Nina Allan: The Art of Space Travel and Other Stories

Everything I’ve read by Nina Allan has been good, but not all of it has been to my taste. I feel like there are two versions of Allan; the speculative writer whose fiction is always tinged with a thread of horror, and the writer more concerned with magical suburbia, whose style feels deliberately old-fashioned, harking back to the 1950s and 1960s. In the first camp, I’d put her brilliant novels The Race and The Rift; in the second, The Dollmaker and The Silver Wind, which were undoubtedly accomplished but just didn’t create worlds I was interested in inhabiting; both felt too narrow and twee-archaic for me. The joy, then, of this collection of short stories, The Art of Space Travel, which spans her writing career, is that it brings together these different versions of Allan, and so has something for everyone.

My favourite stories, not surprisingly, were those that had the strongest tinges of either science fiction or horror.  ‘Flying in the Face of God’, which looks at astronauts who undergo a process known as ‘the Kushnev drain’, which wears down their bodies so they can be fit for space travel, combines elements of both, and was my joint favourite story in this collection. My other favourite was ‘Four Abstracts’, a wonderfully creepy story about an artist who believes her family are part-spider. I didn’t read the stories in this collection in order, and only realised later that this is a kind of sequel to an earlier story, ‘A Thread of Truth’; I’m pleased, however, that I came to ‘Four Abstracts’ first, because I felt ‘A Thread of Truth’ was the weaker story, spelling out too much of what had been so carefully implied in ‘Four Abstracts’. And this is really the theme of this collection: the stories where Allan knows just how much to say are simply superb (‘The Art of Space Travel’ is another example) whereas others tell us either a bit too much (‘The Science of Chance’, ‘Microcosmos’) or, more usually, too little (‘Amethyst’, ‘Heroes’, ‘Marielena’). Allan is also brilliant at invented films, novels and other works of art, to the point where I found it difficult to distinguish between real references and imaginary ones; these imaginary artworks and their creators haunt many of her stories.

For me, an uneven collection, then, but one that contained some unforgettable worlds.

I received a free proof copy of this collection from the publisher for review.