Aliya Whiteley's Blog, page 3

Reading and writing around

Writing is usually thought of as a solitary business, and it is when it comes down to putting words on the page, but then there are moments when I’m reminded of everyone I’m writing beside, and around, and in the company of, even if we don’t know each other, or have never spoken directly. And readers too – we’re all readers. That brings its own rewards, in recommending and sharing the words.

Big shout out to all the other readers and writers.

There are so many good things out there to read right now, but if you’re looking for more recommendations you can try the Locus Recommended Reading List for 2024. Thanks to all the reviewers who spent time to put it together, and for putting Three Eight One on there too.

Just showing off the design in the hardback 381
before the paperback gets published next week…

The British Science Fiction Association has released their recommendations list in the run-up to the shortlist for the BSFA awards for 2024, and there are loads of great things on there. Thanks to the people who put forward some of my things, including Three Eight One, my short story in The Utopia of Us, and my short story collection from last year, Drive or be Driven.

Calque Press puts some really interesting work out there including small pamphlets on non-fiction themes, and I’ve written one for the 2025 collection. I’ll put some more details on the blog soon, but for now here’s a link to the excellent pamphlets from previous years.

Also, the Lincolnshire Folk Tales anthology is now available to preorder from Five Leaves Publications! Here’s the link. If you’re after a bit of folk horror from writers with a Lincolnshire connection (hello to you all!) then this is the book for you.

Folk Tales, Covered

Here’s the atmospheric cover for an anthology of reimagined Lincolnshire folk tales in prose and poetry that will be published soon. I contributed a story that’s a version of the tale of the Anwick Stone. I lived near Anwick for a while, and have long had a love of old standing stones, which are the favourite hiding places of dragons or the devil, and might even have a hoard of treasure underneath them.

It’s a great project involving some brilliant writers. I’ll put up a post once it’s published.

My favourite reads of 2024

Let’s do it! A look back over a year of books, starting with Martin MacInnes’ In Ascension because it was one of the first books I read in 2024, which is an amazingly strong start by anyone’s standards. I’m enjoying the fact that Barack Obama also has good taste by picking it as one of his reads of the year.

These books that somehow create an intimacy yet take place on an epic scale, contrasting the inner life and the vastness of societies – they are so difficult to do, and so wonderful to read. Different genres provide various ways to make it work. Where In Ascension did it with SF, Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night did it with horror. There are sections of that book I’ve run over and over in my mind. It’s all about the way the reader is placed within the world that’s so absorbing.

I’ve found a lot of horror in my favourite reads this year, not always stridently so, but sometimes to brilliant, surprising effect. I loved Jenn Ashworth’s Ghosted, Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts, and Samantha Schweblin’s Little Eyes. Conchita De Gregorio’s The Missing Word was heartbreaking and so strong. At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop is stunning. Also Kay Chronister’s The Bog Wife, which was published in October in the UK and suited a muddy autumn. These books were all somehow rooted in reality even when dealing with the worst or the strangest things, and all had the magic ingredient: I had to know what happened next.

What did happen next? I revisited some of my favourite authors, and treated myself to Rupert Thomson’s first novel, Dreams of Leaving. Yes, he was even brilliant back when he wrote this, his first novel. Rachel Cusk’s Parade was just beautiful in its shape and ideas. Jorge Luis Borges’ The Book of Sand contained a story so apposite, so completely tied up in things I’m thinking about right now that I’ve reread it multiple times. It’s called Utopia of a Tired Man.

While I’m thinking about short stories, I’ll also just mention Verity Holloway’s collection Cheer the Sick, filled with wise tales that aren’t afraid to turn in unexpected directions. Laura Mauro’s one-off story in The Dark magazine online, Wiremother, is just perfectly creepy and sad and very much pushed all my buttons.

There was the thrill of discovering a writer from the past, and feeling as if they were speaking directly to me: Elizabeth Jenkins’ The Tortoise and the Hare was funny, sharp, bitter, and I finished it and immediately got a copy of another novel of hers, Harriet, which is based on a shocking murder case from 1877 (Harriet was published in 1934). It’s a fascinating novel, which puts the reader into the minds of the murderers in really uncomfortable ways. It’s so weird to think of how the reporting of crime has changed since then, and reflect on the differences.

I’d read Olaf Stapledon before, years ago, but I got reacquainted with him this year when someone gave me a copy of his novel about a genetically altered dog, Sirius, from 1944. It’s not something I would have chosen to pick up, but as soon as I started reading I was sucked in, and I love its unerring focus on moral issues without sacrificing emotional weight.

Back to the here and now – well, sort of. I haven’t read Sandra Newman’s new book yet, but I caught up with The Heavens from 2019. That mixture of past and present, events affecting each other, and the way people change because of how they perceive their history, was brilliantly done.

Finally, a graphic novel: Monica by Daniel Clowes feels like both a classic and something so far out there that you need to scoop your brain up after reading. That ending.

And on that ending, I’ll end.

Looking back over these names, these voices, I’m hugely grateful for their work and their companionship. Have a great Christmas and I hope you’ve found both new and familiar writers to keep you company through the year, and onwards into 2025.

2024: The Year of the Optical Illusion

Is it a rabbit or a cat? An old woman, or a young man with a beard? A long year of change in which one person began and another ended, or an inestimably small increment in which nothing was achieved but an eye blink in which the world distorted, then pulled itself back to its usual shape? I haven’t got to grips with my 2024, and I’m at the summation stage, which feels a bit dangerous. I won’t decide upon an answer. I’m still writing it out. I’ll get back to you once I can see it clearly. This could take a really long time. My eyesight is awful.

In the meantime, here’s an unclear look at my writing adventures this year.

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Three Eight One! It was published by Solaris in January 2024, and made The Guardian’s Best SF list of the year this month. It was my lockdown novel, filled with yearning for getting out and going to places even if none of the places made sense any more. It’s very personal, but also comprised of images and situations and emotions about which we’ve learned to hold certain expectations. It’s amazing to think that it has meant something to readers on those terms. Some inexplicable experiences we share.

I haven’t been brave enough to listen to it myself, but an audio version of Three Eight One was released a few months ago. Wild. The paperback version, with a stylish new cover, is being published in 2025.

From the new to the old, and round in a circular fashion: the tenth anniversary edition of The Beauty, accompanied by The Arrival of Missives, was published by Solaris with an introduction by the wonderful MR Carey. For the first time there’s also an audio version of it, too. I can’t tell you how strange it has been in the last few months to walk into my local bookshop and find copies of The Beauty in hardback face out, greeting me with a yellow stare. It’s been translated into other languages, and it’s both bizarre and brilliant when other creative people tell me they’ve found inspiration in it. It started out so small, and just kept growing.

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My collection of short stories, Drive or Be Driven, was published by NewCon Press in April 2024 and got a starred review from Publishers Weekly that made me an extremely happy pedestrian. It’s part of a series of SF collections called Polestars, and I’m very proud to be included in a wonderful line-up of work there. These stories of travel are mainly SF flavoured, I’d say, including future cars and spaceships and deep sea exploration. But there’s also historical fantasy, and horror, and long ocean journeys and walks deep in scary woods, and treks to the beach, and psychological roadtrips, and a symbolic prison break by a car hood ornament. I loved putting this collection together. I hope it’s finding its way to readers.

I also had work included in three excellent anthologies:

Heartwood, a homage to Robert Holdstock’s influential Mythago Wood, was published by PS Publishing and edited by Dan Coxon. I wanted to take the opportunity to bring a bit of Arthurian Legend to life, and wrote a story called The Known Song. Mythago Wood is loved by so many readers; I hope I managed to convey some of my own history within its depths for the story.

I really enjoyed rediscovering Zamyatin’s We for the anthology The Utopia of Us, published by Luna Press and edited by Teika Marija Smits. We is one of those novels that has puzzled and surprised me for decades, creeping back into my thoughts every now and again. This time around I connected with its sense of humour and wrote a story called Intrinsic – Extrinsic – Terrific, set in the world of We, that dealt with the way we make constrained choices in the framework available to us, and call that hope.

In October there was a charity writing day for Macmillan cancer support via Green Ink, undertaken by a host of great writers, and I managed to complete a three thousand word short story in eight hours called Hair of the World. It features a green hairy wall. The stories seem to come out even stranger than usual under a strict time limit. The anthology was only available to those who donated – many thanks to all who did.

Parsec 11, the speculative fiction magazine edited by Ian Whates, featured work by writers attending WorldCon in Glasgow, and my story, about wanting to be part of an easier world, was called The Inhalations. There have been some lovely reviews of this issue of the magazine, and WorldCon was an overwhelming and incredibly positive experience. I signed books, spoke on panels, even gave a table talk and bribed the attendees with sweets and free books. If you came along for that – thank you! It was one of the highlights of my year.

Speaking of speaking, I got the chance early in 2024 to have a conversation with Martin MacInnes about his novel In Ascension. We spent an hour or so at Waterstones Trafalgar Square chatting about science fiction, space fiction, concepts of futures and otherness and things that influence us. He’s a wonderful writer. Thanks to Waterstones for letting me bombard him with questions.

I haven’t spoken much about Three Eight One because it’s really difficult to do that, at least eloquently, but I did attempt a conversation with editor Gareth Jelley for Interzone podcast. Listening back to it, it’s quite entertaining in our attempts to pin down the slippery nature of the story.

Sticking with Interzone, I’ve continued to write my regular column Climbing Stories for the magazine, spanning books, films, SF, fantasy, horror, video games, plants, monsters, museums, training montages, and other subjects. I’ve got a couple lined up for 2025 already, including a dive into the business of horror writing as represented in horror anthology movies.

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In fact, when it comes to things I’ve written this year, horror films are a big influence. I’ve been working on a couple of novellas with some of my favourite weird films of the 1950s and 1960s strongly in mind.

I have finished a new novel – a complete antidote to the machinations of Three Eight One – and will start the editing process next year.

Short story-wise, I’ve written a few this year for various anthologies and magazines that will be published in 2025, starting with a magazine that I’ve enjoyed for years: Three-Lobed Burning Eye held a kickstarter and met its targets (hurray!), so I’m contributing a story. It’ll be great to be back in 3LBE again, after a decade.

There’s also a story of mine in an anthology of tales from the Lincolnshire Folk Tales Project. I lived in Lincolnshire for a while and was delighted to get the chance to write about a piece of folklore from that county – here’s an article about my choice. Five Leaves Publications will release the anthology at the start of 2025.

There are some exciting non-fiction projects coming up next year, including a first: I got the chance to write an introduction for the 30th anniversary reissue of a wonderful book by an author I love. Feeling very lucky about that.

But the big thing next year is, of course, the April publication of City of All Seasons, a collaborative novel I wrote with Oliver Langmead. Review copies are out in the world now. Titan Books have made such a great job of this book, including beautiful illustrations and a gorgeous cover. Thanks to all at Titan.

City of All Seasons has been a big part of my writing life for the past few years, and it’s very exciting that publication is only months away. This has been such a fulfilling and energising project for me, and I hope for Ollie, too. We’re looking forward to being able to talk about the book more next year; hopefully there’ll be a few events lined up to chat about it together.

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More communication! Maybe I need a bit of help from everyone else to make sense of 2024. I’ll look around and reach out, and remind myself that every writer is trying to make sense of the senseless. But nonsense gets a bad press, I think. Duck or rabbit, young man or old woman, long journey or short bunny hop to the next project, reading or writing, wherever you are and whatever you’re seeing, I hope you’ve found the things you need along the way this year.

I’ll be back with a few mentions of my favourite reads of 2024 before the year is out.

Paperback cha

The lesser spotted paperback cha will be available within the pages of Three Eight One as from 13th February 2025, and there’s a brand new cover to mark the occasion:

Thanks to Gem Sheldrake and all at Solaris for the wonderful new look, complete with cha.

Seasonal Roads

December! Hello! I’m making a big effort to clear one of my TBR shelves so I can treat myself to lots of cool new books for Christmas. There are a few very interesting titles on The Guardian’s Five of the Best Science Fiction Books of 2024 list that have caught my attention, so that’s a great place to start – and the added delight here is that I found Three Eight One among them, in great company with Oliver Langmead’s epic SF poem Calypso, too.

It won’t be long until Three Eight One is released in paperback. I think that’s in February 2025. It’s got an eye-catching new cover, but I’ll go into detail about that (and other things coming up in 2025) a bit later on, along with a look back over my writing and reading year.

Speaking of which, it was great to find two of my horror stories from 2023 on editor Ellen Datlow’s list of Honorable Mentions for that year. Possibilities are Endless from the final edition of Black Static and Meet in the Middle from Terror Tales of the Mediterranean (Telos Publishing) are mentioned, along with many other stories that are worth tracking down if you’re also getting some serious reading done before the end of the year. Here goes.

Speaking of the futures

2025 is starting to coalesce before our very eyes, and I’m pleased to be able to focus on a really fun event that will kick off my writing year. I’ll be taking part in Writing Genre Fiction: a discussion with Robert Shearman, Barry Forshaw and Dan Coxon, based around the ‘Writing…” series of books Dan edited for Dead Ink. These books have been fascinating and I think it’s going to be a brilliant night, in great company.

It kicks off at 6.30pm on Wednesday 22nd January at Waterstones Islington. There are a limited number of tickets that you can buy here.

A Covered City of all Seasons

The cover for our City of All Seasons is here, and it’s gorgeous:

It won’t be long until advance reading copies are out in the world. Shout if you review things and you want one.

A huge thank you to everyone at Titan for working so hard to bring this book into the world. It’ll be published in April 2025. Until then, I’m just going to keep looking at our cover. I love it.

99p steal is a beautiful scream

The Rebellion Halloweek! Book Sale has started, and there are a lot of very tempting bargains on their website for the next few days, all at 99p for ebook versions.

Yep, that includes the tenth anniversary edition of The Beauty, with added Arrival of Missives and a new introduction by MR Carey.

Look at some of the other options here:

Hairy Speaking Lands

We did it! Congratulations to my fellow writers who took part in the Green Ink Writing Challenge for Macmillan Cancer Support – we wrote our short stories in the time limit and they’ve now been collected and published. My story, Hair of the World, is a response to the prompt ‘pleasant lands’. It went down to the last half hour to get it finished, and clocks in at just under 4000 words of weirdness.

If you sponsored us, thank you. You should have your copy of the anthology by now, but if you don’t, give me a shout and I can forward one on.

And speaking of speaking, the audio version of Three Eight One is released tomorrow! This is very exciting. I have no idea how it will work in that format. I’m interested to find out. Many thanks to everyone involved in putting that version together.