Book Review: The Race by Nina Allan
Ecological collapse, genetically modified dogs that bond with their human trainers and owners, the darker side of decaying worlds and the people trapped within them, and metatextual games. The Race by Nina Allan is a SF novel that is much more on the literary end of science fiction, much more Rachel Swirsky than Linda Nagata. The Race is composed of several interlinked and interlaced stories, and finding and discovering the connections, even below the immediately obvious, is part of the joy of the novel. In part one, Jenna’s story is of a hardscrabble existence in a town devoted to genetically uplifted dogs, and the desperate life people on the margins sometimes live. It encapsulates the domino problem and the fragility of people on the edge: just one domino falling can bring down an entire chain of lives. In terms of more straightforward science fictional elements and their use, this was by far the strongest section of the novels.
