The book's title was derived from the following quote by Ernest Shackleton, which Wilkes includes at the beginning of the novel: Men go out into the void spaces of the world for various reasons.

Some are actuated simply by a love of adventure, some have the keen thirst for scientific knowledge, and others again are drawn away from the trodden paths by the “lure of little voices,” the mysterious fascination of the unknown.All the White Spaces was nominated for the 2022 Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel.

Wilkes stated that All the White Spaces is set in an alternate history to the one in which Ernest Shackleton and others explored Antarctica in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

[4] But after reading a statement Fergus Fleming wrote in his introduction to the 2004 edition of Shackleton's South, that "the concept of heroism evaporated in the trenches of the First World War,"[5] Wilkes "immediately knew [she] wanted to tackle a post-WW1 Antarctic story".

She explained that he is "trapped by his assigned gender", and when an opportunity presents itself to join Randall's expedition to Antarctica and its male-dominated world of "hero-worship and grave peril", he seizes it.

"[7] A reviewer in Publishers Weekly described All the White Spaces as "a gripping narrative that is [an] explorer’s yarn, [a] trans man’s coming-of-age story, and a tale of a survivor grappling with horrors that defy definition.

"[8] In a review at the British Fantasy Society, Sarah Deeming wrote that "Wilkes has created the perfect environment for a truly spine chilling yarn.

Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Lowell Duckert described All the White Spaces as "a trip into an abyss limned by the sublime and Gothic" with "a phantasmic shapeshifter who preys upon its victim’s deepest emotions".

[11] But he added that another of the book's horrors is Randall's "heroic masculinity" that demands "scripted gender roles meant to display strength, grit, and honor" from his crew.

[11] Lowell said that Jonathan, the book's narrator, is Wilkes' "most significant contribution" to Antarctic literature: "The habitual depiction of cisgender men on ice propels a macho feedback loop, which, in turn, promotes this pattern of risky behavior as the norm.