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The Race (Allan novel)
The Race is a 2014 science fiction and literary fiction[1][2] novel by English writer Nina Allan. It is her debut novel and was first published in August 2014 in the United Kingdom by NewCon Press. A second edition of the book, in which an appendix was added, was published by Titan Books in July 2016. This new edition is the first book of a two-book deal Allan signed with Titan in 2015; the second book is The Rift, published in 2017.[3] The novel consists of four loosely connected novellas. The second edition of the book includes a fifth novella, referred to as an appendix. Allan described The Race as "A Mobius strip of actual and imagined realities, featuring telepathic dogs, giant whales, and the search for alien life."[4] Two of the sections take place in "our world", whereas the other two, plus the second edition appendix, are set in an "alternate near-future".[5] The Race was generally well received by critics. It was nominated for three awards, the 2015 British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel,[6] the 2015 Red Tentacle Award for Best Novel,[7] and the 2015 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.[8] The Race was translated into French by Bernard Sigaud as La Course and published by Tristram in 2017.[9] The book was also translated into Spanish by Carmen Torres and Laura Naranjo as La carrera and published by Nevsky in 2017.[10] DevelopmentPrior to The Race, Allan had written a novella, Spin (2013), and published several story collections, including The Silver Wind (2011) and Stardust: The Ruby Castle Stories (2013). In Silver Wind and Stardust, the stories are tenuously linked to each other, an approach that Allan followed in the loosely connected novellas in The Race.[11][12] Allan said The Race turned out to be very different from its initial drafts. It began as a story about a World War I soldier suffering from Post-traumatic stress disorder who becomes a serial killer.[4] The soldier was to have been Derek in the novel, but Allan found herself "disliking him so much" she focused instead on his sister, Christy.[5] Allan said Christy's character came naturally to her because "her voice is closest to my own".[4] The original character of Derek the soldier later became Dennis Beaumont in Allan's 2015 novella, The Harlequin.[5] Inspiration for the smartdogs came from Alejandro González Iñárritu's Mexican film Amores perros (2000) about underground dog fighting in Mexico City. Allan explained that while she disliked the "inherent cruelty" of dog fighting, she turned it into underground dog racing with telepathic greyhounds, drawing on an idea she had previously had about telepathic dogs on a remote planet.[13] Plot summary
Critical reception.jpg) In a review of The Race in Locus magazine, Gary K. Wolfe wrote that despite the fragmented structure of the book, with its multiple narratives and narrators, and stories embedded within stories, it feels "oddly unified" and produces "a kind of psychic landscape".[11] Wolfe stated that the world Allan has created here "is thoroughly seductive and ominously credible, and a degree of narrative sophistication as impressive as anything I've seen in recent SF".[11] Niall Alexander described The Race as a blend of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Jo Walton's Among Others. Reviewing the book at Tor.com Alexander called Allan's novel "a wonderfully understated work of words, worthy of all the awards [it] was nominated for".[12] He said it shows how "the lives of ordinary people can become unfastened from reality".[12] A review at Publishers Weekly described The Race as an "enticingly mysterious episodic debut novel".[14] The narrative switches between fictional and actual settings: "real countries take on or remove altered fictional guises". The reviewer stated that "[s]trong writing and the layering of realities gives the book a mental hook akin to the best alternative history fiction".[14] Reviewing The Race in the LA Review of Books, Helen Marshall called Allan's novel "a story of split identities".[1] The histories of people are reworked and merged and "the borders between fact and fiction dissolve".[1] Outwardly this does not make sense until it becomes clear that Derek mirrors Del and Jenna is Christy's double. Marshall said the thread linking the sections of Allan's novel is "a secret language of memory". The characters bear the burden of their own memories, but also an inherited racial memory. Marshall noted that The Race is more than science fiction, it can also be seen as a ghost story reminiscent of the likes of M. John Harrison and Robert Aickman. She said Allan "makes the familiar unsettling", but also "shows how prosaic, how livable a horrible situation can become over time."[1] Marshall described the book as "[i]ntensely readable and intellectually sophisticated", adding: "Like the very best works of literary fiction, The Race establishes its own rules for play, its own grammar: it is a world unto itself".[1] Stuart Conover at ScienceFiction.com had mixed feelings about The Race. He liked the first section and the dystopian England it portrayed, but found it "a little more difficult to experience the magic again" when the narrative returned to that world in the fourth section, knowing that it was a story within a story.[15] Conover felt that while the quality of Allan's writing is good, and it is "a well put together piece", it is "not a perfect piece of science fiction".[15] Kirkus Reviews also had a mixed reaction to the book. The reviewer said that the first novella "creates a brilliantly weird world that's utterly riveting", but felt that the next one is "flabby and inert" instead of "fraught", and in the third one, the story "gets bogged down by details".[16] While the fourth novella returns to the "dystopian future" of the first, "readers will likely find it difficult to work up enthusiasm for this now doubly fictional world".[16] The reviewer found the book's second edition appendix "baffling", and added that it "read like writing exercises that were never meant to see the light of day".[16] Awards
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