The Skyward Inn was not always so called, but it is nonetheless flourishing. Under the management of Jemima and Isley it has become the hub of a small rural community, the place where people drink and socialise at the end of a working day, the place where meetings are conducted, business disputes are settled, community issues resolved. The locally brewed beverage it has become renowned for seems to have a particular way of drawing people together and if some of the villagers were suspicious of newcomer Isley when he first arrived, he is now accepted as part of the scene.
The lives of Jem and Isley are not as settled as they might appear on the surface, however. Jem is locked in an unspoken conflict with her brother Dominic over the rightful custody of her son, Fosse, born as the result of a brief liaison when Jem was still a teenager. As the villagers argue amongst themselves over whether an immigrant family should be allowed to take over the running of an abandoned farm, Dom feels increasingly concerned about balancing brute economics with the values of family, community and land that have sustained the locals through multiple generations. As the newest member of the community, Isley strives to be accepted even while struggling with the feelings of displacement and alienation that inevitably come with trying to make one’s way in a new environment. And for Isley, everything is new. An alien from a distant planet, he is literally not of this world.
The world of Whiteley’s novel is both futuristic and retrograde. A wormhole in space – known colloquially as ‘the kissing gate’ – has allowed the development of insterstellar travel and more specifically the exploration of a superficially Earthlike planet rich with resources, barely understood but almost certainly lucrative. Rather than risking invasion and possible destruction, the peaceful Qitans have opened their world to the human colonisers, who rapidly establish a trading outpost and dispatch teams of prospectors. A small number of Qitans – like Isley – have travelled in the opposite direction and settled on Earth.
In this possible future, Britain has fragmented. The larger part has joined the Consolidation, a federation of nations and peoples united in their desire for progress and alien trade. The West Country, already split off from the rest of the UK as the result of climate change, has followed an isolationist route. In the Protectorate, the population follow stubbornly in the footsteps of their forefathers. Travel to and from the Consolidation is severely restricted, new technology is spurned, and the region scrapes its living from selling the crafts, raw materials and organic produce for which it is still famous.
Is this Whiteley’s Brexit novel? Certainly it would be difficult for any British reader to read the first half of Skyward Inn especially and not remember comments made by Tory MP Andrea Leadsom in the wake of the 2016 referendum about how Britain was going to sustain itself on profits from home-made jam and Aberdeen Angus, or something. Seen through the clarifying lens of science fiction, the determination of the Protectorate to keep itself separate, Jem and Dom’s parents’ retreat to a gated community on a UKIP version of Lundy Island, the stubborn determination to ‘muddle through’ – these things appear wrongheaded rather than redoubtable, a wilful rejection of progressive attitudes and sustainable modes of living in favour of nostalgia and with inevitable shortages of medicines and essential services as a result. Working people are barely muddling through, if at all, and without an influx of new arrivals, communities are atrophying. Farm buildings are standing empty, fertile land is lying fallow with no one to farm it. Rather than bucolic utopia, the Protectorate is a lonely place, depleted and depressed. There is a feeling, above all, of things running down.
Yet Whiteley’s novel is too subtle, too multifaceted to fall into polemic. Skyward Inn highlights issues faced by England’s rural communities anyway, even without Brexit or alien incursion. Jem’s son Fosse has been born and raised in the Protectorate and understands both its uniqueness and its vulnerability. He is dismissive of attempts to recreate the region’s unique character in artificial simulations – he recognises these at a gut level for the rose-tinted idealisations they are – yet unlike older members of the community, he recognises the necessity of change, of building bridges with other communities and individuals, and it is from his perspective that we get to experience the strangeness and the beauty of an alien world.
In her previous works, Whiteley has been resourceful and imaginative in portraying the social, geographical and political dynamics of communities, both on a wider scale and in close-focus observation of individual and family relationships within them. Skyward Inn returns to this subject area with even greater power and precision, exploring the future-possible while remaining critically attentive – like all the best science fiction – of the here and now. Her descriptive writing is as clear-eyed and boldly evocative as ever, not just in summoning the West Country landscapes she knows so well but in the creation of alien sights and concepts that bring to the final third of this exceptional novel that edge of surrealism and the uncanny that mark Whiteley as one of the most original and provocative voices in contemporary science fiction.
The concept of the hive-mind, or ‘monoculture’, as Whiteley puts it, is not new in SF. We can point to the slave-minds familiar from The Matrix and from the Borg in Star Trek as illustration of the more destructive attributes of shared consciousness, but the benificent ‘children’ of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End and the intimate culture based around shared speech patterns as detailed in China Mieville’s Embassytown provide more progressive templates. Indeed, science fiction’s obsession with this particular trope in both its positive and negative permutations would seem to indicate that the subjects it embodies – individuality versus collectivism, loss of privacy and its impact on societies as well as individuals – have been of continuing and increasing interest to us as readers and as writers, through the dawn of mass media and into the digital age. If Whiteley’s novel has a core theme, it is communication – not only how we interact with one another at street level but how the collective imagination might be broadened to accommodate the perspective and worldview of those who think differently. The way she will happily use a small group of people as a kind of literary petri dish in which to work through the implications of an idea shows a creative approach to science fiction that put me immediately in mind of Ursula Le Guin.
Most of all, it is Whiteley’s ability to mingle the marvellous with the quotidian that makes her work special. Like Peter’s sojourn on the alien planet in Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, Jem’s leap into the unknown in Skyward Inn is believable to us at least in part because the world she leaves behind is so intensely familiar. No matter how far we travel in Whiteley’s company, we never lose faith that the incredible sights she shows us are on some level real, and that they matter intensely.