In her most recent novella, Greensmith, Whiteley once again delivers a compelling and plausible future world alongside disquieting horror, but she also adds a new weapon to her arsenal: humor. It is the horror of the loss of self, of loneliness, and of realizing that the world is more dangerous and cruel than you had been raised to believe. At the same time, the horror in Whiteley’s stories runs deeper than mere disgust. Her stories are characterized by finely-honed worlds and thought-through counterfactuals, but also by viscerally disturbing body horror-the fungal women and the effect they have on the men who take them for wives in The Beauty (2014) the alien rock fused with a shell-shocked soldier’s body in Missives the layers of skin sloughing off the characters in The Loosening Skin (2018). In addition, she is an author whose work tends to straddle, with an expert control of tone and imagery, the divide between science fiction and horror. Clarke award: The Arrival of Missives, 2015). She is, for example, unusual in having made a name for herself while writing almost exclusively at the novella length (including the first novella ever shortlisted for the Arthur C. In a short but already quite storied career, Aliya Whiteley has distinguished herself in several ways.
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