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.

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Review from BSFA Review 17 - Download your copy here.