Sector General Omnibus 3 - General Practice
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Authors: James White
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I
n 1987, James White was about to turn sixty. For thirty years, he had been publishing stories about Sector General, a vast, self-contained multi-species hospital hanging like a great Christmas ornament in the middle of space near the galactic rim. Bolted together into loose episode chains, these stories filled six books, which Tor has recently assembled as two large omnibus volumes—
Beginning Operations
(2001) and
Alien Emergencies
(2002). The central protagonist of the six books, an inventive, intuitive, go-it-alone, extremely bright human doctor named Peter Conway, had become loved by two generations of readers. But Conway was aging—a little slower than White or his readers, out here in the real world, but fast enough—and at the very end of
Star Healer
(1985), number six of the pre-1987 volumes, he received his final promotion, to Diagnostician-in-Charge of Surgery. Readers of the series knew that had to be the end of Conway as the point-of-view protagonist of any future volumes.
n 1987, James White was about to turn sixty. For thirty years, he had been publishing stories about Sector General, a vast, self-contained multi-species hospital hanging like a great Christmas ornament in the middle of space near the galactic rim. Bolted together into loose episode chains, these stories filled six books, which Tor has recently assembled as two large omnibus volumes—
Beginning Operations
(2001) and
Alien Emergencies
(2002). The central protagonist of the six books, an inventive, intuitive, go-it-alone, extremely bright human doctor named Peter Conway, had become loved by two generations of readers. But Conway was aging—a little slower than White or his readers, out here in the real world, but fast enough—and at the very end of
Star Healer
(1985), number six of the pre-1987 volumes, he received his final promotion, to Diagnostician-in-Charge of Surgery. Readers of the series knew that had to be the end of Conway as the point-of-view protagonist of any future volumes.
Diagnosticians (as White had made clear from the get-go) were simply too
senior
in the command structure of the great hospital-hive to be heroes; in any case, they were too busy coping with the downloaded doppelgänger minds of various alien physicians—for Diagnosticians had to incorporate other-species skills in this manner, if multi-species medicine were to continue to advance—to do very much
but keep order among themselves. The sight of Diagnostician Conway haring off on a mission would have been about as convincing as watching the laddish Captain Kirk bounce off the walls of that famous Hollywood backlot which stood in for every alien planet in the universe in 1967, the bounces of Kirk contributing significantly to the unique viewing experience which was
Star Trek
in its corseted pomp.
senior
in the command structure of the great hospital-hive to be heroes; in any case, they were too busy coping with the downloaded doppelgänger minds of various alien physicians—for Diagnosticians had to incorporate other-species skills in this manner, if multi-species medicine were to continue to advance—to do very much
but keep order among themselves. The sight of Diagnostician Conway haring off on a mission would have been about as convincing as watching the laddish Captain Kirk bounce off the walls of that famous Hollywood backlot which stood in for every alien planet in the universe in 1967, the bounces of Kirk contributing significantly to the unique viewing experience which was
Star Trek
in its corseted pomp.
White was too clever a writer to commit that error, and he respected his creation—the Sector General hospital complex—far too deeply to treat its chain of command as risible. Conway would now have to do what commanders do: command the chain of command. There would be no orders to flout except his own. As a protagonist, then, Conway was a goner. By 1987, it was time for a change.
The two books collected here as the third Sector General omnibus show just how successfully James White responded to the challenge he had set himself.
Code Blue—Emergency
(1987) is what Brian Stableford, in his introduction to the first omnibus, called a mosaic novel: a series of stories or episodes, whether or not previously published, joined into a loose narrative. (Other terms for this very science-fictional format include A. E. van Vogt’s “fixup,” or “suite,” which I myself would prefer to use in order to describe the essentially sequential nature of White’s assembly-work.)
Code Blue—Emergency
(1987) is what Brian Stableford, in his introduction to the first omnibus, called a mosaic novel: a series of stories or episodes, whether or not previously published, joined into a loose narrative. (Other terms for this very science-fictional format include A. E. van Vogt’s “fixup,” or “suite,” which I myself would prefer to use in order to describe the essentially sequential nature of White’s assembly-work.)
The Genocidal Healer
(1992), on the other hand, despite one detachable flashback episode, is a genuine full-stretch novel, the first full-length tale in the entire Sector General sequence. A few others followed over White’s last decade (he had been a diabetic for many years, almost completely lost his sight in the 90s, and died of a stroke in 1999, 71 years old), but
The Genocidal Healer
is perhaps the most sustained of them all, the most cumulatively energized book he would ever write about Sector General, which is, out of all the venues created over a century of science fiction, the very best place of all for good things to happen.
(1992), on the other hand, despite one detachable flashback episode, is a genuine full-stretch novel, the first full-length tale in the entire Sector General sequence. A few others followed over White’s last decade (he had been a diabetic for many years, almost completely lost his sight in the 90s, and died of a stroke in 1999, 71 years old), but
The Genocidal Healer
is perhaps the most sustained of them all, the most cumulatively energized book he would ever write about Sector General, which is, out of all the venues created over a century of science fiction, the very best place of all for good things to happen.
Let’s digress for a moment, and talk about good.
In the depiction of goodness may lie the real genius of James White, the ultimate goal of all his savvy writer’s tricks and sallies, for it is a terribly difficult thing for an author to make a reader want to know how a good
protagonist can make good things happen in a good place in the middle of a universe filled with species who share, ultimately, the ethos which governs Sector General: that Good is normal, and that the problem of Evil, which may be defined as a lesion on the Good,
is operable
. Evil is a blockage in the flow of Good, which White tended to describe in evolutionary terms. He was an evolution Whig. On the evidence of the Sector General stories, he thought that unhampered evolutionary change generated species whose sentience was essentially benevolent. Evil was a cramp in the river of betterment. Fortunately, from the standpoint of Conway and his compeers, cramps could be operated on, excised. Sector General did not only make unhealthy organisms healthy; it rectified the immorality of blocked evolution, evolution gone awry, as Conway does with the Protectors of the Unborn in
Star Healer
.
protagonist can make good things happen in a good place in the middle of a universe filled with species who share, ultimately, the ethos which governs Sector General: that Good is normal, and that the problem of Evil, which may be defined as a lesion on the Good,
is operable
. Evil is a blockage in the flow of Good, which White tended to describe in evolutionary terms. He was an evolution Whig. On the evidence of the Sector General stories, he thought that unhampered evolutionary change generated species whose sentience was essentially benevolent. Evil was a cramp in the river of betterment. Fortunately, from the standpoint of Conway and his compeers, cramps could be operated on, excised. Sector General did not only make unhealthy organisms healthy; it rectified the immorality of blocked evolution, evolution gone awry, as Conway does with the Protectors of the Unborn in
Star Healer
.
I believe this is why some of us have been reading Sector General stories for most of our lives.
My only personal encounters with White himself were late in his life, after years of diabetes had paled him. He wore thick glasses against the fall of night. He was as thin as a wraith, a wraith smiling. I saw him at a convention, in the northeast of England I believe, in a hotel corridor. We stopped and spoke for a moment. He radiated an almost visible halo of goodness of spirit. Nothing much was said—I think I may have mumbled something about
The Watch Below
(1966), my favorite of his singleton novels—but as he continued on his way, downward saintly to some clamorous event, another thought came to me, a thought about Sector General.
Well
(I thought, more or less)
now I understand Sector General. For it is he.
The Watch Below
(1966), my favorite of his singleton novels—but as he continued on his way, downward saintly to some clamorous event, another thought came to me, a thought about Sector General.
Well
(I thought, more or less)
now I understand Sector General. For it is he.
The challenge was simple, then, in 1987: to back Conway off from the forefront of the action, because he was now too
responsible
to stay there, but to retain all the while the happy kinetic flow toward greater good of the earlier volumes, which Conway had embodied so visibly, with his pertinacious problem-solving mind, and his immensely clever hands. This was vital. White must have known from the first—he was far too clever a
writer not to know pretty exactly what taproots he was sounding—that the strength of the Sector General sequence was rooted in what might be called the Visible Engines of First Sf, the kind of sf written by E E Smith, whose Lensmen series haunts the corridors of White’s magnificent artifact on the galactic rim. In the sf of the 1930s, it was still possible to imagine futures shaped by ornate technologies whose workings could be observed. (Donato’s cover to Donald Kingsbury’s
Psychohistorical Crisis,
Tor 2001, brilliantly evokes, just as Kingsbury himself evokes, the world of an older sf: a world turned by engines of thought and steel, a world you could touch the engine of, a world whose handles turned.)
responsible
to stay there, but to retain all the while the happy kinetic flow toward greater good of the earlier volumes, which Conway had embodied so visibly, with his pertinacious problem-solving mind, and his immensely clever hands. This was vital. White must have known from the first—he was far too clever a
writer not to know pretty exactly what taproots he was sounding—that the strength of the Sector General sequence was rooted in what might be called the Visible Engines of First Sf, the kind of sf written by E E Smith, whose Lensmen series haunts the corridors of White’s magnificent artifact on the galactic rim. In the sf of the 1930s, it was still possible to imagine futures shaped by ornate technologies whose workings could be observed. (Donato’s cover to Donald Kingsbury’s
Psychohistorical Crisis,
Tor 2001, brilliantly evokes, just as Kingsbury himself evokes, the world of an older sf: a world turned by engines of thought and steel, a world you could touch the engine of, a world whose handles turned.)
So it is with Sector General, and the healings it enables. The engines are visible. The great hospital “hangs” out there in the intergalactic dark, all 384 levels aglow to the eye. Hatches gape open to embrace ships from hyperspace. Hatches slam shut. The ships arrive and the ships depart. Sentient beings—all of them described according to the four letter classification system White took straight from Smith, though he revised it in order to shed Smith’s bias to the humanoid—enter the hospital, jostle with other sentient beings along corridors used communally by almost every species in the complex, quarrel (at times), make gifts, interact, heal, are healed. It all happens in the clear. We see it all. If a visitor is sick, it is diagnosed by healers—not by computers, or VR simulacra under invisible remote control, or nanobots—who can do so safely because invisible stuff like viruses does not pass between species in this universe. If it needs an operation, Conway and/or one of his colleagues (usually male) are there, nurses (usually female) at beck, intricate tools in hand or tentacle or proboscis, and get down to work. If that patient’s species and/or ailment was previously unknown, Conway will unpack the maze of unknowing, and will expand the map of the known. If a patient’s problem is psychiatric—though for a long time White banned psychological problems from Sector General, arguing (through his protagonists) that such problems were too intangible for multi-species hospital work—then that psychiatric problem will have been caused, more often than not, as we’ve already noted, by some visible somatic interference, some blockage of the good.
But (I think) White was too honest a writer, and loved Sector General and what it stood for too deeply, to wish to solve the Conway problem by introducing a new and younger Doc Conway to the series, because the ultimate Conway problem, over and above his seniority, lay in the fact that he was a single doctor, and that his main job in life was precisely to do doctor work as part of the intricate Sector General
modus operandi
. All too often, White was forced to give Conway his head as a loner, and to retrofit his rogue exploits into the overall picture. As White’s (and our) sense of Sector General complexified, and as it became clearer and clearer that those who
ran
the great complex were on the same side as those who doctored within it, it became harder and harder to justify loner exploits. The hero of Sector General was Sector General.
modus operandi
. All too often, White was forced to give Conway his head as a loner, and to retrofit his rogue exploits into the overall picture. As White’s (and our) sense of Sector General complexified, and as it became clearer and clearer that those who
ran
the great complex were on the same side as those who doctored within it, it became harder and harder to justify loner exploits. The hero of Sector General was Sector General.
The solution was to introduce characters who—whatever their medical qualifications—had somehow disqualified themselves from frontline doctoring, and who had to come to serve Sector General from, as it were, within. They had to become bureaucrats, which, as old-time readers of the series know, meant that they had to become part of Major O’Mara’s staff. O’Mara is the truculent, impatient, sensitive Chief Psychologist of Sector General, and is the de facto boss of the whole shebang, though it won’t be until the penultimate volume in the sequence,
Mind Changer
(1998), that he becomes its official administrator. It is O’Mara’s central task to ensure that the vast congeries of interacting (and occasionally conflicting) species inhabiting Sector General, staff and patients alike, continue to behave with efficiency toward each other and toward the ultimate goal, which is to bring the greatest good—the good health which affirms the essential goodness of the evolving cosmos—to as much of the galaxy as can be reached. In order to accomplish this task, O’Mara must constantly monitor, interfere with, insult, cajole, console, in short
shake the story loose
wherever there’s a blockage, real or potential. O’Mara is the healer of the hospital.
Mind Changer
(1998), that he becomes its official administrator. It is O’Mara’s central task to ensure that the vast congeries of interacting (and occasionally conflicting) species inhabiting Sector General, staff and patients alike, continue to behave with efficiency toward each other and toward the ultimate goal, which is to bring the greatest good—the good health which affirms the essential goodness of the evolving cosmos—to as much of the galaxy as can be reached. In order to accomplish this task, O’Mara must constantly monitor, interfere with, insult, cajole, console, in short
shake the story loose
wherever there’s a blockage, real or potential. O’Mara is the healer of the hospital.
In
Code Blue—Emergency,
we meet Cha Thrat, a top-notch warrior-surgeon from the planet Sommaradva with lots of agile limbs, an impetuous acuity of mind, and a tendency to solve problems before her superiors have a chance to. As we discover through the neatly linked
episodes of the text, her apprenticeship at Sector General is marked by several episodes in which her ultimate rightness is confirmed, as is her inability to operate within an ensemble. (During the course of the book, she is forced to incorporate a couple of downloaded minds, one of them the formidable Conway’s, which females are not supposed to be able to abide, for reasons White never made particularly plausible; but the implications of her success are not developed in the course of this volume.) At the end of the book, O’Mara seconds her to his own staff, where the congenital jostle of her being may do some good.
Code Blue—Emergency,
we meet Cha Thrat, a top-notch warrior-surgeon from the planet Sommaradva with lots of agile limbs, an impetuous acuity of mind, and a tendency to solve problems before her superiors have a chance to. As we discover through the neatly linked
episodes of the text, her apprenticeship at Sector General is marked by several episodes in which her ultimate rightness is confirmed, as is her inability to operate within an ensemble. (During the course of the book, she is forced to incorporate a couple of downloaded minds, one of them the formidable Conway’s, which females are not supposed to be able to abide, for reasons White never made particularly plausible; but the implications of her success are not developed in the course of this volume.) At the end of the book, O’Mara seconds her to his own staff, where the congenital jostle of her being may do some good.
In
The Genocidal Healer
—a pretty unfortunate title for a tale as full of loving kindness as this—the new recruit to O’Mara’s staff is Surgeon-Captain Lioren of the planet Tarlan, also a being with lots of limbs. Lioren is wracked with guilt, as his cure for a planetary plague has—partly because of the imperious urgency with which he acts upon his diagnosis—almost killed off an entire sentient species. He wishes to be executed, but the medical councils which try him insist (rightly) on exonerating him. O’Mara assigns him to several patients who share one thing: a need to help someone in graver spiritual straits than they are. In the end—it is an ending as technically adept, and as deeply stirring, as the final paragraphs of T. H. White’s
The Sword in the Stone
(1938)—Lioren discovers that, through his sacrificial exposing of his sins in order that others may forgive their own, he has become a priest.
The Genocidal Healer
—a pretty unfortunate title for a tale as full of loving kindness as this—the new recruit to O’Mara’s staff is Surgeon-Captain Lioren of the planet Tarlan, also a being with lots of limbs. Lioren is wracked with guilt, as his cure for a planetary plague has—partly because of the imperious urgency with which he acts upon his diagnosis—almost killed off an entire sentient species. He wishes to be executed, but the medical councils which try him insist (rightly) on exonerating him. O’Mara assigns him to several patients who share one thing: a need to help someone in graver spiritual straits than they are. In the end—it is an ending as technically adept, and as deeply stirring, as the final paragraphs of T. H. White’s
The Sword in the Stone
(1938)—Lioren discovers that, through his sacrificial exposing of his sins in order that others may forgive their own, he has become a priest.
Nowhere in the entire Sector General sequence does the moral wholeness of White’s enterprise come so nakedly to the surface, almost chastening (though for only a moment) the exuberant gaiety of the stories of physicianly healing which make up the heart of the rest. White was a pacifist, and his greatest work was a series adamantly dedicated to a blanket refusal to kill. In his introduction (written a couple of years ago), Stableford notes regretfully that White, who was a native of Ulster, died before the 1999 accord brought peace to his savaged homeland. As I write (in October 2002), that brief peace is at the point of collapse. In the real world, it may be the lesions of Evil are faster than the surgeon. In the world of Sector General, the healing comes in time. White gave us a dream. It is good to remember this dream.
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