Aliya Whiteley's Blog, page 7

Three Eight One, covered

Cover reveal! Here it is:

It’s wild, and the more I look at it, the more I get sucked into it, and see things that relate to the book brilliantly. Thank you very much to Dominic Forbes, who also designed the cover for Skyward Inn.

Also an enormous thank you to the very talented writers who have been kind enough to read it and say lovely things about it already:

“A brain-charging voyage through the present and the future, a novel that shepherds the reader out and then brings her back in, changing her in the process. It’s like Kafka rewrote Pale Fire as a science-fictional novel. A Pilgrim’s Progress through a godless world where the pilgrim is Patrick McGoohan’s ‘Prisoner.’ A dream of a book, in several senses: enigmatic, marvellous, utterly original. Whiteley really is one of the most striking and brilliant writers working today.” — Adam Roberts

“There’s nothing like a new Aliya Whiteley novel, and no Aliya Whiteley novel is like any other. Three Eight One may be her most enigmatic work to date, a parable of maturation and the milestones of life that is at once mythical and down-to-earth. I adored every moment of it, and I found it overwhelming in its scope, honesty and emotional impact. It’s certainly one of the best novels I’ve read this year.” — Tim Major

“Masterfully written and rich with meaning, Three Eight One confirms Aliya Whiteley as one of our most ingenious — and important — storytellers. Travelling the Horned Road is a wild and unique experience: funny and thoughtful, frightening and joyful. I already want to go back.” — Matt Hill

“Three Eight One is an extraordinary offering from one of the UK’s greatest living writers of speculative fiction – blurring genres and playing with form to produce a gripping, exciting, poetic adventure.” – Oliver Langmead, author of Birds of Paradise and Metronome

“A hero’s journey stripped back to its essence, remixed with spaceships and conspiracies, masquerade and menace. Is it an allegory pretending to be an adventure story? An adventure masquerading as a secret history of the world? A new kind of wisdom literature for the digital age? Whatever it is I loved every second of it. Truly Aliya Whiteley is one of the most original and interesting writers in the field.” – Helen Marshall

“Like watching a magic trick happen… I’m going to be thinking about Three Eight One for a long time.”—Fiona Barnett, author of The Dark Between the Trees

“Three Eight One celebrates the art of storytelling with every clever twist and turn in this exquisitely crafted, beautifully realized voyage of discovery.” — E. J. Swift

“Slippery and whip-smart, this is a novel profoundly perceptive of the human condition. It has a disorienting ebb and flow – elegantly elusive and dream-like at times, while also being finely-tuned and precise. A mediation, perhaps, on the fallacies of history, and the futility of searching for meaning.” — Lucie McKnight Hardy

“Whiteley’s self-deconstructing quest narrative is a puzzle box full of delights, perils and strange wonders. Haunting.” — Mike Carey

I think advanced review copies might be available soon. The publication date is January 2024, but you can pre-order a copy here.

Dancing the Horned Road

It’s a beautiful September morning, and 2023 is beginning to wane. Here goes. Solaris will publish my new novel Three Eight One in January 2024, and I am so happy to be in their capable hands once more. Working on Skyward Inn with them was loads of fun, and I know they will do my new adventure proud.

Here’s a bit more information about Three Eight One:

In January 2314, Rowena Savalas – a curator of the vast archive of the twenty-first century’s primitive internet – stumbles upon a story posted in the summer of 2024. She’s quickly drawn into the mystery of the text: Is it autobiography, fantasy or fraud? What’s the significance of the recurring number 381?

In the story, the protagonist Fairly walks the Horned Road – a quest undertaken by youngsters in her village when they come of age. She is followed by the “breathing man,” a looming presence, dogging her heels every step of the way. Everything she was taught about her world is overturned.

Following Fairly’s quest, Rowena comes to question her own choices, and a predictable life of curation becomes one of exploration, adventure and love. As both women’s stories draw to a close, she realises it doesn’t matter whether the story is true or not: as with the quest itself, it’s the journey that matters.

It’s a weird one.

Solaris will also publish the book that comes after Three Eight One, which currently has at least three working titles and is about halfway done.

And…. Solaris will also rerelease the four titles that previously lived at Unsung Stories, starting with a ten year anniversary special edition of The Beauty next summer. I can’t believe it’s been a decade. What a decade. I mean, a lot happened. I’ll keep trying to process all the things that happened in the world, and crack on with this new novel, but I’ll also be celebrating today, and I would love it if you celebrated a little bit with me.

You can pre-order it here.

ParSecs and Peaches in Print

ParSec magazine has been around for a few years now, putting stories by a lot of great writers out there, so it’s a treat to have some of them collected together for this anthology ParSec in Print. It’ll be released properly at FantasyCon this year (which I’m gutted to say I won’t be able to make) so you can pick up a copy there or order it through PS Publishing here. My story from the second issue, Lovers on the Yuleton Lip, is a Christmas tale, so be prepared to think seasonal thoughts if you visit my weird elf land this Autumn.

Love the cover for that one.

Also – Peach Pit is published today! It’s had lots of great reviews and my unpleasant super-person origin story is in unbelievably good company. You can take a look here.

Writing the Future in London

Not long now until Writing the Future, a collection of non-fiction pieces about the business of writing science fiction, is published. It has a wonderful list of contributors, and I’m very happy to be one of them. My piece is about the role of research in SF creation.

I think there are a couple of launch events taking place, including one at FantasyCon and one coming up on 7th September at the Dead Ink bookshop. I’m really pleased to say I’ll be taking part in Comic Con in London this year – I’ll be there on Friday 27th October – to talk about Writing the Future with Matt Hill, Una McCormack, and editor Dan Coxon. I’ll be signing books at some point, too. I’m hugely looking forward to the conversation in such cool company.

Peach in the flesh

Look at my beautiful copy of Peach Pit!

It’s an anthology of short stories about morally grey women. I’m very pleased that my super-person origin story, called Composition, is in there. The book has had some great reviews already and it will be published in September.

Mediterranean Reading

I’ve got a new short story being published in an anthology of horror tales based in the Mediterranean, and the prompt for it was a bit of a gift: use a real location. I set my story in a place I’ve visited that has a fascinating and ancient scientific history (although I’m not going to tell you where!). Editor Paul Finch has a short extract from my story (called Meet in the Middle) up on his blog now, along with details of how to order.

Terror Tales is a long-running series and Telos publishing has a deal on their website to get a discount on three or more of the titles if you order them together. You can see the details here.

Reading the Eyeless

The strange coincidence of getting these two magazines through the post on the same day, then lining up their confrontational eyeless gazes on my sofa to take this photo, is bothering me a bit:

Brrrrr.

I have stories in Cloister Fox 3 and the final Black Static. Both stories are about the losing of possibilities.

Our bundle of green

If you fancy lots of weird British SF then this could well be the digital bundle bargain for you. Storybundle’s latest includes novels by great writers such as Adrian Tchaikovsky, Stark Holborn, Lavie Tidhar, Adam Roberts, and even EJ Swift’s The Coral Bones, which was one of my favourite reads of last year; it’s currently a shortlisted title for the upcoming Clarke Award. It’s very lovely to see the adventures of my space-travelling bio librarian Penelope Greensmith as one of the bargains, too – you can buy four books for as little as $5 and all ten from $20, I think, but you can check the details here. I’m proud of Greensmith, and the cover is magnificent. Here’s my cue to post it up yet again, just because I like it so much.

Another green thing – the Green Ink Sponsored Write for Macmillan Cancer Support takes place on 14 October 2023. There are a number of writers taking part, and we will write non-stop from 10.30am until 5.30pm to come up with a story relating to a prompt that will be supplied by Paul Tremblay. After that, the results will be collected into an anthology and sent out to all who are kind enough to sponsor us. I’m really looking forward to the challenge. Here’s the sponsorship page if you’re interested.

I just wanted to mention an open submission period that’s coming up for a very interesting anthology based on the novel We by Evgeny Zamyatin. Submissions will be accepted in October, so that gives people plenty of time to get something down on paper, and I think it might make for an exciting collection. In the meantime, I think I’ll give We a reread. October seems far away, but something tells me I’ll blink and –

Happy/Sad Unsong

This morning my long-time publisher Unsung Stories announced they are coming to an end in the summer. There’s a press release that goes into the reasons for that.

I can’t just feel incredibly, selfishly sad about this loss; I’m keeping in mind my sheer joy and gratitude, shared with all of their writers, at having been published by Unsung, so well, with such care and dedication. I hope many more people keep starting and running small presses, and finding new writers who need weird-shaped homes for their weird-shaped thoughts. Being found in that way has been a hugely good thing in my life.

In the meantime, the four books of mine that Unsung published – The Beauty, The Arrival of Missives, The Loosening Skin, and Greensmith, are available at very low prices from the Unsung Store in order for the warehouse stock to be cleared. You can even get a bundle of all four of my books for £10. Please do take a look and see if there’s anything there out of my titles, or the other wonderful titles that they have published over the last ten years, that you’d like to read.

Hiding in the Cloisters

Good grief, time has gone past. I’ve been working on a lot of different projects which have yet to get to the point where I can start shouting about them, and I would really love to shout. But while I’m still mainly in stealth mode, I’ll deactivate my cloaking device and peer out from behind the pillar to say: the next edition of beautiful weird fiction magazine Cloister Fox is soon going to press, and I have a story in it. The theme of the issue is The Ruins, and looking at the other authors involved, I’m very keen to read their offerings.

You can pre-order a copy through Etsy here, and I recommend the first two editions, too, if you haven’t come across it before. It should be out in the world by July.

I’ve got short stories coming up in Black Static and the Peach Pit anthology from Dzanc Books later in the year, and articles in Writing the Future, from Dead Ink, and in Interzone magazine. And I’ve been working away on my Small Objects project: this year I’m writing one piece of flash fiction per week, with an accompanying photo of some small thing that’s caught my attention. It’s here on the blog (click on the title at the top of the page) if you want to take a look at the latest piece, which is another small item: a tiny homage to one of my favourite writers.

Hopefully I’ll have more news to post soon.