utopic city in which I had lived for nearly eleven years, formed the background for SLOW RIVER.

It is a very deliberately layered book because that is how I have come to view the world. Details of Lore's character are lacquered one on top of the other, each revelation seeping through to stain the next, each informing the whole. Layering forms not only the narrative structure, but also the predominant image of the novel. Lore knows the different strata of a bioremediation plant because she has, literally, been different people. Remember those four white girls? Lore has been rich and spoiled. She has been a thief and a prostitute. She has been a kidnap victim. She has been a lowly grunt in sewage processing plant. I have learned to see cities from several perspectives. They are all very interesting. Lore learns the city from an even greater range of viewpoints (because in fiction, after all, you can turn up the heat without getting personally burned). She knows that the city is like a jungle, each layer having its own predators and prey. She understands where the power in each milieu lies, and how those milieux interact.

Much science fiction of the nineties destroys some aspect or other of the city. I did not want to do that. I wanted to keep as background the city as I have seen it, as a reader might recognize it. My need with this book was to ask questions about people and their place in the world; to look at how if you change one, you change the other; to examine the influence of each upon the other. So the city in SLOW RIVER hover continually on the brink of disaster: one slip in a vital system and there will be pollution and death on a terrible scale. Not much different from what we know to be true of most cities today.

But SLOW RIVER is science fiction, so I posit a technological advance that adds a bit of hope to the mess: the means to remediate pollution safely and completely. It is a small change. All the old buildings and systems are still there: the sewers, the old water treatment building, the culverts and roads. All the people still live. The citizens are real. It is neither utopia nor dystopia.

The city of SLOW RIVER is a very personal vision of what might be. It springs from the cities I have seen, the places I have lived. I do hope, however, that I end up living somewhere else.

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