Nina Allan - The Silver Wind

the
SILVER WIND

Praise for The Dollmaker:

A fantastic book, revealing a zone of wonder and a world of truth
Andrew OHagan, author of The Illuminations

Elegant, beautiful and subtly scary
Daniel Kehlmann, author of Measuring the World

Mesmerising, richly layered and wholly original worthy of a
modern Grimm Andrew Caldecott, author of Rotherweird

A masterful and multi-layered haunted toyshop of a novel
Tony White, author of The Fountain in the Forest

Beautifully written and deeply strange
Leaf Arbuthnot, Sunday Times

Unsettling, intricately constructed and teasingly elliptical
Stephanie Cross, Daily Mail

Praise for The Rift :

Beautifully told, absorbing and eerie in the best way
Yoon Ha Lee, author of Ninefox Gambit

It leaves the reader looking at the world anew. Dizzying stuff
Anne Charnock, author of Dreams Before the Start of Time

A lyrical, moving story The Guardian

Moving, subtle, and ambiguous Booklist

A wrenching read, offering a missing person story with more depth
and emotion than the plot normally allows Barnes & Noble SFF blog

One thing you wont find in this brilliantly ambiguous book is the
truth, but so long as you dont read it expecting a definitive explanation, you
definitely wont be disappointed Tor.com

Praise for The Race :

A unique and fascinating near-future ecological SF novel. Buy it!
Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Annihilation trilogy

Literate, intelligent, gorgeously human
Alastair Reynolds, author of Revelation Space

An ingenious puzzle-box of a narrative that works both as a haunting
family saga and as a vivid picture of a future worth avoiding
Chicago Tribune

Enticingly mysterious... akin to the best alternative history fiction
Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

A novel of tender nuances, brutality, insight and great ambition
Tor.com

Also available from Nina Allan:

the RACE

the RIFT

the DOLLMAKER

the
SILVER
WIND

NINA ALLAN

TITAN BOOKS

To Peter

The Silver Wind

Print edition ISBN: 9781789091694

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789091700

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: September 2019

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Nina Allan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Copyright 2019 Nina Allan. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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AUTHORS FOREWORD

It is now more than ten years since I first found myself writing about a character named Martin Newland. Martin originally turned up in Darkroom, which was commissioned for an anthology of slipstream stories entitled Subtle Edens. He wasnt even real at the time he was a figment of another characters imagination though rereading that story now I can still see why Martin kept pestering me, insisting that there was more to his walk-on role than Id given him credit for.

There are a lot of things I would change about Darkroom, were I to imagine it again from the beginning, but Martin Newland would not be one of them. Though it hardly seems fair on the other characters to say so, the most interesting thing about Darkroom is the way it relates to the stories that came after it. My own shorthand for these is the Martin stories, which together make up the book you are holding, The Silver Wind.

The original incarnation of this book took me four years to write. Longer than might reasonably have been expected, given the volumes relatively small number of pages, though as must be the case with most fiction, the book that eventually appeared represented only a fraction of the material that had been written, the work that had been going on behind the scenes. What I was battling with through those years was not so much how the story should go as what narrative should be. Then, as now, I found the concept of straightforward linear storytelling difficult to justify. The novel is a uniquely flexible, perennially interesting art form, both as a means of self-expression and as a forum in which broader questions of reality and experience can and should be asked. As such, it seems normal and desirable to me that the form the novel takes should itself be interesting and flexible.

As both reader and writer, I want a novel to do more than simply tell a story. The practical application of such an ambition still forms most of the ongoing drama of my working practice. As the writer I was then, in 2008, it felt like trying to stuff an inflated balloon through a letterbox without it bursting. Although I instinctively knew what I wanted, the technicalities involved in achieving it were more long-winded.

* * *

In short, I wrote a lot of stuff about Martin, and not all of it worked in the context I was providing. There was a long-running story strand devoted to his battle with the rat-catcher in Darkroom, for example I still have an abnormal number of books on rats and the Black Death to prove it. But while there is still mileage in those ideas Harry Phelps was a great character, and rats are fascinating creatures I had in the end to accept that this wasnt their story. The book I eventually settled on contained the essence of the ideas I had been playing with about the unreliability of time when applied to memory, about sibling relationships and our own relationship with the past and future, about my personal love for H. G. Wellss novel The Time Machine, about the ordinary miracles of mechanical engineering, and of course about narratives natural tendency towards the non-linear but even at the time of publication I felt painfully aware that the text as it existed was not complete.

There were stories that did belong, but were not present, simply because of my technical difficulty then in making them come out the way I wanted. At the heart of that dissatisfaction lay the story of Owen Andrewss apprenticeship in Southwark, a segment of narrative that formed much of the logistical and emotional underpinning of what came later but that I could never seem to resolve in a manner that felt in keeping with the story as a whole. When I was asked if I might write a new Martin story to celebrate the publication of this new edition, it was Owen Andrewss missing pages that leapt immediately to mind, and I am delighted to present them completely reworked for the first time here.

Also present is the story Ten Days, a straight-up Silver Wind story I wrote for the NewCon Press anniversary anthology