Aliya Whiteley's Blog, page 9

Paperback fungi

It’s publication day for The Secret Life of Fungi in paperback, and I want to say a humongous thank you to everyone who’s been reading it or reviewing it. I hope it’s inspiring people to take a look around and find fungi this autumnal season – I’ve spotted a few myself on my morning walks with the dog, and have been taking my usual blurry photos of them. Here’s one that’s not too bad:

mushrooms!

As ever, I remain terrible at identifying them, but they were a welcome sight on a slightly chilly morning, with that first bite of autumn in the air.

Speaking of humongous things, I was checking some fungal facts and discovered that since I wrote the book there’s now a new largest organism on this planet. It’s no longer the humongous fungus in Oregon. The title now belongs to a seagrass off the coast of Western Australia, claiming the Guinness Book of Records title. Everything changes. The seasons, the fungi underneath (or growing on) our feet, the facts and figures we think we know. Is there any such thing as solid ground? Maybe not, but at least it can erupt into the most interesting things. I’l keep looking.

The paperback cover of The Secret Life of Fungi

Bundled

I’ve been bundled.

Thanks to Lavie Tidhar for including Skyward Inn as part of a set of dark SF he has curated for StoryBundle. For the next seventeen days or so you can buy up to ten titles of deep, dark SF dives. You pay what you can afford, and a portion of every payment goes to charity.

Here’s a picture of all ten books lined up together, with their wonderful covers on display:

The Dark SF Bundle

Secret paperback life

Not long to go for the release of the UK paperback of The Secret Life of Fungi – that’s scheduled for September 2022 and I think it’s available on Netgalley now for reviewers. I love the new cover. Here it is:

Thanks to Alice Tarbuck for the cover quote, and thanks to everyone who has already read it. Here’s hoping it reaches a new audience just in time for mushroom season.

Clarke company

The shortlist for the 2022 Arthur C. Clarke award is out! Here it is:

Deep Wheel Orcadia  – Harry Josephine Giles (Picador) Klara and the Sun  – Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber & Faber) A Desolation Called Peace  – Arkady Martine (Tor UK) A River Called Time  – Courttia Newland (Canongate) Wergen: The Alien Love War  – Mercurio D. Rivera (NewCon Press) Skyward Inn  – Aliya Whiteley (Solaris)

Yep, there’s my book, in fantastic company. A huge THANK YOU to the judges and the organisers. It is absolutely mind-blowing to think of people finding my book through that list, and giving it a try – or any of the great books there. Here’s to reading new things, and thinking new thoughts.

Details about the award, including the upcoming ceremony in October, can be found here.

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Best sea fungus table

Last year Shoreline of Infinity published a short story of mine about alien invasion, camouflage, and theme parks. I do love a theme park.

I’m really pleased to say that story, More Sea Creatures to See, will be making an appearance once more in NewCon Press’ Best Of British SF 2021, along with an ocean of wonderful stories. You can see the line-up and pre-order here.

Best of British SF 2021

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On the fungal front, the UK paperback release of The Secret Life of Fungi is lined up for September 2022, so I should have a cover to show you shortly. Watch this space. It’ll pop up on the blog, out of nowhere, like a fruiting body. September’s a great time of year for that.

But onwards with summer – I will be taking part in a round table discussion about communication in science fiction at the CRSF annual conference, along with some hugely exciting writers. That’ll be on Friday 1st July, but there’s a host of good stuff going on on all the days. Please do have a look and sign up here.

Weird Workshop

This is a bit of a departure for me. I’m excited to say I’m going to teach a workshop in writing my kind of strange stories. The National Centre for Writing will be hosting me, and it will be held online, conducted via Zoom, on the morning of Saturday 6th August. If you’d like to spend a couple of hours working on whizzing up genres in a blender – complete with writing exercises and lots of very enthusiastic feedback on my part – then please do sign up.

Here’s the link and the details. Hope to see you there. I’m aiming for gentle genre-squelching fun.

Trades and Pearls

It’s a big thrill to be able to say I’ve got a story in the latest edition of Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine. It’s called ‘Cold Trade’ and it’s about a small group of aliens trying to make first contact with a very different sort of life form for trading purposes. I loved writing it, and I love that it found such a brilliant place to be published.

Here’s the cover for the May/June 2022 issue. (My name! On the cover! Whooped with delight when I saw it!)

The cover of F&SF May/Jun 2022

I’ve been having a good run with short stories recently. I had some lovely feedback for ‘Knotlings’ in The Dark recently, and my 2020 story from the NewCon Press anthology London Centric will be republished in Prime Books’ Year’s Best Fantasy and Science Fiction anthology. It’s called ‘Fog and Pearls at the King’s Cross Junction’. Editor Rich Horton posted a list on his website of all the stories that will be appearing – click here if you want to take a look. I’ll put up more details here later.

It’s very good to see these strange stories out in the world. I’ll go write some more.

Knotted up in the Dark

This is shaping up to be a busy year for short story writing, and I’ve been working away on a few new ones. This month I’m really pleased to be back in The Dark with a story called Knotlings. It’s about a mother who teaches her son how to deal with a specific problem they share, but struggles when his solutions begin to differ from her own. There’s a very good audio version also available at the site – thanks to all at The Dark for that.

Wonderful cover for the latest edition of The Dark

Other stories in this edition are by Ai Jiang, Steve Rasnic Tem, and Jack Klausner, so it’s all well worth checking out. Meanwhile, it’s April! Everything is growing. Things are sliding up through the soil, and hiding in the thickening hedges. It’s magical. Happy April.

News about the Inn

I’m thrilled that Skyward Inn has made the shortlist for Best Novel in the 2021 British Science Fiction Association awards! That means I get to show off this badge:

BSFA Finalist badge!

BSFA members can vote via the website here. I’m in wonderful company and very pleased to be there. Thanks to everyone who votes or has voted, and to the BSFA.

I’ll just add that I recently chatted about Skyward Inn to Rosie Peat, host of the Rebellion Book Club. We went off-topic a bit once or twice because it turned out we shared a favourite book and other such things, but it was a really fun discussion and it will be up on the website tomorrow (2 March). I think you can get a discount code for the book in the podcast.

Rich and growing skies

Phew to getting through a long January, and February gets a great start for me with a reappearance in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. My new story Rich Growth will be in the February issue (349) which is a science-fantasy crossover extravaganza featuring Yoon Ha Lee, Jason Sanford and Ted S. Bushman. The small extracts for them all are intriguing.

Rich Growth is one of my plant-based stories, and looking at the extracts of the other stories, I’d guess there’s an organic growth theme to most of them.

There’s a sense of deja vu about this, as the last time I was in BCS was for science-fantasy issue 298, which also featured a great story by Yoon Ha Lee called The Mermaid Astronaut. It was a finalist for the Hugo awards that year. My own story in that issue, The Spoils, went on to be the last story in my collection From the Neck Up. So here’s hoping being back in such good company brings us all luck for the rest of this year.