Sector General
Sector General is a series of science fiction books created and written by the Northern Irish science fiction author James White. The series derives its name from the setting of the majority of the books, the Sector 12 General Hospital, a huge 384-level hospital space station located in deep space, designed to treat a wide variety of xenobiological life forms, and to house an equally-diverse staff.
The structure can replicate the living conditions for practically any intelligent living species: from beings who breathe superheated steam, to beings made of crystals and methane who find temperatures warmer than 18 degrees Kelvin fatal, to the other extreme of beings who gain sustenance from the direct conversion of hard radiation. In between, there exist the assumed middle-ground of humanity and similar mammalian and avian species - which implies the weak anthropic principle. The hospital's infrastructure can be reconfigured to produce environments for previously unknown species.
The series of novels itself is a manifestation of White's pacifistic philosophy, which developed as a consequence of his growing up amid the violence of Belfast, Northern Ireland. White wanted to create gripping, suspenseful science fiction stories where the conflicts did not revolve around violence or war. Thus, in the "Sector General" universe, war is seen as a massive racial psychosis that is occasionally exhibited by insufficiently-advanced cultures, and violence of a more personal nature is also considered as an aberration. In place of the action or violence usually featured in more adventure-oriented SF, the central plot conflicts of the Sector General series usually revolve around xenobiological medical mysteries, often requiring the hospital staff to diagnose (and subsequently treat) medical maladies of species unknown to them.
This series is remarkable in unusually diverse and believable non-humanoid alien life forms. This series can be compared to common medical dramas like "ER" with the addition of a science-fictional setting.
Stories
The Sector General series began as short stories published in New Worlds from 1957 onwards.[1][2] Sector General is a gigantic multi-species hospital space station founded as a peace-promoting project by two heroes from opposite sides of humanity's only full interstellar war.[3] The hospital accommodates patients and staff from dozens of species, with different environmental requirements, behaviors and ailments, but many of the stories feature types of patient that the builders did not anticipate.[4] Initially most of the stories center round the career of Doctor Conway, who rises from junior surgeon to the top level, Senior Diagnostician.[5][6] In the fourth book the Galactic Federation decides that the emergency service which the hospital offers to victims of space accidents and planetary catastrophes is its most effective means of making peaceful contact with new spacefaring species, which allows the series to expand its range of plots, characters and locations.[7][8] White said that The Troubles in Northern Ireland induced him to write about the sort of world he would like to live in, and that he dislked war and militarists. Hence he relied on epidemics and natural disasters to provide the conflicts that stories need to make them interesting.[9]
Originally White intended to end the series with Star Healer (1985), by which time the central characters had reached the top levels in their careers, but Ballantine Books persuaded him to continue. He extended the stories' range by introducing new central characters beginning with Code Blue - Emergency (1987), and The Genocidal Healer (1992) focused on psychological and theological issues of guilt and forgiveness rather than strictly medical ones.[9] The books in the series are:[1]
| Hospital Station (1962: stories published in New Worlds 1957 – 1960)[5] | |
| Star Surgeon (1963)[10] | Major Operation (1971: stories published in New Worlds 1968 – 1971)[11] |
| Ambulance Ship (1979)[7] | Sector General (1983)[12] |
| Star Healer (1985)[6] | Code Blue - Emergency (1987)[13] |
| The Genocidal Healer (1992)[14] | The Galactic Gourmet (1996)[15] |
| Final Diagnosis (1997)[16] | Mind Changer (1998)[17] |
| Double Contact (1999)[18] | |
These were also published as omnibus editions:
- Beginning Operations (2001) contains Hospital Station, Star Surgeon and Major Operation.[19]
- Alien Emergencies (2002) contains Ambulance Ship, Sector General and Star Healer.[20]
- General Practice (2003) contains Code Blue - Emergency and The Genocidal Healer.[21]
- Tales of Sector General (1999) contains The Galactic Gourmet, Final Diagnosis, and Mind Changer.[22]
Notes:
- White's short story Sector General is in the book Hospital Station.[1]
- In addition to these books, several related short stories (Countercharm, Tableau, Occupation: Warrior, and Custom Fitting) appear in other collections by White.[1]
- The short story Occupation: Warrior, published in 1959, provides the backstory of the Monitor Corps' Commander Dermod, who appears in some of the books. However the editor of Science Fiction Adventures removed all reference to Sector General from Occupation: Warrior because he thought it was too grim to be treated as part of the series.[4][23]
- Alan E. Nourse also wrote a science fiction novel called Star Surgeon.[24]
Difficulties of inter-species medicine
Sector General was founded to promote inter-species harmony,[12] and therefore all medical staff must be prepared to treat beings with very different physiologies and behavior patterns, and sometimes with environmental requirements that would be lethal to staff without suitable protection.[5][13] The hospital uses a four-letter classification system to assign patients to wards that provide suitable environments, a device used earlier by E. E. "Doc" Smith's Children of the Lens. White's Star Healer introduces the classification "FOKT", which is regarded as an in-joke on the name of the Glasgow science fiction club Friends of Kilgore Trout.[4]
When necessary physicians, surgeons and pathologists download information about patients' species into their minds from "Educator tapes", recordings of the memories of great practitioners in the appropriate species. However, in addition to medical knowledge, the educator tapes also capture the personalities of the medical experts who recorded them. Thus having an educator tape active theatens the recipient with multiple personality disorder. The new personality is from a vastly different species, often with very behavior codes and sexual preferences and, to make matters worse, the donors were often very dominant personalities. The mildest symptom of such conflicts is a running gag in which users of these tapes are often seen in the Sector General's cafeteria, eating a bland-looking sandwich with closed eyes. On the other hand the risk of finding members of other species sexually attractive is a serious concern.[5][13]
Junior doctors usually have these acquired memories erased as soon as possible.[5] However as a doctor rises up through the hospital hierarchy, and if its mind proves to be sufficiently stable, it may find himself the permanent recipient of one or more tapes. Diagnosticians, the medical elite of Sector General, can have as many as ten different tapes active at one time, as they may have to supervise treatment of many species at the same time.[13]
In each story characters belonging to species different from that of the protagonist are treated as neuter and refered to as "it". Some species are touchy about any refence to sexual roles and behavior, some have more than two sexes and some change sex once or more during their lifetimes.[13]
In the case of species with two permanent sexes, including but not limited to Earth-humans, the stories state that females are psychologically incapable of allowing their psyches to be violated to the extent required by the educator tapes.[5] However in one of the later books a very assertive non-human female character accidentally acquires several sets of memories which cannot be erased, and adjusts to this with relative ease.[13]
Regular characters
Although the majority of the characters are "Earth-human" – "human" is ambiguous because all species refers to themselves as "human" in their own languages[13] – the stories feature medical staff from a wide range of species.[5][13][14] The following appear in nearly all the stories:
- Dr. Conway
- A male Earth-human who starts as a junior intern and, over the course of the series, works his way up to Chief Surgeon and eventually Diagnostician in Charge of Surgery.[5][14] Conway generally prefers extraterrestrial company to that of his own species,[5] and has a habit of thinking aloud. His passions are healing, in which he combines an unconventional approach with stubborn resourcefulness, and Murchison.
- Murchison
- A curvaceous female Earth-human first seen as a senior nurse in the Pathology department.[5] She eventually becomes a doctor and a Pathologist herself, and also Conway's wife.[13]
- Dr. Prilicla
- A large but fragile winged insect-like being from the very low-gravity planet Cinruss. In addition to being highly skilled in the more delicate types of surgery, Prilicla is an empath and therefore can sense the emotions of most other lifeforms including many non-intelligent animals. Its tact and the desire of colleagues to avoid distressing it by displaying negative emotions generally makes others willing to follow its advice[13] – a pattern that one reviewer described as "a pleasant Machiavellian streak."[25] Despite its natural timidity and the distress that others beings' anger, fear and pain cause it, Prilicla uses its empathic ability in prolonged searches for survivors of space combat and accidents.[7][12]
- Major O'Mara
- The Earth-human head of the hospital's Psychology department, his job is to ensure that the hospital's diverse species work together as harmoniously, efficiently and safely as circumstances allow, and particularly to save the staff from being driven insane by over-use of Educator tapes. Since he is a very acute observer of behavior and often uses sarcasm "to shrink heads, not swell them", he is sometimes called a "latter-day Torquemada".[5]
- Charge Nurse Naydrad
- A member of the Kelgian species, Naydrad looks like a giant caterpillar. Since the involuntary movements of Kelgians' fur completely shows their emotions, the species is incapable of both lying and tact. Naydrad is a specialist in rescuing victims of space accidents.[7]
- Thornnastor
- A native of the high-gravity planet Traltha, Thornnastor has a body like a six-legged elephant, and its own keen senses are supplemented by a symbiont that provides acute vision over up to 360 degrees. Thornnastor is the Diagnostician in Charge of Pathology, and it carries ten Educator tapes. Its fascination with gossip, especially about the scandalous activities of a multi-sexed, methane-breathing, cryogenic species, is a running gag in the series.[5][13]
Critical appraisal
The Sector General series defined the sub-genre of multi-species medical stories, [26] although L. Ron Hubbard's Ole Doc Methuselah stories and Murray Leinster's Med Service stories, neither of which were highly regarded, had explored some similar themes.[4] Sector General was "the first explicitly pacifist space opera" series, while much of contemporary space opera from the USA was notably military.[8] Mike Resnick decribed the series' characters as "the most memorable crew of aliens ever created".[26]
Many commentators attribute the series' popularity to the altruism of its doctors and the emphasis on seeking to build peaceful relations between different species.[27] John Clute wrote that "in the depiction of goodness may lie the real genius of James White."[28] White's hatred of war and xenophobia was a constant theme of the series, notably in: Star Surgeon, where the Monitor Corps fights a savage battle in defence of the hospital space station, to prevent the conflict from escalating into a full interstellar war that can only end in genocide;[10] and in The Genocidal Healer, where an alien race's sexual urges are almost eliminated by a plague and can only be stimulated by hand-to-hand combat.[14][4]
The early stories focus almost entirely on medical problems, mainly from Conway's viewpoint. In Dave Langford's opinion the xenobiological novelties were becoming less credible by the end of Star Healer, and using a variety of alien viewpoint characters gave the later books "considerable new pep".[4] These also deal with deeper issues, notably in The Genocidal Healer, and better than most science fiction acccording to Resnick.[26]
Opinions differ about the quality of the series as a whole. For example Gary Westfahl wrote that "the Sector General stories remained consistently fresh and involving, and they grew in prominence as the series progressed."[27] On the other hand Todd White wrote that the series declined after Star Healer (1985), hitting a low point with the Galactic Gourmet (1996), and that the later books tended to stretch a short story's worth of content to the length of a novel. However he thought that Mind Changer (1998) represented an improvement.[29]
Publishers Weekly described Mind Changer as "White's finest performance, replete with wit, originality, medical expertise and sheer decency" and commented that the series shows no signs of aging,[30] and Booklist described the book as an "enjoyable, witty resumé" of Chief Psychologist O'Mara's career.[31]
Clinton Lawrence described the last Sector General book, Double Contact (1999), as "in a very positive way, a throwback to an earlier era in science fiction" since it is optimistic and depicts several advanced species working harmoniously. The struggle to build trust and produce a successful first contact is, he thought, as exciting and suspenseful as one could wish for. However he noted that the level of characterization was the minimum required to support the plot.[25]
Sector General's physiological classification system
The hospital has a classification system, based on the Earth-human English alphabet, which allows easily classification of incoming patients according to size and shape and environmental and dietary requirements. The system uses 4 letters, with the first letter denoting the general environmental requirements (water breather, oxygen breather, chlorine breather, etc) of the entity in question. The second, third, and fourth letters, in combination, reveal information about the entity's metabolism, number of limbs, diet, and so on.
Letters A, B, and C in the first position indicate an aquatic intelligent species, letters D, E, and F in the first position indicate an oxygen-breathing life form, and so on. There are sometimes exceptions and special case rules scattered throughout the system, such as the vegetable-metabolism-based intelligent AACP lifeform (which, while not being a water-breathing lifeform, is nonetheless given a classification beginning with A). Also, any species with a functional psi ability is given a V as its first letter, regardless of any other factors. Human beings from Earth are classified as DBDG, as are at least three other bipedal, warm-blooded, oxygen-breathing species.
The complete list of physiological classifications mentioned in the series is as follows:
| AACP | (A plant species) |
| ASML | Creppelian |
| AUGL | Chalder |
| BLSU | Groalterri |
| BRLH | Tarlan |
| CHLI | Trolanni |
| CLHG | Drambon (Roller) |
| CPSD | "Blind Ones" |
| DBDG | Earth-human |
| DBDG | Etlan |
| DBDG | Nidian |
| DBDG | Orligian |
| DBKR | Cemmeccan |
| DBLF | Kelgian |
| DCNF | Sommaradvan |
| DCSL | Cromsaggar |
| DPBK | Dwerlan |
| DSVJ | (Not Given) |
| EGCL | Duwetz |
| ELNT | Melfan |
| ELPH | (Not Given) |
| FGLI | Tralthan |
| FOKT | Gogleskan |
| FROB | Hudlarian |
| FSOJ | Protectors of the Unborn |
| GKNM | Ian |
| GKSD | Crextic |
| GLNO | Cinrusskin |
| LSVO | Nallajim |
| MSVK | Euril |
| OTSB | (Not Given, symbiotic with Tralthan) |
| PVSJ | Illensan |
| QCQL | (Not Given) |
| SNLU | (Not Given) |
| SRJH | Drambon |
| SRTT | (Not Given) |
| TLTU | (from) Therecald 5 |
| TOBS | (from) Fotawn |
| TRLH | (Not Given) |
| VBGM | Kermi |
| VTXM | Telfi |
| VUXG | (Not Given) |
References
- ^ a b c d Andrews, G. "Dr. Kilcasey in Space: A Bio-bibliography of James White". Retrieved 2008-12-17.
- ^ ""James White"", Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 261, British Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers Since 1960, Gale Research Publications, retrieved 2008-12-17
- ^ James White (July 1982). "Accident". Futures Past. Del Rey. ISBN 0345304330.
- ^ a b c d e f Dave Langford (1983), "James White and Sector General", White Dwarf, retrieved 2008-12-18 Also at Dave Langford. "Critical Mass". Retrieved 2008-12-18.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l James White (1962). Hospital Station. Ballantine.
- ^ a b James White (1985). Star Healer. Ballantine.
- ^ a b c d James White (1979). Ambulance Ship. Ballantine.
- ^ a b Brian M. Stableford (2004), "James White", Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction Literature, Scarecrow Press, pp. 385–386, ISBN 0810849380, retrieved 2008-12-18
- ^ a b James White (March 1993), "Full Time Hobbyist (interview)", Locus, retrieved 2008-12-18
- ^ a b James White (1963). Star Surgeon. Ballantine.
- ^ James White (1971). Major Operation. Ballantine.
- ^ a b c James White (1983). Sector General. Ballantine. Cite error: The named reference "White1983Sector General" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k James White (1987). Code Blue - Emergency. Ballantine.
- ^ a b c d James White (1992). The Genocidal Healer. Ballantine.
- ^ James White (1996). The Galactic Gourmet. Ballantine.
- ^ James White (1997). Final Diagnosis. Tor Books.
- ^ James White (1998). Mind Changer. Tor Books.
- ^ James White (1999). Double Contact. Tor Books.
- ^ James White (2001). Beginning Operations. Tor Books. ISBN 0312875444.
- ^ James White (2002). Beginning Operations. Orb Books. ISBN 0312877706.
- ^ James White (2003). General Practice. Orb Books. ISBN 0765306638.
- ^ James White (1999). Tales of Sector General. Science Fiction Book Club . ISBN 0739401599.
- ^ {{citation | author=James White | title=Occupation: Warrior | magazine=Science Fiction Adventures | issue=7 |date=February 1959 }
- ^ Alan E. Nourse (2008). Star Surgeon. Bastian Books. ISBN 0554256002. Retrieved 2008-12-18.
- ^ a b Clinton Lawrence. "Double Contact (review)". Retrieved 2008-12-18.
- ^ a b c Mike Resnick (1996), "Introduction", The White Papers, NESFA Press, ISBN 0-915368-71-4, retrieved 2008-12-18
- ^ a b Gary Westfahl (2002). "Doctors' Ordeals: the Sector General Stories of James White". No Cure for the Future: Disease and Medicine in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 111. ISBN 0313317070. Retrieved 2008-12-18.
{{cite book}}: Unknown parameter|editors=ignored (|editor=suggested) (help) - ^ John Clute (2003), "Introduction", General Practice, Orb Books, ISBN 0765306638
- ^ Todd White. "Mind Changer (review)". Retrieved 2008-12-18.
- ^ Publishers Weekly http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Changer-Sector-General-Novel/dp/0812541960, retrieved 2008-12-18
{{citation}}: Missing or empty|title=(help) Summarized at "Singularity: An Online Review of Books: December 1999 / January 2000". Retrieved 2008-12-18. - ^ Booklist http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Changer-Sector-General-Novel/dp/0812541960, retrieved 2008-12-18
{{citation}}: Missing or empty|title=(help) Summarized at "Singularity: An Online Review of Books: December 1999 / January 2000". Retrieved 2008-12-18.
Further reading
- Gary Louie. "Sector General Timeline". Retrieved 2008-12-18.
- Gary Louie. "The Classification System". Retrieved 2008-12-18.