Allan described The Race as "A Mobius strip of actual and imagined realities, featuring telepathic dogs, giant whales, and the search for alien life.

[5] Inspiration for the smartdogs came from Alejandro González Iñárritu's Mexican film Amores perros (2000) about underground dog fighting in Mexico City.

[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".

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".

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.

"[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".

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".