Uncategorized

Uncategorized, Sue Lange, Book View Cafe, 2010

Here is a group of previously published stories on a variety of subjects.

There is a story about suicide, from the "inside." A small-town tinkerer builds a mobile anti-bullying device. Its artificial intelligence is able to learn the difference between teasing and real bullying. In a world where the weekend entertainment consists of watching bulls be slaughtered and cut into pieces, while still alive, what is the worst, most disgusting thing that a person can do with their spare time?

A woman runs the bar at a run-down, isolated hotel. Just before she calls a plumber for a water-pipe problem, an elderly woman walks up the road to the hotel, saying that she is a plumber. But, she is more than just a plumber. The workers on a mining planet are about to stage a wildcat strike. Having spent years on the planet, they figure they can easily get jobs on other planets. A female worker, who recently came to the planet from outside, and who supposedly has no management aptitude, quickly corrects the notion: there are no jobs out there.

Will there come a time when a company health plan includes quotas? For instance, Company X is required to have a certain number of pregnancies, or cases of cancer, per year. What if that quota is not reached? A female worker is able to spend a lot of time, unprotected, in the radioactive part of a nuclear reactor. It is because of a cell-transformation process that uses a special protein to cause her cells to secrete the biological equivalent of lead. A central ingredient in that protein is male sperm. Company policy says that she has to have sex a minimum of once a year, taking time off work, if necessary. If she doesn't do it, her cell walls break down and she dies.

The only thing these stories have in common is that they are all really good, and well written, and pretty thought-provoking, too. This is very much worth reading.