(Newcon Press 2025)
The new novella by 2025 BSFA award-winner Aliya Whiteley is expertly written – it’s a pastiche of those mid-century country house novels married to a couple of pulpy genre plots, and it all fits together really well. There’s not a moment wasted here. While her Three-Eight-One still puzzles me, it’s the kind of puzzle I want to solve rather than abandon. At first I found The Creator to be slight, but then I realised that it has a well-developed allegorical thread too – one that I’ll try not to spoil.
The Creator is set some time between the wars. The affluent still have servants, gentlemen’s clubs, and country houses. There are two brothers: Phillip is an artist and Reynold is a scientist. Reynold is successful but obsessed with his work. He has made his name but is disappointed with success, neglecting his wife and child, seeking something new – a new project, a new creation. Phillip is a struggling minor artist plagued by headaches, which, it is implied, are due to the war.
The pairing and doubling come thick and fast after that, pitching the two brothers against each other in temperament and philosophy. It’s a murder mystery, but it’s also a pitfalls-of-obsession-and-science story, two genres at once. There’s even a wry nod to The Fly.
What it comes down to is an exploration in fiction of the debate between the arts and the sciences, and the nature of creative practice – there’s a lovely moment where Reynold’s wife, Patricia, talks about the hard work that goes into becoming good at crafts.
“If you started now, Reynold, and sculpted every day with your own two hands for many years, could you not learn how to make something marvellous, and feel a huge sense of achievement because of it?”
There are no shortcuts to creation, we learn – and attempting shortcuts has monstrous, tragic results.
Without spoiling the ending – which is fabulous – I want to note that by the conclusion, Phillip has become a better artist, because good art needs both lived experience and hard dedication to the craft. It’s a nicely worked-out metaphor that could apply to the current debates around using Large Language Models and AI. I’ll say no more – go read it.
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