Customer Reviews

Tritcheon Hash

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
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"Tritcheon Hash" is a funny romp through a future where women basically got tired of men, then left them to stew in their juices on a rapidly declining Earth. They colonize their own planet, "Coney Island," and live in an all-female society.

The title character is a hot-shot pilot, not-so-happily married to her beautiful and smart wife, yet married to her job. She's a brawler, a risk-taker, an aggressive woman--perhaps more "man-like" than other women. She is selected to travel back to Earth to check on what is really happening there. There is a movement to perhaps bring back the two genders together, but the women cannot penetrate the haze of pollution and junk which now surround the planet with electronic means, so they have to sneak in Tritcheon Hash as a spy-observer. She fails miserably at being covert, but she is able to get a basic idea of life on Earth, and after stealing a ship (hers was dismantled) she escapes and eventually makes it back to Coney Island.

The novel succeeds on many levels. It is unique, that is for sure. This is not your standard SciFi. The entire concept is weird and refreshing. The humor mostly works, and the writing style, while it takes getting used to, is fun to read.

And the story is certainly earthy. From the beginning when Tritcheon Hash, after sitting for hours in a test vehicle which won't run, has sweat running down her back and into her butt, driving her mad with the desire to scratch, to her sexual encounter with a man back on Earth, well, this main character is a real human with real, physical needs.

Where it doesn't work is that the author seems to try and interject too many other styles, ala Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams. Sue Lange has her own, enviable style, but on a few occasions, she throws in a long forming pun in the form of a story or writes an out-and-out joke, and to me, at least, this took away from the fast-paced flow of her main story.

There were a few other glitches, such as how many trips it took to get all women to Coney Island and the fact that on a starving planet, the men only ate meat and even made their cardboard out of animal parts while ignoring vegetable matter (used to feed animals). But as a humorous satire, I guess you can forgive those. But I thought the main character's period of insanity was a little forced, and I don't think that added to the story.

Overall, though, this is a great read. I love the concept of the novel, and I liked the execution. The author took a chance on writing this, something I wish other authors would do. I thoroughly recommend this novel.

This is not your grandfather's science fiction, for all that it includes spaceflight and plenty of adventure. Sue Lange has a gift for adding a humorous, sometimes satirical edge, to tropes we all take for granted, and for getting the details right: the first scene, where Tritch is waiting to take off on a test flight and has an itch in a private place is worth the price of the book alone.

But the book is more than a romp. Setting up a world in which women have abandoned Earth to the men and established their own, more advanced civilization, it doesn't end up in the place we might expect. A trip to Earth costs Tritch more than she might have expected -- the men are much more complicated than the conventional wisdom about them on her planet -- and given the things that happen, she is lucky to regain her sanity.

The story adds to the genre of women's separatist fiction, but takes it in new directions. It sets up the potential for male fantasy as well -- surely women can't live without sex with men! -- and doesn't go there, either.

Yes, it's feminist. While I appreciate it that some male reviewers have rushed to say that it isn't because they want to encourage other men to read it, that's based on a simplistic idea of feminism. Tritcheon Hash is feminist because it makes the reader think about the way gender works in our world. After all, good science fiction is a literature of ideas. And this book proves those ideas don't have to be presented in boring fashion.

Very much worth your time.

Set approximately 1000 years from now, Tritcheon Hash is a hot-shot female pilot on the planet Coney Island (named for a famous Earth penal colony). Several hundred years previously, all the women from Earth packed up and moved to Coney Island, leaving the men on their own. Now, the only contact between them happens once a year in a neutral part of the galaxy. At that meeting, all male babies born on Coney Island are exchanged for a ton of frozen sperm.

For the past 50 years or so, secret contacts have been taking place between both planets concerning Reunification, a very touchy subject for both sides. The leaders of Coney Island need to know what's happening on Earth. All their probes and long-distance readings can't get past the Dispro Haze. It's a mile-high layer of dust, chemicals and debris that surrounds Earth and blocks out the sun; giant xenon lamps are used to simulate the sun. Tritch is chosen as a one-person mission to Earth, but specialized training is needed, first. At the local military academy, she meets Bangut Walht, a sensitive young man (it's the only place on Coney Island where men are allowed), to which Tritch is immediately attracted. She also meets Slab Ricknoy, a loudmouthed, arrogant jerk. The program ends, and the men are sent back to Earth, the day that Hash and Ricknoy get into a fight.

Tritch arrives on Earth, near Lake Michigan, and her cover is blown almost immediately. Earth is a place of extreme dirtiness. The air is dirty, the people are dirty and much of the planet is either full of radiation, or officially dead. She runs into Bangut Walht, who shows her the few bright spots. She also meets Slab Ricknoy, now a General, who is convinced that Hash is there to spy on him. He is also a paranoid person, who believes in endless war. Ricknoy has also impounded Hash's ship, looking for its faster-than-light drive, called a lighterator. By galactic law, Earth is confined to the solar system. Should people like Ricknoy get an FTL drive, it would not bode well for anyone, especially the inhabitants of Coney Island.

This is a really sharp satire about men and women about which I'm sure some people will complain. I enjoyed it. It's very easy to read, it has things to say, and it's quite a perceptive story. Well worth checking out.

(Cross-posted from the Adarna SF book blog)

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.

Note: a free review copy was provided by the author

This is a SF novel with a feminist touch. I like the idea very much: though it' is not really orginal to separae genders and let each go their own way. But the author did not manage to write the story good enough to be intrigued. Even more, I did not fid out, what the story is. What t s aimed at? It has no real ending, i.e. no solution of the plot.
It takes a very long start - the author overdoes the world building at the beginning. The middle part is rather good, and then she screws up the end: a very long aftermath. I think, that's because she tried to find a way to put a happy end, though it's a tragedy. The story beter end with Tritch going mad.That would have been logical.

I normally love sci-fi stuff, but something about this story just didn't click with me. I struggled through the early chapters, because I just didn't care about Tritcheon as a character. It wasn't until her recon trip to earth, that I stopped having to force myself to finish the chapters, but I still wasn't truly invested in the story. Most books of this length, I will knock out in 1 or 2 days, yet it took me 2 weeks to finish this one. It wasn't awful enough to abandon without finishing, but I won't be re-reading it, ever.

Welcome to Coney Island, named after that amusement park left behind on Earth hundreds of years ago. Coney Island is a planet made up entirely of women from Earth whose ancestors left the men behind on earth, fed up with their war mongering, dirty and rude ways. They said they would eventually return, but after this long without men, they are not sure they want to. So they send Tritcheon Hash, ace pilot, to sneak into Earth and report back. As expected, this plan doesn't work so well.

The book started pretty abruptly, right into the middle of Tritcheon's boring day at work. I was lost for the first few chapters, not having an introduction to the planet and the new ways of Earth women. I understood intellectually that on a planet full of women, there would be no male characters, but the futuristic names and lack of character descriptions had me picturing males in my head, which made me even more confused.

The best part of this book is the time Tritcheon spent on Earth. The character descriptions improved, the dialogue and character interaction picked up. You could tell that Sue Lange really enjoyed the male characters of the book. They came alive in her writing.

As for the part of the story spent on Coney Island, it seems there was a lot of focus on a very few characters. It was hard to get a feel for Tritcheon when she had no interaction with others. Her children were never really described and as they were supposed to be so important to Tritcheon, it seems rather strange that I am not sure even what color hair they had.

Overall, I would say that the book kept me interested from the time Trichteon landed on Earth up until the point she left Earth. Before and after that could really have been longer and more descriptive.

I received this e-book free from Library Thing Early Reviewers program.

Tritcheon Hash isn't actually my kind of book. I'm certain this is a case where what I think is cool and what the author, Sue Lange, thinks is cool, doesn't match up. We have different tastes in humor or I don't actually know the right cultural references to get some of the humor. There is a well-executed and subtle pun I particularly enjoyed. Be careful--it is liable to sneak past you!

The writing is good, the plot is present and the story stays with the plot with very few detours. The main character, Tritcheon Hash, is very well characterized. In fact, the story is more about her personal evolution as person than about her adventure. Lange does an excellent job of showing us Tritcheon's motivations in the first part of the story. Then we share Tritcheon's experiences and have no difficulty understanding how those experiences change Tritcheon's world-view.

I think if you're more inclined to Lange's brand of weird science fiction and/or her style of humor, you may enjoy this book. If you're more like me and lean toward "hard" science fiction, I don't think this will be your cup of tea.

A hilarious romp filled with witty and tasty treats! A tale told by an ingenious Sue Lange who likes to tempt her readers with humor while declaring truth simultaneously!
Are you sure the planet was named,"Coney Island" after a women's penal colony or a notorious foot-long?

A woman needs a man like a fish needs a lighterated bicycle, and so sometime in the third millennium, the females packed their bags and shipped out to establish their own utopian planet. Now, centuries later, they're doing just fine, thank you very much. The guys left behind, however, are begging them to return to Earth and reunite the human race. Have the boys really grown up? Or are they just taking advantage of the gals' perennial need to love and to be loved?

Tritcheon Hash, Sue Lange's ragingly witty novel about a hotshot pilot-turned-spy for the ultimate girls-only club, is funny, thought-provoking, and surprisingly moving. The title character makes a compelling heroine as she struggles with her own ambivalence toward the males from her past and her marriage to the lovely but unfulfilled Drannie Cove begins to vaporize. The book's defamiliarizing techno-speak and playful futurisms (Tritch's mission-briefing video comes with an "odor track") will appeal to sci-fi fans without alienating the general reader, and the depiction of a battle of the sexes waged on both the personal and the interplanetary scale will undoubtedly entertain all.