Tritcheon Hash by Sue Lange (2011)

Smashwords / Amazon / Book View Cafe

4/5 stars

Description:
Tritcheon Hash is a test pilot in the year 3011. She’s got it all: brains, guts, and a fast jet. But can she survive a mission to the most frightening place in the galaxy, the planet Earth?

Review:
Tritcheon Hash is a comedy with a funny take on both space opera and feminist science fiction. Tritch lives in the all-female planet, Coney Island, as women left Earth in the 22nd century from rising levels of violence. Coney Island is a lesbian vegetarian commune utopia (which is cozier and more suburban than the one in The Female Man), while Earth has gone on with its wars, environmental degradation, and carnivorous ways. There has been minimal contact between the two planets aside from an annual baby exchange, where the Coney Island representative would hand over the boy babies in exchange for fresh-frozen sperm. But there’s been talk of reunification, and Tritch is sent to spy on the Earth men.

It’s not the kind of book that had me laughing out loud, but I grinned with every page. Tritcheon Hash pokes fun at space opera and gender tropes, but it does so in a good-hearted fashion, with the kind of humour that comes from love of the genre, comparable to the way the movie Galaxy Quest plays with Star Trek.

The flippant prose zips through pseudo-technical jargon in deadpan (“The lighterator wouldn’t be fully tested until she got into space, but it had to be checked off now, as later would be too late. Obviously. No sense in flying off into the wide-open vacuum if the ol’ lighterator couldn’t lighterate. Right?”), reveals Tritch’s midlife crisis with her socialite wife, and makes note of Earth’s strange creations (such as their leather composite food utensils—“Tiny bits of animal parts are compressed and glued together. Like how sawdust can make particle board.”).

Here’s a further taste of the book’s wisecracks:

To prepare mentally for her upcoming trip to the other side of the Haze, Tritch took a couple of sessions with a hypnotherapist. She programmed Tritch to be able to recall everything she’d be experiencing in case she lost her pad and paper, and the subcutaneous black box recorder installed when she’d first been licensed as a test pilot failed. Then a separate therapist programmed her to forget all the stuff she’d been programmed to remember in the event she found herself interrogated by an enemy. Only a secret password would bring it all back to her. They wrote the password out in longhand, base 5, superscript cipher, on a piece of muffin wrapping paper in invisible ink, backwards, so you could only read it in a mirror, and only if a candle was placed beneath it. The password was then locked in a safe, which was plunged into five-square-feet of wet plastoset that, when dry, was guarded by a couple of six-foot-tall plants known as Penis Fly Traps.

The quirky humour propels the story forward, but when it switches gears to its character-driven conflict, it’s surprisingly touching. Who knew that a test pilot’s midlife crisis could be so heart-wrenching, when her grand mission-of-a-lifetime brings her further away from her family? It’s the kind of conflict that doesn’t sound very exciting when I try to explain it, but when I read it, it felt like a punch in the gut (in a good way). Lange balances the comedic and serious aspects of the story excellently, and the contrast adds to the story rather than detracts from it, and I must praise her skillful writing. My only criticism is that sometimes the POV threw me off. It occasionally breaks away from third-person limited, but it makes sense with the playful prose style and intertextual quips.

I highly recommend Tritcheon Hash to sci-fi readers, as long as one expects a space opera comedy rather than a space opera adventure. Read the sample first to see if the humour is up your alley.

You might like this if you like…
Feminist science fiction, humour, lesbian commune utopias

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Tritcheon Hash was also listed on Kirkus’ Best Indie of 2011.

If you want to learn more about the author, you can follow Lange on her blog and on her Twitter.