The Art of Space Travel by Nina Allan

(Titan Books, 2021)

Reviewed by Paul Graham Raven

Some day in the not-too-distant future, a scholarly monologue will pick up the gauntlet which Nina Allan offers in her introduction to The Art of Space Travel, where she mentions the unreliability of memory as a thematic of her work, and a sort of counter-motivation for her being a writer at all. I have neither the word-count nor the talent to do so here, which is one reason that I’m going to talk about these short stories in terms of estrangement.

Now, come along, no eye-rolling at the back of the room! Yes, yes, the critical cliché that is Suvinian estrangement is the move of making the strange ordinary—but there’s also a mirror-version (more common to horror and “weird” fiction, perhaps?) of making the ordinary strange. Running both algorithms simultaneously seems to be Allan’s program: hence very ordinary people living very humdrum lives in worlds that just happen to have fairies (albeit ones that Conan Doyle would have found unphotogenic) or regenerative shapeshifters who take human form (albeit as quietly clever girls with reclusive tendencies) or space travellers (albeit by way of a chemical-surgical preparatory procedure that turns them somewhat cockroach-like, mostly but not exclusively in metabolic terms). Moreover, Allan’s POV characters are very rarely themselves the magical or fantastic or technologically transformed persons (at least not at first); they’re more often someone who knows (or knew) or loves (or loved) them, or lost them, or lives down the road from them in a liminal pit-village somewhere in the East Midlands. Indeed, this book is all but devoid of heroes, as if quietly dedicated to Le Guin’s “carrier bag theory” of fiction without being at all like Le Guin in terms of style or topic: Allan’s POVs are rarely real protagonists, and they’re definitely not anthropologists, even by proxy.

There’s also a somewhat Harrisonean approach to worldbuilding, which is to refuse resolutely to explain. In Harrison, this tendency pushes against characters whose search for meaning is a caricature of the genre (or perhaps just its imagined audience) at its most pathological, with the dramatics emerging from their clashing against the over coded world that won’t give up its secrets. In Allan’s worlds, by contrast, things are similarly unexplained, though for the most part far less comprehensively weird—or at least, the weirdness is less intrusive, almost deniable in many cases. Her characters are less bothered about why the world is as it is than about what they might (or might not) do in it, or where their father ended up, how their daughter died, that sort of thing; that the majority of said characters are female may have something to do with that. (Now I come to think of it, the few male characters do seem a lot more single-minded, if still a very long way from being generic Competent Men…but whether this gendered difference in attitude is a deliberate signal from Allan, or simply a reflection of a reality that I, a male person, have not been made to notice so clearly before, I cannot say.)

The division between literary and fantastic has always been a rhetorical artifice (and a marketing strategy), and is perhaps weaker now than at any time since Shelley herself. But there’s nonetheless a recognisable stylistic spectrum—and what’s more interesting than sorting all books into two big boxes (at least for me) is thinking instead about where a given author or work is located between those two wells of stylistic gravity. Many more recent arrivals into this increasingly populated interstitial field are clearly closer to the literary stylistic pole, even as they face toward the archipelago of the fantastic; it’s hard to explain, but there’s something about the way the tropes are handled, a slightly different ratio of sand to ballast in the concretisation of metaphor, if you like. Meanwhile many have travelled, or are travelling, in the other direction (though I’ll not risk starting a flame-war over dating that development).

But Allan makes it look easy, suspended in a wrinkle in the field that allows her to spin slowly in whatever direction takes her fancy, so long as she remains at the Lagrange point. It’s precisely that balancing which is the heart of her style: only seemingly effortless, what might at first seem to be a delicate (and perhaps very British) femininity—the sort of softness the rock-ribbed-rayguns crowd used to scoff at—becomes on closer inspection an incredible strength, that poise the result of total control over muscles all the more powerful for their not bulging out in macho display.

Allan makes it look easy, this plain prose, these workaday voices, the twists and kinks of strangeness, the possible parsings implicitly offered but never fully confirmed or denied. You’re almost always offered a fairly easy path to writing the strangeness off as an overactive imagination on the part of the narrator, or—by having it happen after the tale ends—pretending that it’s just a metaphor or stylistic flourish. But it’s precisely this inclusion of an easy, well-lit exit from the ghost-train that makes these (e)strange(d) pieces all the more believable, somehow.

She makes it look easy—and that’s one mark of mastery, an effect achieved, paradoxically, through the nigh-total absence of “effects”. Throughout this collection the strange is made ordinary, the ordinary made strange, the genre becomes less a storytelling style than a subject or secondary character, and experiments with form allow returns to ideas already played with, but whose potential for play are, for Allan, far from exhausted. She quietly, assuredly, estranges the genre of estrangement from itself. “The only way we can explore the future is to reinvent the world”, says a character near the end of the collection, as if unaware that their creator is on the case.

Review from BSFA Review 17 - Download your copy here.