Aliya Whiteley's Blog, page 6

Three Eight One Go

We have lift off – Three Eight One is published in the UK today. If you open a copy up, you can see a few of the things that appear in this quest:

I’ve been popping up in a few places to mention it:

At SciFiNow I wrote an article about strained family relationships in SF, a theme that touches on some aspects of the book.

The page 69 is always a fascinating test to take. Did the contents of page 69 of my book give a truthful impression of Three Eight One? Here’s my answer.

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A huge thank you to everyone who has already read it and left a review. If you haven’t read it yet, maybe Three Eight One is a good book to go into without knowing much about it, but here are links to some reviews if you’d like more info:

It appeared in The Guardian’s Best Recent Science Fiction and Fantasy Roundup.

From Polar Peril to Fantasy Futures: you can find it in the Financial Times’ Best New SF.

Interzone 297 has lots of good stuff in it, as ever, and there’s also a great review section that mentions Three Eight One.

And I just wanted to mention my friend and fellow writer RN Morris, who wrote a 381 word review of sorts, complete with footnotes, which captures the spirit of this strange adventure.

I didn’t write this book with a reader in mind, and I’m just delighted and amazed that it is finding people. Thank you to everyone at Solaris for giving Three Eight One such a good home.

Three e-eight one: the future

The UK publication date for Three Eight One is Thursday 18th January, but it seems the US versions and the UK e-book version are out today, so I’ve decided to celebrate a tiny bit now as well.

Hurray!

Okay, that’s enough celebrating for today. I’ll be back on Thursday with some links to reviews and places I’ll be popping up in. See you then.

My favourite reads of 2023

I don’t know if one book leads to another, so it’s a weird business to lay them out chronologically and think that the one before informs the one after. That’s probably not true, right? And yet there was a feeling, this year, that each read was in order, changing my perceptions, revealing new insights. Even the rereads had fresh things to add to the mix. I like the idea that this was a year of a reading journey, so instead of organising the ones that have stayed with me by genre I’m going to lay them out in the order I came to them, starting with the very first book I read last year:

Acting Class by Nick Drnaso was an eerie graphic novel experience for a January start. I love Drnaso’s blank faces that reach towards emotions, looking for something real, something true, in all sorts of places. It becomes all-involving and chilling, this search. The sense builds that something terrible could happen imminently, because these blank faces are truly, deep-down, desperate.

From there to Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love, which is full of people who would find it impossible to maintain a blank expression. This is a family bigger than reality, each one written to have fantastic energy and self-involved charisma: an antidote to Drnaso. It’s a book I’d heard people talk about, and never quite found time for; I’m so glad I did this year.

My first revisit of the year came straight afterwards in the form of another fantastical vision. I first read Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov as a teenager and it’s safe to say it was a different experience this time around. I wanted to read it again after I’d got the writing of Three Eight One out of the way, not before, so that only a memory of those footnotes, that hidden journey, informed my own. What a book. Even as a dim recollection it had power – this time around, it was incredible.

Some journeys are less imaginary but no less vivid. Tash Aw looked back over his family’s travels in Strangers on a Pier, exploring how the experiences of past generations have led to a complex sense of belonging, of identity, of self. He has such beautiful, honed prose, exploring deep ideas with precision. I was hugely moved by his attempts to talk about the things that have happened, and cannot quite be explained.

Belonging shaped by world events also lies at the heart of Eva Ibbotson’s The Morning Gift, but this is a totally different experience, one born of romance and a lightness of touch, as sweet and gentle as a book can be. I’ve kept it to reread whenever I feel low. I’d read Ibbotson’s books for children at exactly the right age, and I think I found this book at precisely the right moment too. She was a brilliant writer.

Speaking of brilliance, I found JG Ballard’s The Kindness of Women in the library, realised I’d never read it, and got completed sucked into it. There’s a quality of extreme, surgical honesty to his prose that is frightening, and this book dissects some formative experiences of his own. From Ibbotson to Ballard is a hell of a jump. One is so kind, and the other so cruel, but both are true.

Elizabeth Moon’s Speed of Dark had been sitting on my bookshelf for a while, with a not-great cover and a chunky look about it that didn’t call to me until I finished the Ballard and wanted something with a longer word count to help me catch my breath. It’s a great example of SF’s ability to examine ethical issues relating to the changing world around us, particularly in the area of technological advancement. Here, the autistic narrator questions whether they have value in a new future dominated by corporate goals, but the quality of the voice is so strong that perhaps we already know the answer to that. Still, the issue is handled with care, but also within a storyline that made me desperate to read on. That’s a thrilling combination.

I wandered off to the bookshop to look for something different after Moon’s novel, and ended up standing in the children’s section, totally absorbed in Jon Klassen’s The Skull. This is a retelling – a misremembering – of a very old folk tale, and he embraces the slippery tricks of memory to create something marvellously weird and wonderful. I wished it had been available to me as a child, but it was no bad thing to see it from this end of the experience, with the ability to appreciate his skill.

Sometimes I get asked to read books before their release, and fortuitously Paul Carlucci’s The Voyageur fell into my lap just as I was casting around for the right thing. It sounded wonderfully up my street – a historical exploration of a deeply unpleasant but very important scientific discovery – and discovering an elegant, thoughtful voice driving this tale was brilliant. It’s not out for a few months yet, I think, but I really recommend it for 2024.

I became a fan of John Darnielle last year, and this year I read his Wolf in White Van. I always get the feeling he’s putting his finger on something painful, and pressing it – something that lurks behind the scenes in modern life and can’t quite be put into words. It’s not unlike Drnaso, maybe. Anyway, I love games. I used to play a turn-based mail game (you write down what your character will do, post it off, and the master of the game writes back with what happens next) so this really spoke to me. I don’t like the idea that all second lives have been claimed by the digital world. The kind that live only between two people, on paper – that’s powerful stuff. I’ve become very interested in that since writing my own co-operative book, and maybe thoughts about that, informed by Darnielle’s take, will bleed into my next project.

Junji ito! This year I read his Black Paradox and was suitably disgusted, appalled, freaked out, amused and blown away. I also recommended his Remina (which I first read a while back) as one of my Five SF/Horror Books for the Five Books website. I reread all of those books one after the other, and it made for a disturbing run throughout October.

What could possibly calm me down after that? The discovery of a new favourite author did it for me, although I doubt he’d be new to many regular readers. I picked up Damon Galgut’s The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (I know, I know, it doesn’t sound like a relaxing title, but I can’t help myself) from the library and fell in love with it, so I followed it up straight away with In a Strange Room, which instantly cemented itself as one of my favourite reads of recent years. Journeys go wrong, journeys demand much of us. These journeys changed me.

Travel. It happens in time, in space, in place, and it has unforeseen consequences, but when you look back it seems like that road was always laid out before you. This is a big theme of Three Eight One, and the theme of my reading year, too. Travelling took place, and thanks for reading this glance back along the path. Now I get to read the books I received as gifts this Christmas, and the ones that await me up beyond this first glimpse of 2024! Here goes.

I hope you had a great reading year, too, and here’s to your 2024, wherever it leads you.

2023: The year of the grated escape

Have you ever wanted to run away?

Some escapes are smooth, audacious and seamless. They are carefully planned, perfectly executed: the whole package of well-timed disappearance. I envy the escapologists who can enact such cohesive plans. They have an outfit, a patter, a mechanism.

My own vanishing act in 2023 involved losing a little bit of myself at a time, in snatched hours, in between interruptions. There goes an eyebrow. A toe. Then some internal organs, and maybe, if I’m lucky, a hour or two of total immersion in the onstage tank. My attention span has been struggling, recently. I’m a sliced-up writer these days, but hey, lots of the greatest things are grated, and you can’t always see the join once it’s all been melted together.

Or maybe that’s just cheese on toast.

Anyway. It’s been another weird year. Here’s what I got up to, writing-wise:

I wrote a lot of flash fiction! I know, grated fiction. Little shredded bits that started clumping, and became shark-infested. I wrote one a week for the year, and put them up on the blog (under the Small Objects tab) with a photo. Sometimes the photo inspired the fiction, and something the fiction inspired the photo. I knew I wasn’t going to get to a lot of well-honed short story writing this year, so this was a great way to explore a lot of ideas at speed, although it kept struggling to turn into a narrative. Sometimes I felt like I was wrestling the shark armed only with a pencil and a mobile phone. The end of 2023 will mark the end of the project, but I’ll leave the tab up for a while, and maybe one or two pieces will get turned into something longer. Or maybe grated fiction bits are better than big blocks, every now and again. They’ve got peppy bite.

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Although I didn’t write many short stories, I did have a few published:

Possibilities are Endless turned up in the very last edition of Black Static in July 2023. It’s a story about people who have certain opportunities physically removed from them, and what that process might look like. I’m very sad to see the end of Black Static. It was one of the first magazines to publish my weirder, darker fiction, and I have always been very proud to see my work in it, along with so many other talented writers.

Cloister Fox is just beginning its magazine life, and I hope it runs for a long time. It takes one word as a prompt and asks authors to produce something unforgettably strange. My story Clean Up was for an issue with the key word of ‘ruins’, and it details a long-term experiment that escapes into the world, leaving all kinds of mess in its wake.

I was thrilled to be part of Peach Pit, an anthology of short stories determined to put some morally grey women front and centre. What an amazing line up. I wrote Composition, an origin story using the necrobiome as inspiration.

I’d long been looking for an opportunity to write about the tunnel of Eupalinos, having visited it a few years ago. Then the chance to be in one of the Terror Tales series of books – Terror Tales of the Mediterranean – came along and I got to try to convey some of the really scary atmosphere of that ancient tunnel in Meet in the Middle, my story of a midlife crisis that leads to the island of Samos, and a wonder of the ancient world.

And in October I wrote a 4,500 word short story in a day for the Green Ink Sponsored Write challenge. It went by the title of Within the Well (the prompt being ‘a well of strength, the strength of will’) so of course it featured a well. It also featured a lot of other things that tend to pop into my head when I leave it unsupervised, including talking animals, huge palaces, and tapestries. I just like tapestries. Thank you to everyone who sponsored me. The story was collected into an anthology for those who donated.

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I didn’t have a new novel published in 2023, but I’ve finished writing two. One is a collaboration with another writer I hugely admire, and we had the best time writing a fantasy novel that I am just so flipping proud of. What a great experience it was. I’ll hopefully be able to tell you more about where that will be published shortly.

The other is a novel I’ve been working on for three years, finding bits of it here and there, ready-grated, and I’ve been trying to piece it into a workable shape. It’s not been an easy write but I set myself the task of finishing the year with it pressed into a shape I like, and I think I’m about there.

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Non-fiction! I wrote about writing for Writing the Future, and I concentrated on researching science fiction, and how to tie the real to the created. There were some incredible essays in this book, so I really recommend getting a copy if you’re interesting in creating SF of your own.

I popped up at Five Books – a site I really like for recommendations in so many genres – to talk about my five picks for SF novels that go heavy on the body horror.

Interzone magazine has seen a lot of changes in the past year, but I’m really glad that my regular column, Climbing Stories, is still part of the line-up. I’ve written about what alien goddesses might smell like and why we should always press a big red button when we find one, along with lots of other things. Hopefully I’ll keep writing them throughout 2024.

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Speaking of 2024, the big thing for me right now is the upcoming publication of Three Eight One, my experimental quest novel that meanders around with all the genres. It will be available from 16th January.  If you’re going to read it, I hope you enjoy it. It’s been a wild adventure.

There will be another longer project of mine getting out there in the world around Easter in 2024. I can’t say much about yet, but I’m really excited about it. ( I know, veiled reveals like this are really annoying. Sorry.)

Short story-wise, I’ve written a couple for themed anthologies based on concepts so good that it’s going to be brilliant to see what else people have written. I love being a part of a killer anthology.

I’m hoping to write more short stories in 2024, and also I’ve been thinking about novellas again. I really love novellas.

But for now, I’m in between longer projects and in between years. Here’s to tiny stretches of time that sit between the usual stuff. They are grate. Thank you to everyone who has been involved in these projects throughout 2023, and thank you to everyone who has read my words, read the blog, read anything of mine. Have a great Christmas. I will drop by between Christmas and the new year to talk about my favourite reads of 2023, and then… let’s run away some more. Keep running. Thattaway.

Five go on a horrible adventure

Thanks to Five Books for asking me to chooses some disgust-heavy science fiction for reading pleasure. I revisited all of my choices in a splurge of reading before the interview, and ended up feeling a bit odd at the end of it. Brilliant books, though. And I rediscovered a short story that had been lurking in my mind, upsetting me every now and again, since my early twenties.

All recommendations of your own SF classics that make your insides feel weird are very welcome! Although I might give it a while before I revisit the sub-genre.

You can click here to read my choices.

Demolished Foundations

Foundation, the International Review of Science Fiction, has a new edition available (number 146) that includes essays by great writers such as Abi Curtis, Harry Josephine Giles and Roz Kaveney, plus reviews by Niall Harrison, Fiona Moore and others.

There’s a regular feature in the magazine called The Fourfold Library, in which a writer explains the impact they feel a particular novel/piece of work has had upon their own.

I was asked to contribute to The Fourfold Library and so I wrote about Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man. The piece also includes mentions of 2000AD, the Alfred Hitchcock film Marnie, and Marks and Spencer.

You can get a copy of Foundation through the Science Fiction Foundation website here. It’s a hugely interesting read.

Forts of the Future

A huge thank you to Solaris Books for sending me some copies of the beautiful hardback edition of Three Eight One, which will be published in January 2024. It’s gorgeous, and also very handy for building a small fort.

And hurray! The recent roundup of the month’s best science fiction, fantasy and horror in The Guardian included a mention of Writing the Future. Edited by Dan Coxon, it’s a mixture of essays on the subject of writing SF by a host of talented writers.

I contributed one about researching for a story and then getting the balance right between innovation and accepted knowledge. (It would make a good Christmas present! Argh. Sorry. The future will keep intruding, even behind this fort.)

Scary shiny Tunnel Tale

It’s so shiny! I received a contributor’s copy of the anthology Terror Tales of the Mediterranean and I’m really pleased with it. Lots of great writers are involved, and it’s part of a long-running series of horror stories edited by Paul Finch, and published by Telos.

My story takes place in a very long and impressive ancient tunnel, and I’m looking forward to finding out where the other stories are set. The book is published tomorrow, so if you’re in the mood for Halloween-suitable tales, I think this (or any of the excellent Terror Tales series) would fit the bill. There’s a deal on the website link above for those who want to buy a few from the collection.

Parsec in the hand

I’ve got my contributor copy of ParSec in Print! It’s very smart and shiny. I’m looking forward to checking out the other stories.

For those who contributed to the charity writing day to raise funds for Macmillan Cancer Support, I’m delighted to say we raised £2335. I had a vaguely strange idea of a starting point for my story, and it soon ballooned over the course of the writing day into over 4,000 words about metal people, palaces, loss, and a talking crocodile. If you backed the anthology but haven’t received a copy, give me a shout and I’ll send one along.

Finally, an apology – due to personal circumstances I’m no longer able to attend ComicCon this year. I was meant to be taking part in a panel about writing SF, but with Dan Coxon, Matt Hill and Una McCormack there I think people will get a huge trove of interesting info about that subject anyway. I hope the event goes well and I’m sad to miss it.

Netgalley Numbers

Three Eight One is now available on Netgalley. If you’re a reviewer and you’d like to give it a look, go along and request it, and I hope you enjoy this story of travel, adventure, small furry creatures, space flight, and breathing.