Book Review: The Art of Space Travel and Other Stories by Nina Allan
Genre: Sci-Fi
Age: Adult
Format: ebook
I wasn’t a fan of this collection. It’s presented almost like a retrospective of Allan’s career, and the stories are in chronological order by publication date. I knew nothing of Allan’s work prior to this collection, but I assumed while reading the earlier stories were from maybe the late 90s, as they read as pretty outdated. The earliest was from 2007.
There’s a strange sense of romanticism towards the locations Allan pulls from. I can’t quite put my finger on it, and I wouldn’t presume to understand Allan’s background, but I got a bit of a ‘middle England’ vibe to the ways these places were described. There’s some elements that feel like they speak to a particular outdated view of ‘progressiveness’, and admittedly this took the shine off a lot of this for me.
It wasn’t as sci-fi as I thought it would be, either. There are small sci-fi elements; some of the stories take place in a dystopian landscape, and others involve space travel, but in the majority of stories it doesn’t feel like we really see anything ‘sci-fi’, but are instead told about it.
The stories also become quite repetitive with themes and content. Which would be fine, if they weren’t all approached in a similar way. The characters were consistently whiny and annoying, the writing was often self-indulgent, and too many of the stories felt like they just didn’t have a beginning, middle, and end, and were instead maybe a beginning, sometimes with a middle, and often ended so abruptly they felt like they should have been the start to something else.
It’s more speculative than sci-fi, which is absolutely fine, but for the most part these weren’t the kind of stories I enjoy, and I found myself too often bored by the stories and characters themselves. It’s not one I’d recommend unless you’re already familiar with and like Allan’s work.
Review by Elle Turpitt
Twitter: @elleturpitt
Bluesky: @elleturpitt.bsky.social
I received this ebook from Titan Books via NetGalley for review consideration.
