Jan 08 2026
Jamie lives in a city of perpetual winter. Snow and ice blanket the island of Fairharbour, where he survives by scavenging for materials that he can use to make pretty trinkets he can subsequently trade for food and fuel. But when he puts together a kaleidoscope and tests it out, he catches an impossible glimpse …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/01/08/city-of-all-seasons-by-oliver-k-langmead-aliya-whiteley/
Sep 17 2021
Bluntly, I don’t know anyone working in speculative fiction today who consistently writes such disturbingly weird shit. But not like in a gratuitous way. Aliya Whiteley doesn’t want to shock you, necessarily, but she is unafraid to plumb into the deeper, uglier parts of the human psyche to examine the monstrous and strange, to ponder …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/17/from-the-neck-up-by-aliya-whiteley/
Mar 19 2021
The most rational part of my brain understands exactly what I’ve just experienced with this book, but every other part of me, the emotional, the lizard brain, the higher consciousness etc. is absolutely 100% going, “What the fuck did I just read?!” and not in a bad way either. Inspired by Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/03/19/skyward-inn-by-aliya-whiteley/
Feb 25 2021
I first read this novella over two years ago, courtesy of the lovely people at Unsung Stories, one of the finest British independent purveyors of weird fiction today. I very much enjoyed it at the time, so when Titan Books told me they were publishing it for the first time in America, I leapt at …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/25/the-loosening-skin-by-aliya-whiteley-2/
Oct 12 2020
Bear with me for a moment while I serve up a relevant anecdote here. When I was 8 years old, on a layover in London, I climbed the stairs of the narrow house of the auntie who was hosting my mother and me, and turned on the TV in the bedroom. I was fresh out …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/10/12/greensmith-by-aliya-whiteley/
Dec 12 2018
I did not love this nearly as much as the book that first introduced Aliya Whiteley’s genius to me (The Arrival Of Missives — go pick it up, it’s amazing,) but it was still an incredibly deep and powerful meditation on an important aspect of the human condition, examined through a sci-fi what-if filter. In …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/12/12/the-loosening-skin-by-aliya-whiteley/
Nov 08 2018
Q: Every book has its own story about how it came to be conceived and written as it did. How did The Arrival Of Missives evolve? A: It started with the voice of my main character, Shirley, and grew entirely from there. I loved her straight away; she’s a teenager who is both naïve and …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/11/08/an-interview-with-aliya-whiteley-author-of-the-arrival-of-missives/
Nov 06 2018
This is a volume that is dead set on subverting our expectations of science fiction, and succeeds at that goal brilliantly. Packaged together with the short story The Last Voyage Of The Smiling Henry, the title novel (I know that some might argue that its 133-page length renders it more of a novella, but I, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/11/06/the-arrival-of-missives-by-aliya-whiteley/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire