Aliya Whiteley's Reading List

"It’s about a prison planet in the far, far future, when humanity has started traveling through the stars. This planet is one of the worst places you could possibly imagine. It’s a planet where humans start to grow extra limbs and organs, and those are then surgically removed from them and sent back via a donor process for organ transplantation. It is absolutely horrible. It’s really the first time I can remember coming across sci-fi body horror, and I was fascinated. I would have been a late teenager when I read this story in an anthology. It stopped me in my tracks. Cordwainer Smith is one of those writers who creates an amazing universe that’s incredibly vivid to the reader. He’s so imaginative. The idea of these extra fingers, toes, heads, limbs, and organs emerging from people in this terrible prison environment—I never forgot it. That’s why I chose this story. “If you’re going to read all five of these books at once, make sure you take regular breaks!” The strange thing is that when I first came across it in an anthology, I didn’t pay attention to who had written it. For many years, I’ve thought about it quite regularly as this example of something I found really upsetting and was entranced by: a nightmare of the future. When you contacted me and asked me about the best science fiction horror writing, I thought: I would love to choose that story, but I can’t—I never found out who wrote it. But I asked around online, and somebody pointed me in the direction of Cordwainer Smith. It’s been only about two weeks that I’ve known the name of the story again. It’s been a lovely reconnection."

"I think this is the most scientifically based of the five stories that I’ve picked. It’s very much in the tradition of Frankenstein , in that some of the book is taken up with the story of a scientist who’s pushing the boundaries of morality and experimenting with using the body in new and strange ways, but this time on a cellular level. The first third of the book is connected to his journey. Then, we witness the effects of what he has unleashed and the way humanity is changed by what he’s done. I wouldn’t want to spoil it by giving too much away, but I remember reading it and being so fascinated by this vision of complete change for humanity and for the planet. It goes to some very surprising places. The book was released in 1985, and we’re dealing with a scientist who’s working on the cusp of areas of exploration at that time. When Frankenstein was released, galvanism and the exploration of electricity through the body were at the forefront of experimentation. I wonder if Greg Bear was dealing with an area of cellular exploration that was popular at the time. He expands on themes of ‘what’s at the boundary of modern science understanding, and what could that lead to?’ Similarly, at the moment, we’re seeing some brilliant science fiction being written that addresses climate change . Quite often, whatever we feel is at the vanguard of what we’re trying to understand or deal with, as a problem or as an area of exploration, bleeds into the science fiction that’s being written."

"Octavia Butler is one of my favourite writers. She’s had a huge influence on me. She writes about humanity and what it would have to offer to other species, to other ways of living, and what we’re prepared to trade to make a deal within ourselves or with other civilizations, if we ever met them. She’s very interested in the cost of trying to live together in harmony. Bloodchild is a novella. It imagines a future in which humanity is traveling through the stars and has ended up on a planet where other aliens are living. Part of the trade to live peacefully with them is that humans let the aliens implant their eggs in our bodies. It’s sensitively written and incredibly thoughtful about what that might mean and whether we’d be capable of doing that. At the same time, it’s stomach-churning to read some of the descriptions. It’s upsetting stuff, but it’s amazing, in terms of intelligently asking: What are we capable of trading? What are we capable of giving away about ourselves and what would we most want to protect about ourselves? Absolutely, and she never suggests that there would be a straightforward solution or that everybody would feel comfortable. Everybody, including the aliens, has their own thoughts and feelings about these intermingled and cooperative ways of life and how that’s going to play out. It’s never simplistic, and I love that about her work. Butler was an amazingly dedicated person. She was determined to write science fiction and to write what she wanted to write, at a time when that was very difficult to do for her. What’s good about this collection, about Bloodchild and the other short stories, is that you get a little bit of her own voice at the end, where she describes why she wrote those stories and what they mean to her. There’s even a little bit at the back of the book about her personal writing methods, which is really interesting to read. As I said, I just think she’s amazing."

"It’s a book that’s set on Earth—right now, I would say—and it’s imagining that the aliens are already here but have been surgically altered to look like us. On their home planet, they look a bit more like sheep, so they feel that they have more of a bond to sheep than they do to us. And they bring their preconceptions to our world, about how we can’t be very intelligent or important because we’re hairless, two-legged weirdos. It’s a brilliant reflection of our preconceptions about bodies, and what we think other forms of life may be capable of or how important we think they are, in terms of whether or not they look like us. The novel is written from the point of view of an alien who has a particular job to do, which involves rounding up humans (while trying to fly under the radar and go unnoticed), and then processing them for a particular use back on her home planet. It’s about her struggle to decide whether humans have thoughts and feelings, and if we’re worth trying to save in any way at all. Yes. I really love the way Faber uses language in the book to do this: the alien refers to people of her own kind as human , and to us as animals . It’s just a great reflection within the language of how they think; it’s so beautifully written throughout. There is a film adaptation, which I really like, but it doesn’t go into why the alien is collecting these lonely hitchhiking humans. The book goes into much more depth that brings it into the category of sci-fi body horror for me. What possible use could we be to them if we’re considered such a lesser form of life? It’s quite hard to take in its final pages, but it opens your mind so well to looking at the situation in a different way. Challenging our preconceptions of what otherness looks like, of how it might act, is a big part of my own work. I’ve imagined aliens in all sorts of ways. If you make them like us, a mirror of us, that raises its own questions. If you make them very different, as in Butler’s Bloodchild , where they’re giant insects, then that’s a new level of repulsion that the reader has to deal with. It’s a question of deciding to what extent you want the reader to feel connected to or separate from those beings, and then, how you can play with the distance you have from them. Three Eight One is a fantasy adventure. A young woman has to embark on a quest and discover herself, and some very strange, weird things happen on the way. That’s what usually happens in my books, so it’s no different in that regard. But this was an attempt to try something quite different: all the sections of the book are 381 words long. I really enjoyed it. I was surprised that it started to come naturally to me at some point. I would just read the word count at the end of each section and think, ‘Oh, I’m about right.’ It was loads of fun to do."