The Art of Space Travel and Other Stories by Nina Allan

​    I’ve never heard of the author and her short story collection turned out to be way longer than the original page count (erroneously listed when the Netgalley ARC first appeared) had led me to believe and so I read some of it and put it away. For a while.
    This wasn’t a quality thing - the few stories I read were actually very good, if somewhat strangely ended (more on this later), it was simply the matter of my dislike for fat books and a giant TBR list to deal with.
     The other day, for some reason, I selected this collection again and this time stayed with it until it was over. The result is…well…wow. I mean, fat or not, this book has won me over. The stories have won me over.
      Nina Allan, the author I still haven’t heard of outside of this book but really ought to look up now, is, without a question, a master storyteller. It’s a striking quality, the one you recognize immediately in the way the narrative flows, in the way the characters come to life, in the way the stories play themselves like movies on the screen of your mind when you read them. It’s just so…seamless, so seamlessly perfect. 
       That isn’t to say the stories themselves are perfect, although the majority are dangerously close, overall, they may not be, but then again, they are so much more than merely good. It took me a while to get used to the authors’ endings, which at first just seemed anti-climactic and bathetic. The stories are also very, very long, unwieldly so at times, practically novella- or novelette-sized. Maybe that’s just me, I am a sizist. Traditionally, I prefer my short fiction…well, short. But writing this good deserves exceptions.
        The collection ends with a nonfiction essay on the author’s love of esoteric European science fiction. Fairly random and it’s still so good and compelling. Just goes to show you what a good writer can do.
      Allan takes you away from this world with her tales. But she doesn’t take you to a happier world or worlds. The one she imagines in these occasionally tangentially interconnected stories is one devastated by climate change, bleak and quite sad. In other words, it’s very much like this one, but set in the not-so-distant future. 
       No matter how expertly the author world-builds, it remains second-best to her character writing, but then again, her character writing is so superlative that most things would take a backseat to it. The emotional engagement of this reading experience alone...
       In so many ways, reading this collection was like taking a master class on writing short fiction. If that isn’t high enough of a praise, I don’t know what would be. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.