{"id":4697,"date":"2011-06-14T23:08:10","date_gmt":"2011-06-15T04:08:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.starshipnivan.com\/blog\/?p=4697"},"modified":"2011-06-15T21:21:56","modified_gmt":"2011-06-16T02:21:56","slug":"the-hard-underbelly-of-the-future-sue-lange%e2%80%99s-uncategorized","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/?p=4697","title":{"rendered":"The Hard Underbelly of the Future: Sue Lange\u2019s Uncategorized"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Sue Lange\u2019s collection Uncategorized<\/em><\/a> (Book View Caf\u00e9, 2009, $1.99 digital edition) contains fifteen stories published in various venues (among them Apex, Astounding Tales, Sentinel, Mbrane<\/em> and Aoife\u2019s Kiss)<\/em>. If I wanted to categorize them, I’d call them quasi-mundane near-future SF \u2013 but some of the unifying threads that run through them are unusual.<\/p>\n

One is Lange\u2019s love and professional knowledge of music, which pops up in unexpected spots in the stories and is the focus of one of them (\u201cThe Failure\u201d).\u00a0 Another is the matter-of-fact attitude toward technology: the people and societies in Uncategorized<\/em> have come to terms with genetic engineering and its cousins, although they are aware of their problems.\u00a0 Finally, the points of view are resolutely working class (many springing directly from Lange\u2019s varied work experience). This doesn\u2019t merely mean that the protagonists\/narrators are blue collar. Instead, almost all the stories in Uncategorized<\/em> center around work issues for people whose jobs are not a way of \u201cexpressing themselves” but a way to keep food on the table. These are people who cannot afford ennui or angst, who must punch time cards and undergo intrusive HR evaluations.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an additional feature that makes Lange\u2019s blue-collar protagonists stand out: most are women who do \u201ctraditionally masculine\u201d work: meat plant workers, plumbers, soldiers, radiation cleanup crews. Furthermore, these women focus on their jobs and many of their co-workers and friends are women as well. In other words, Lange\u2019s stories handily pass the Bechdel test without falling even remotely into the arbitrarily devalued subgenre of chicklit. If you took Rosie the Riveter and transposed her to a near-future alternate US (minus such outworn cyberpunk accessories as pneumatic-boob avatars and Matrix-style gyrations), you\u2019d have the setting for most of the stories in Uncategorized<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Contributing to this gestalt are Lange\u2019s deadpan humor and rapid-fire dialogue, which require some acclimatization but can become as catchy as strong beats and riffs. Her language is unvarnished Bauhaus \u2013 there\u2019s scarcely a descriptive adjective or adverb to be found. Ditto for the settings, which are urban grit to the max even in the stories set off-Earth. One recurrent weakness is hurried endings, often accompanied by twists that were predictable (to me at least). Almost all the stories in Uncategorized<\/em> would have increased their impact if they were longer and\/or less sparse, because they grapple with important issues in original ways without fanfare.<\/p>\n

Although Uncategorized<\/em> hews to the premise of its title, some of its stories are thematically paired \u2013 one version comic, the other tragic. \u201cThe Club\u201d \/ \u201cHow to Dispose of Sneakers\u201d deal with the intractable problem of humanity\u2019s ecological footprint; \u201cBehaviorNorm\u201d \/ \u201cBuyer\u2019s Club\u201d tackle another intractable problem, the callousness of administrative management (think Dilbert with a touch of Big Brother transhumanism). For me, the standouts in the collection were: \u201cPeroxide Head\u201d, a poignant vignette on what balancing issues might really be like for a liaison to \u201cOthers\u201d in Banks\u2019 Culture universe; \u201cThe Meateaters\u201d, a no-holds-barred Outland retelling of Eurypides\u2019 Bacchae;<\/em> \u201cBuyer\u2019s Club\u201d; \u201cPictures\u201d, a valentine to second chances; and \u201cZara Gets Laid\u201d, in which sexual intercourse boosts the immunity of bio-augmented radiation cleanup workers (based on solid extrapolation, no less!).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Despite its deceptively plain trappings, Uncategorized<\/em> subtends a wide arc and is textbook-classic SF: its stories follow \u201cwhat if\u201d questions to their logical conclusions, pulling no punches. It\u2019s a prickly, bracing read that walks a fine line between bleakness and pragmatism, and it deserves the wider readership it might well have got if its author had been of the other gender.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sue Lange\u2019s collection Uncategorized (Book View Caf\u00e9, 2009, $1.99 digital edition) contains fifteen stories published in various venues (among them Apex, Astounding Tales, Sentinel, Mbrane and Aoife\u2019s Kiss). If I wanted to categorize them, I’d call them quasi-mundane near-future SF \u2013 but some of the unifying threads that run through them are unusual. One is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,13,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","category-science-fiction","category-writing-and-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4697\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}