Blog Tour Guest Post: How DH Lawrence Shaped my Sci-Fi Life by Aliya Whiteley

I’m thrilled to be part of the Titan Books blog tour for The Arrival of Missives by Aliya Whiteley. I’ve already had the pleasure of reading this book in an earlier edition a couple of years ago, and I’m very excited to see it getting not only a shiny new cover, but a second chance at finding a new audience. Today, Aliya is taking over the blog with a guest post about, well, let’s just let her tell us in her own words, shall we? Welcome, Aliya!

---

How DH Lawrence Shaped my Sci-Fi Life

By Aliya Whiteley

I first came across DH Lawrence’s writing at school. We were studying The Rainbow, and I had to admit that I took one look at the cover and decided it wasn’t going to be for me. It looked very boring, and very old, and I was sixteen years old and thought I already knew everything I would ever like and dislike. The young can be sure about things in that way.

Then I started to read it. It was about Ursula Brangwen, a young woman who also had a lot of opinions about life and the future. She was pretty easy for me to relate to. She wasn’t boring. She ended up in a relationship with a man who had his own strong opinions about their future. The tension between them fizzed and seethed on the page. This wasn’t romance. This was anger, and fear, and the will to try to control events in a time when a woman’s right to shape her own destiny was denied.

So, yes, I fell in love with The Rainbow, and I would name it as one of my favourite books for years, if anybody asked me. But I thought of it as separate from my usual tastes, which included Frank Herbert and Ray Bradbury. I considered myself to be a lover of science fiction first and foremost, and when I began to take the business of being a writer seriously I decided to write genre fiction.

Genre interested me, with its rules and predictabilities that could be twisted in strange ways. I wrote crime, horror and science fiction, of course, and then I mashed them all together and started to write books that used elements from all of those genres. I was finding my own path; it never occurred to me that I knew how to be brave because I had learned from the example of heroines like Ursula.

Then I sat down one day, not long ago, with a blank piece of paper and a pen and started writing a new story. The voice that emerged was of a young woman who reminded me a bit of me and a bit of Ursula. She had a lot of opinions that, from my well-worn perspective, had charm and naiveté as well as determination.

It’s strange how we re-evaluate ourselves as we age, even though the events we lived through remain the same. We feel we’ve moved from being that young person, while also acknowledging that we haven’t really changed that much at all. How can that be? Life never felt like walking a path, but when we turn around there it is, laid out, leading back to the beginning so clearly.

So I looked back to the beginning and remembered Ursula, and my own thoughts and feelings from my teenage years, to create my main character in The Arrival of Missives. She, too, is headstrong and certain of herself. She is in love with a man who has his own vision of the future, and she must fight to preserve her own ideas. This is historical fiction, and science fiction. It’s a puzzle and a war and a love letter to being young and brave, and looking back at the past – and at the work of great writers like DH Lawrence – to find the future in our own way.

---

The Arrival of Missives is a genre-defying story of fate, free-will and the choices we make in life. In the aftermath of the Great War, Shirley Fearn dreams of challenging the conventions of rural England, where life is as predictable as the changing of the seasons.

The scarred veteran Mr. Tiller, left disfigured by an impossible accident on the battlefields of France, brings with him a message: part prophecy, part warning. Will it prevent her mastering her own destiny?

As the village prepares for the annual May Day celebrations, where a new queen will be crowned and the future will be reborn again, Shirley must choose: change or renewal?

Find the book: Goodreads | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | The Book Depository

Read my review here!

---

ALIYA WHITELEY was born in Devon in 1974, and currently lives in West Sussex, UK. She writes novels, short stories and non-fiction and has been published in places such as The Guardian, Interzone, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Black Static, Strange Horizons, and anthologies such as Unsung Stories’ 2084 and Lonely Planet’s Better than Fiction I and II. She has been shortlisted for a Shirley Jackson Award, British Fantasy and British Science Fiction awards, the John W Campbell Award, and a James Tiptree Jr award. Her stories are unpredictable; they can be terrifying, tender, ferocious and deeply funny. She also regularly reviews film, books and television for Den of Geek.  She blogs at: aliyawhiteley.wordpress.com  and she tweets most days as @AliyaWhiteley.