Aliya Whiteley's Blog, page 14

Daily lumping

Short and sweet. Well, with a slightly bitter aftertaste, perhaps – a piece of flash fiction I wrote about love, money and alien administration is up at Daily Science Fiction today. They deliver a piece of excellent SF flash every morning to my inbox, and I’ve long wanted to join their number.

Lump Sum Love is available to read here.

Future Fogginess

Fogginess is such a great word.

NewCon Press will be publishing an anthology of short stories about London in the future. That is, they’ll be publishing it in the future (27th October 2020, to be precise) and it’s about future London. Except my story, Fog and Pearls at the Kings Cross Junction isn’t really 100% about the future, but anyway, I’m amazed and very happy to be in the line-up, which is very impressive. Click here and go take a look.

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Off to be foggy elsewhere. Fog fog fog.

Covering 2021 with skyward paper

It feels like 2021 is a very long way off, but something tells me we’ll trudge on, then pause, look up, and realise we’re already in it.

Getting to show off the cover for Skyward Inn, which will be published in 2021, makes me, personally, feel that I’m drawing closer to something. I’m not sure what yet. You can find the cover over at SciFiNow today, along with a short extract from the start of the book.

I’m just blown away by it. Many thanks to Rebellion Publishing, and designer Dominic Forbes.

Holding hexagonal patterns

Wow, my Greensmith cover is just so beautiful that I’m going to stare at it some more:

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Please feel welcome to stare at it too, particularly since the original publishing date has now, very wisely, been delayed until October. Please hold on to whatever thoughts/plans you had about it and we’ll reconvene with that cover later on. Also, The US edition of The Loosening Skin will not be published until August, and that has a beautiful cover too so I’ll take the opportunity to put that up again:

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I’m really looking forward to a time when both of these books get out there joyously and wisely in the world, and we all do too.

In the meantime, there should be a couple of new short stories coming up shortly, and my regular columns in Interzone continue, so see you in those places. Right now I’m working on a non-fiction project and obsessing over a range of board games including Cryptid. A strange monster roams somewhere on a hexagonal map; can we track it down and capture it? Short answer: no, not with my spatial reasoning skills. It’s a great game though.

Collecting

Yesterday a collection of short stories went on sale as an e-book, with all the proceeds to go to the NHS, and today it’s sitting at the top of Amazon’s charts. I put that down to two things: the incredible generosity and empathy of readers, and the sheer amazingness of talent put together in one book by editor Ian Whates for NewCon Press. Here’s the ToC:

Introduction by Ian Whates
Last Contact – Stephen Baxter
Slink-Thinking – Frances Hardinge
Gossamer – Ian Whates
The Feather Dress – Lisa Tuttle
The Man Who Swallowed Himself – Chris Beckett
Fat Man in the Bardo – Ken MacLeod
Kings of Eternity – Eric Brown
Muscadet Kiss – Michèle Roberts
Dead Space – George Mann
The Trace – Christopher Priest
Golden Wing, Silver Eye – Cat Hellisen
The Golden Nose – Neil Williamson
On Ilkley Moor – Alison Littlewood
About Helen – Tade Thompson
Iphigenia in Aulis – M.R. Carey
Just Watch Me – Lesley Glaister
The Family Football – Ian R. MacLeod
The Grave-Digger’s Tale – Simon Clark
The All-Nighter – Mark Morris
Her Seal Skin Coat – Lauren Beukes
A Conclusion – Paul Cornell
Liberty Bird – Jaine Fenn
The Ki-Anna – Gwyneth Jones
Scienceville – Gary Gibson
The Sphere – Juliet E. McKenna
An Eligible Boy – Ian McDonald
The Quick Child – Jane Rogers
Trademark Bugs: A Legal History – Adam Roberts
Working on the Ward – Tim Pears
During the Dance – Mark Lawrence
Out of the Woods – Ramsey Campbell
Trick of the Light – Tim Lebbon
Roman Games – Anne Nicholls
Digits – Robert Shearman
The Fox Maiden – Priya Sharma
Roads of Silver, Paths of Gold – Emmi Itäranta
All Deaths Well Intention’d – RJ Barker
Epilogue: England, Summer 1558 – Jon Courtenay Grimwood
The Christmas Repentance of the Mole Butcher of Tetbury – Aliya Whiteley
Gulliver’s Travels Into Several Remote Nations Of The World, Part V: A Voyage To The Island Of The Wolves – Philip Palmer
Barking Mad – Ian Watson
Lady with a Rose – Reggie Oliver
Missing – Blake Morrison
What We Sometimes Do, Without Thinking – Mark West
Events – Stan Nicholls
Wars of Worldcraft – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Fixer, Worker, Singer – Natalia Theodoridou
Witness – Kim Lakin-Smith
Unravel – Ren Warom
Like Clockwork – Tim Major
A Million Reasons Why – Nick Wood
The Road to the Sea – Lavie Tidhar
Ten Love Songs to Change the World – Peter F. Hamilton

I was so pleased to be able to contribute a story to this. I’m also really pleased to be able to read it, which I’m about to start doing. You can get your copy here.

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(On a selfish and personal note, I get to be in a book with my daughter’s favourite author! I just became thirty-eight times cooler.)

((I’ll leave you to work out who her favourite author is.))

Don’t mention the inn

Wait! Actually I can mention the inn. Here are all the details:

 

Solaris are thrilled to announce the acquisition of Skyward Inn by Aliya Whiteley, a new and thoughtful speculative fiction novel set in the English moorlands.

Skyward Inn will be published in spring 2021.

Editor David Thomas Moore acquired World English rights in Whiteley’s new novel from Max Edwards at Aevitas Creative Management UK.

Synopsis:

This is a place where we can be alone, together.

Skyward Inn, on the moorlands of the Western Protectorate, is removed from modern technology and politics. Theirs is a quiet life – The Protectorate has stood apart from the coalition of world powers that has formed. Instead the inhabitants choose to live simply, many of them farming by day and drinking the local brew at night.

The co-owners of the inn are Jem and Isley. Jem, a veteran of the coalitions’ war on the perfect, peaceful planet of Qita, has a smile for everyone in the bar. Her partner Isley does his cooking in the kitchen and his brewing in the cellar. He’s Qitan, but it’s all right – the locals treat him like one of their own. They think they understand him, but it’s only Jem who knows his homeland well enough to recreate it in the stories she tells him at dawn.

Skyward Inn is Jamaica Inn by way of Ursula Le Guin, bringing the influences, too, of Angela Carter, Michel Faber and Jeff Vandermeer to create a fantastic story of love, belonging, and togetherness. Asking questions of ideas of the individual and the collective, of ownership and historical possession, and of the experience of being human, it is at once timeless and thoroughly of its time.

Aliya Whiteley on the acquisition:

“It’s a joy that Rebellion will be publishing my latest novel. I wanted to write a story that conveys my love of science fiction, with all its scope and creativity for imagined futures, and how it can uniquely reflect on the way we live our lives now. I know Rebellion shares my passion for producing exciting science fiction; it’s the perfect home for Skyward Inn.”

Editor David Thomas Moore:

“This is a strange, gentle, utterly beautiful book about how humanity might live alongside another people wholly unlike us – and about how we live alongside each other. I’m beyond delighted that Aliya agreed to make Solaris its home.”

Agent Max Edwards:

“Aliya is one of the most incredible voices in British SFF, and Skyward Inn showcases her astonishing talent. From the first paragraph I read of this hauntingly beautiful book, I knew, like all Aliya’s work, it was something special. I’m thrilled David and Rebellion will be publishing Aliya’s book.”

About the author:

Aliya Whiteley is one of the most exciting talents in the UK. The author of four books of speculative fiction, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlisted The Loosening Skin. Her novels have been shortlisted for many awards, including the Clarke Award, the Shirley Jackson Award and the James Tiptree Jr. Award. She lives in Sussex with her husband and teenage daughter.

For review copies of Skyward Inn and interviews please contact Hanna Waigh, Fiction – PR & Marketing Manager: hanna.waigh@rebellion.co.uk.

 

Amazing. But there are a thousand things to do before we get there, so I’m trying not to get too excited just yet. Failing, but trying.

Spoils for grabs

Ending what’s been a hugely exciting week for me for reasons I’m mainly not allowed to talk about yet* (but one of which was that it was my birthday and I received a huge pile of new books to read – I love book-heavy birthdays) is the publication of a short story of mine on Beneath Ceaseless Skies, next to other stories by Yoon Ha Lee, Christine Tyler and Katrina Smith.  It’s their science-fantasy issue, so there’s bumper content of stories that sit between (or arch over?) both genres – anyway, I’m delighted to be there.

The Spoils is the story of a strange creature’s death, and what that death gives to a community who have lived by ancient rules that don’t quite make sense to them any more. It took quite a bit of effort to get right – huge thanks to editor Scott H. Andrews for putting that effort in with me.

You can read The Spoils right now by clicking here.

*I know, that’s a mean thing to do, but I definitely tell you as soon as I can.

Heavy necking

I love my Titan covers, and this new one is no exception:

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Here’s the blurb:

The new collection of humane, beautiful and disarming short stories from the award-winning author of The Beauty, Clarke Award nominee The Loosening Skin and The Arrival of Missives, Aliya Whiteley. In 16 stories Whiteley deftly unpeels the strangeness of everyday life through beguiling gardens, rebellious bodies and journeys across familiar worlds, with her trademark wit and compassion.

Witness the future of farming in a new Ice Age, or the artist bringing life to glass; the many-eyed monsters we carry and the secret cities inside our bodies; the alien invasion through our language to the Chantress and her twists on the fairy tale. Fascinating and always unexpected, Whiteley is unlike any other writer working today.

Embarrassingly lovely. The collection will be published in November 2020. Thanks to Titan, and Julia Lloyd for her amazing cover design skills. I can’t wait to get a physical copy and line all my Titan titles up together. What a matching set they’ll make.

Cover that Greensmith

Prepare to have your eyes dazzled; it’s the cover of my new novel –

 

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You can read a bit about the book and my feelings about the magnificent cover (which sort of gives away how I feel about it really) over at Fantasy Hive. 

Great big thanks to Sam Chivers for the perfect image and Vince Haig for the design.

I think you can pre-order Greensmith over at the Unsung Stories website. Publication date is May 2020.

Horrific Eyes

This is such a great idea – illustrator Marta Oliehoek-Samitowska has interviewed a selection of horror authors about their favourite horror films and then drawn their portraits. Eye portraits, in extreme close-up, which shows her vast skill, but also feels a bit unnerving, like staring into some very dark places. Having said that, all the horror authors I’ve met have been lovely people, but if you ever did wonder what influences them and how many horror films they watch, this is definitely the project for you. I got to talk about folk horror and British cinema and the filmic images that still keep me awake at night.

The interviews and portraits are on their way to being crowdfunded in order to be turned into a book, and you can order a copy here. You can even select an option to have Marta produce a portrait of your own eye.

Can you spot my eye in the video?