Senior Physician Conway is giving a bunch of trainees a tour of Sector General, a vast hospital in space, when he encounters his friend, the empathic and physically delicate Doctor Prilicla. Prilicla is acting oddly and encourages Conway to seek out Chief Psychologist O'Mara, who tells him the big news: Prilicla has been promoted to take over Conway's position as head of the ambulance ship Rhabwar, while Conway is being given the opportunity to try for Diagnostician. First, though, Conway is being sent away to the planet Goglesk to rest, think about his options, and observe the situation on Goglesk.

The Gogleskans are friendly but deeply afraid of physical contact, to the point where even doctors must avoid touching patients. Conway tries to figure out what's going on and what he might be able to do to help, but eventually has to go back to Sector General, where he is assigned many more cases, some of which look hopeless, than he's used to dealing with at once. He's sent to work in the Hudlar geriatric ward, and put in charge of a pregnant Protector (a mindlessly violent creature that must constantly be beaten in order to remain healthy, whose fetus is sentient and telepathic until the moment of its birth). He's also put in charge of several Hudlar patients injured in a horrific accident.

I had meant to read a new-to-me Sector General book but realized after a few pages that this was in the Alien Emergencies omnibus I read (and reviewed) several years ago. Still, I couldn't remember the details very well, so I decided to continue on.

As I said in my first review of this book, I liked that readers got to see Conway doing more than just working. Although, granted, even his rest periods tended to count as work - it's not uncommon for Sector General folks to talk shop during meals. At this point in the series, Conway and Murchison were married, so one of the things that frequently came up was the effect all those Educator tapes had on Conway's ability to interact with (and be attracted to, and have sex with) Murchison. I had forgotten how often sexual attraction was brought up in this book - I understood Conway's concern, and it made sense that his fellow Diagnosticians would want to give him advice and a sympathetic ear, but I still found the Diagnostician discussions about hot female Sector General employees to be irksome.

As much as I enjoy this series overall, its handling of female characters is terrible and very dated. Readers are told that Murchison is the second most knowledgeable pathologist at Sector General, and yet because she's a woman, she isn't allowed to take any Educator tapes, one of the most vital and helpful tools at Sector General. The argument (paraphrased) is that female minds would not be able to withstand sharing space with Educator tapes from donors that didn't share their same sexual interests. Never mind that Conway found himself attracted to a Hudlar female many times his own size and managed to adjust to that. And never mind that several of the aliens in the Sector General series don't have binary genders and therefore wouldn't be contributing Educator tapes based on male donors. Also, why not just have some of the Educator tape donors be female?

Anyway, back to the story. One of the other things I forgot about this book was that the Gogleskans would not be the primary focus. Just as I was getting involved in their story and wondering how White was going to resolve it, Conway was sent back to Sector General. He never returned to Goglesk, although there were indications that Khone, the Gogleskan doctor he encountered there, might eventually come to visit him at Sector General (and might be female? in which case, the reasoning for not allowing women to take Educator tapes becomes even weaker considering the effects of Conway and Khone's telepathic contact).

A bit of quick googling indicates that, if I continue reading the Sector General series, I should eventually encounter Khone again. I'm looking forward to it, but at the same time I'm hoping White doesn't mess it up. The way I saw it, the Gogleskan "problem" was a form of species-wide crippling anxiety, and I've found White's handling of psychological issues to be pretty terrible.

The Hudlar geriatric ward, Protector maternity case, and the aftermath of that accident were all fascinating to read about, although, again, I could see some of White's biases on display in the way he wrote about male vs. female Hudlar reactions after surgery. Also, I found it interesting that, in the Diagnostician discussion about the Hudlar geriatric ward, surgical intervention that might lead to a longer but miserable life was viewed as "doing something" and therefore better, whereas forgoing surgery and making the patient comfortable in its last days was viewed as "doing nothing."

Despite my complaints, I actually enjoyed this quite a bit. I love the premise of this series, and the various medical problems in this volume were interesting, despite my issues with some of White's biases.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

Star Surgeon starts off with Conway treating an alien of a sort he’s never seen or heard of before. It turns out that his newest patient’s species is seen as somewhat godlike by those aliens that know of them. They’re purported to be immortal, and they have a habit of gradually making themselves the supreme ruler of a world, solving its problems (I was left with so many questions), and then leaving. They are always accompanied by a companion of a different species.

Conway’s efforts to treat his patient, Lonvellin, impress it so much that it later insists he help it and the Monitor Corps with a problem it’s having on the planet Etla, which is part of a larger Empire made up of several planets. Etla used to have a thriving population before it was hit by one horrible illness after another. To make matters worse, Etla’s natives are deeply suspicious of beings that look different from them, so they refuse to accept help from anyone except the Empire’s Imperial Representative, who rarely stops by. Earth humans and Etlans just happen to look very much alike, so Conway and the Monitor Corpsmen are able to sneak in, assess the situation, and try to help. Unfortunately, the situation is much worse than anyone realizes and deteriorates to such a degree that Sector General finds itself caught up in an interstellar war.

I think this is my second full-length Sector General novel, although I’ve read a bunch of Sector General short stories. So far it looks like one of the nice things about the full-length novels is that they gave the author the time and space to show readers things that weren’t directly related to solving medical mysteries. Star Surgeon shows readers one of Sector General’s recreational areas (as Conway tries to convince Murchison to take their relationship from “friends, sort of” to “dating and maybe even having sex”), and I learned that there are apparently 218 human (or at least DBDG) women at Sector General, not that we ever learn the names of any of them besides Murchison.

Unfortunately, Star Surgeon turned out to be less focused on medical mysteries and more of a war book. Lonvellin’s medical issues were dealt with fairly quickly, and Etla’s problems were revealed to be less medical and more political (and absolutely horrifying). That left the interstellar war, with Sector General at its heart.

This book’s tone and message reminded me strongly of the story “Accident,” available in the Sector General omnibus Alien Emergencies. The specifics of how Sector General was evacuated were fascinating - in addition to concerns about moving sick or injured patients, every species’ general physical needs (gravity, atmosphere, temperature, and more) also had to be taken into account.

Unfortunately, Sector General’s evacuation and the events that happened afterward were also a bit emotionally draining. Sector General was intended to be a hospital capable of catering to any and every alien species. The evacuation and Sector General’s transformation into “what amounted to a heavily armed military base” (104) were both painful.

Once again, I can’t help but wonder about the economics of the Sector General universe. Money still seems to exist and be necessary, because it took great gobs of money to build Sector General in the first place. The damage Sector General sustained during the battle and the hospital’s evacuation and repurposing should probably have financially wrecked it. And yet it apparently recovered just fine, because there are many Sector General stories and books that come after this one.

As much as I like the idea behind the Sector General series, the books and stories have several recurring problems. One of those problems kept rearing its ugly head in Star Surgeon: sexism. Since the series is usually careful not to assign a gender to any of its aliens, except in one instance where a particular alien species cycles through genders during the course of its life, that means that most of the more blatant sexism involves Murchison, the series’ only named human woman (that I know of).

If Murchison ever appeared on-page without some mention of her appealing physical form or features, it was rare. Also, just like in Star Healer, Murchison requested to be allowed to use an educator tape, only to be shot down by O’Mara.

“‘As for the girls [he means the nurses],’ [O’Mara] went on, a sardonic edge in his voice, ‘you have noticed by this time that the female Earth-human DBDG has a rather peculiar mind. One of its peculiarities is a deep, sex-based mental fastidiousness. No matter what they say they will not, repeat not, allow alien beings to apparently take over their pretty little brains. If such should happen, severe mental damage would result.’”  (132)

And then there was this, said by Murchison to Conway:

“‘I...I asked him to give me [an educator tape], earlier, to help you out. But he said no because…’ She hesitated, and looked away. ‘...because he said girls are very choosey who they let take possession of them. Their minds, I mean…’” (141)

Am I the only one who thinks that explanation sounds uncomfortably sexual? At any rate, while I’m thankful that at least one Sector General fix fic exists, it doesn’t stop the burst of anger I feel whenever I come across things like this in the original books and stories.

Well, even though I hate the series’ sexism, I love its “doctors in space” focus. Unfortunately, this particular book was grimmer and had less in the way of medical mysteries than I preferred. It wasn’t a bad entry in the series, but it wasn’t quite what I was hoping for when I started reading.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

Alien Emergencies was my introduction to the Sector General series. It contained books 6 through 8, so I could have opted to read Book 9 next but instead decided to go back to the beginning, Hospital Station. Although several of the stories do reference each other, Hospital Station is basically an anthology containing five short stories, so I'll be reviewing it as one.

All in all this was...okay. “Medic” and “Out-patient” were good, but the other stories all disappointed me a bit, for various reasons. I'm kind of glad that this wasn't my first experience with the Sector General series. I missed getting to see the full cast of characters I'd gotten to know in Alien Emergencies.

“Medic”

This story introduces O'Mara, the man who later becomes Sector General's Chief Psychologist. Sector General is still in the process of being built, and O'Mara is one of the people helping to put it together. Although he's well-educated in both psychology and electronics, he hasn't yet found an employer willing to look past his craggy face and tough build. Everyone figures that manual labor is all he's good for.

After a Hudlar couple is killed in an accident at the construction site, O'Mara is forced to take care of their baby until an investigation is completed and someone comes to take the baby away. Unfortunately O'Mara knows next to nothing about Hudlarian childcare, and his boss and coworkers, who blame him for the accident, aren't willing to provide much help.

It was kind of weird, considering how they all felt about him, that everyone was okay with O'Mara being solely in charge of a possibly traumatized infant. Yes, there were a few “if anything happens to that child” threats, but why not remove the possibility of anything happening to the baby by putting it in the care of someone people actually trusted?

Anyway, aside from that and some issues I had with the way a stuttering human character was handled, I thought this was one of the two best stories in the collection. I really enjoyed reading about O'Mara's efforts to provide the best Hudlarian childcare he could. All his information came from a book, he didn't have anywhere near the strength of an adult Hudlar, and the baby was too young to give him much feedback. Even so, he did pretty well.

“Sector General”

Sector General is now a functioning hospital. Here we have Dr. Conway's introduction, as well as the introduction of Educator tapes. Dr. Conway has to use an Educator tape for the first time in order to treat Telfi patients. The Telfi are a radiation-eating group-mind, and the Educator tape wreaks all kinds of havoc with Conway's thoughts. Unfortunately, his biases and assumptions about Monitors (space police officers, sort of) keep him from getting help until it's almost too late. This continues to be an issue after a ship crash lands into Sector General and a possibly confused and injured alien causes serious problems with the gravity all over the hospital.

I wonder if this was originally published as two stories? The part with the Educator tape and the part with the crash definitely worked nicely together, but they were distinct enough from each other to confuse me a little. I kept expecting the Telfi and/or the Educator tapes to come up again during the crash portion.

This story was a bit of a mess, to be honest. It felt like White was trying to say something complicated about pacifism and violence, but then it just sort of petered out. I also felt like White took the easy way out with the way he handled the details surrounding Conway's actions at the end.

Conway, a pacifist, was faced with a terrible decision. He tried to go for a middle ground option and ended up doing more than he'd intended. Instead of dealing with the repercussions of this decision, White scaled things back until it turned out that none of it was really all that bad after all. Except that it should have been, because no matter how things turned out in the end, at the time Conway thought he'd done something that went against everything he'd believed and had been taught. There should have been more emotional fallout.

I could sort of see what White was trying to say about Monitors and their work, but it felt like he just tossed a few things out there without properly trying to connect most of it. It was disappointing.

“Trouble with Emily”

In this story, Conway acts as an assistant and guide for a VUXG doctor (the letters refer to the series' being classification system – humans are DBDG). Dr. Arretapec has psi abilities (telepathy, telekinesis, a bit of precognition) and has for some reason chosen a seemingly healthy dinosaur as its patient.

This was the story that inspired the book's cover art, which was actually pretty accurate. The dinosaur did indeed look like a brontosaurus with a spiky tail (one thing I didn't quite understand at first: although it looked similar to Earth's brontosaurus, it was actually a being from a completely different planet). Also, if you look closely you can see a little ball strapped to the man's shoulder. The man is Conway and the little ball is Dr. Arretapec.

Dinosaur lover that I am, I was looking forward to this one. Sadly, it wasn't quite as good as I had hoped. Watching Conway try to deal with Dr. Arretapec's condescending attitude was fun, but Dr. Arretapec's goal turned out to be a bit too big and lofty for my tastes. I also wondered about the ethics of it. On the one hand, the final goal was admirable. On the other hand, those were some pretty major changes Dr. Arretapec and its people were trying to bring about.

“Visitor at Large”

Dr. Conway gains a new assistant, the physically fragile and empathic Dr. Prilicla. Their tour of Sector General becomes more complicated when a young and frightened shapeshifting visitor runs loose through the hospital.

Dr. Prilicla is my favorite Sector General character, so I was really looking forward to this story. I enjoyed seeing Conway gradually adjust to his new assistant, who looked likely to get squashed at any minute but was actually very capable. Unfortunately, although Prilicla did get a chance to show off a little of what it could do, I felt that the character's appeal wasn't as apparent here as it was in the later stories I'd read. Its personality didn't really get a chance to shine.

As far as the visitor went, I had issues with the way that played out. It was during this story that I realized that White has a tendency to present problems with a psychological basis as something patients can get over just by really wanting to do so, or by having the proper motivation to do so. It came up in the first story, in the way O'Mara treated the stuttering human character, and it was the primary justification for Conway's incredibly cruel treatment of the young hospital visitor. It worked out in the end, but it made me very uncomfortable.

“Out-patient”

Conway is now a Senior Physician, which means he has a great deal more responsibility on his shoulders. In this story, he has to treat an unknown being rescued from a wrecked spaceship. He has to use clues from the wreck to try to figure out the being's atmospheric and gravity requirements, and the information doesn't make sense. The patient doesn't have long, either. Although it appears to be relatively uninjured, its whole body is gradually being covered by a tough malignant growth of some sort.

Like “Medic,” this was one of the better stories in the book. It was an intriguing medical mystery that tested Conway's trust in his own judgment and his willingness to make unpopular decisions.

I really enjoyed the medical mystery aspect of it, but I was a bit put off by Conway's behavior. He had only just become a Senior Physician, so his lack of willingness to talk to anyone seemed like an overreaction to his newly increased level of responsibility. I (and the characters) worried that he was so determined to prove himself that he'd accidentally kill his patient because he was afraid to ask for help. Just like in the previous story, it all worked out in the end. The only reason it worked for me this time around was because I felt that Conway had slightly better justifications for his actions here than he did in the previous story, but it still made for harrowing reading.

Additional Comments:

Just like in the Alien Emergencies omnibus, when O'Mara told Murchison that she couldn't use an Educator tape because female minds can't handle them, I was annoyed with the way female medical staff were written about in this book. For one thing, there was really only one confirmed female character, Murchison. For another, at the end of “Trouble with Emily” there was this exchange:

“O'Mara had paused then, shook his head wonderingly and went on, 'Not only do you get on exceptionally well with e-ts, but I don't hear a single whisper on the grapevine of you chasing the females of our species...'

'I don't have the time,' said Conway seriously. 'I doubt if I ever will.'

'Oh, well, misogyny is an allowable neurosis,' O'Mara had replied, then had gone on to discuss the new assistant.” (112)

This conversation made me raise my eyebrows for multiple reasons. Sector General is a place with extremely diverse patients and staff members - even unconscious biases could get a staff member transferred elsewhere. O'Mara is one of the primary people who'd be evaluating staff members and their ability to work well with others. And yet he thinks “misogyny is an allowable neurosis”? Also, Conway's statement didn't strike me as being particularly misogynistic. Unless that was supposed to be a bad joke?

This stuff seems to happen most often with O'Mara, so maybe it's just a part of his character. The problem is that, at least in what I've read so far, not one male character calls him out for it, or even thinks about doing so.

All right, there was one last thing I wanted to bring up: the editing. This book's editing was terrible, with typos and misused words everywhere. It became particularly noticeable in the second half. Dr. Mannon's relationship with his beloved dog was viewed by aliens as a possibly “symbolic relationship” (53) or “symbiotic reassuringly” (103) rather than as a “symbiotic relationship,” Conway “talkeed” (134), plus a few other embarrassing mistakes.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

Warning: this review is pretty long.

Alien Emergencies is the second Sector General omnibus and includes either four or three works in the series, depending on how you count them. There's Ambulance Ship, Sector General, and Star Healer.

Ambulance Ship starts off with “Spacebird,” a story set on Sector General, a vast hospital in space. Ambulance Ship continues with stories detailing the first voyages of a specially designed ambulance ship, the first of its kind. True to the spirit of Sector General, the ambulance ship's crew includes not only humans like Senior Physician Conway and Pathologist Murchison, but also Dr. Prilicla, an incredibly fragile empathic alien who looks like a giant insect, and Charge Nurse Naydrad, who looks like a giant silver-furred caterpillar. These hospital employees are accompanied by members of the Monitor Corps, sort of an intergalactic police force. Ideally, everybody should work together in order to solve the medical mysteries they encounter in the best and quickest possible way, but things don't always go quite as smoothly as they should, especially at the beginning.

Sector General includes more stories dealing with the ambulance ship's various adventures. In Star Healer, however, Conway is provisionally promoted to the position of Diagnostician and can no longer be part of the ambulance ship's crew. Star Healer is the only novel-length work in the omnibus, and the only work where Conway is assigned several clinical cases and medical emergencies at once. His patients include: a violent alien that's about to give birth to its telepathic fetus and render it just as mindlessly violent as itself; Hudlars (very strong aliens) critically injured in a horrific accident; geriatric Hudlars whose bodies are deteriorating more rapidly than their minds; and a less time-sensitive case involving the Gogleskans, aliens who have an instinctual fear of physical contact, even with members of their own kind.

While Conway deals with all of this, he also has  to adjust to one of the more difficult aspects of being a Diagnostician: learning to live with multiple alien personalities inside his head. Every Diagnostician permanently possesses at least four Educator tapes, the full medical knowledge of a doctor of another species. Unfortunately, Educator tapes don't just impart medical knowledge, they also include the tape provider's personality, dreams, nightmares, body sense, and more. It's disorienting, to say the least.

All right, now for my review. I bought Alien Emergencies because it was on sale and because I was intrigued by the idea of pacifist medical science fiction. However, I hadn't read the first omnibus and wasn't sure how lost I'd be. As it turned out, there was no need to worry. I adjusted to the world, the characters, and their relationships fairly quickly – the only thing that took me a while to figure out was that Conway and Murchison were either married or dating. It also helped that the stories were mostly set up as relatively self-contained medical mysteries. There were a lot of first contact situations, and the characters often had no more idea of what was going on than I did. Their primary focus was on figuring out the situations and what, if anything, they needed to do in order to help their patients.

I loved the whole “doctors in space” aspect. Even though the cynical part of me occasionally wondered how everything was being paid for and whether anyone at Sector General had ever heard of the word “budget,” I kind of loved how idealistic it all was. Sector General was this enormous place designed to accommodate any and all beings, either as patients or as medical staff. It was built to encourage cross-species cooperation and thereby promote peace, and the inspiration for its construction was a single horrific accident. The Monitor Corps could technically be considered a military force, but their presence in the book was entirely limited to assisting Sector General. There were no trigger-happy Monitor Corpsmen who abused their power, and not even a sense that such people could exist. It was weird, but nice.

Characterization was pretty basic, but I still had a few favorites. Prilicla was a big one. At first, I wondered how it could possibly be useful, considering that it had to keep well out of everyone's way in order to avoid being injured and considering that others' negative emotions could cause it a great deal of distress. However, I came to enjoy the effect that it had on those around it. Everyone made an extra effort to stay calm and reasonable in order to avoid upsetting or harming it, and its empathic abilities turned out to be incredibly useful in pretty much every situation.

Of all the works in this omnibus, my favorites were probably Star Healer and the first story in Sector General. I can't say much about the latter without giving too much away, but Star Healer was my favorite because it was the only work long enough to give readers a more complete picture of what life was like for medical staff at Sector General. I finally got to see Conway try to juggle multiple patients, talk to his patients about adjustments they'd have to make once they were discharged from the hospital, chat with friends during meal breaks, and demonstrate that he had at least a little bit of a personal life. It didn't go quite as far as I would have liked - Conway still felt like his social life mostly consisted of having sex with Murchison, and I was disappointed that one of Conway's cases was left with some significant loose ends - but it was good enough to make me wish the other works in the omnibus had been novels as well.

For the most part, I very much enjoyed Alien Emergencies. That said, it was by no means perfect, and certain aspects of it were very dated and just not okay (FYI, these books were published in the late '70s and early '80s).

One particular story got me to thinking about how disabilities were handled (or not handled) in the series. In that story, blind aliens

Then there was the way women were written. Murchison was the only human female in the whole book, and one of maybe two or three female characters period. The number of times she was described as attractive was ludicrous. And she wasn't even attractive in a specific way – I couldn't tell you what color her eyes or hair were, or how tall she was, or if she had freckles. She was just generically gorgeous in such a way that all human males found her attractive, and White felt the need to repeatedly remind readers of this. To be fair, this wasn't the only thing White repeated. One of this series' other problems was that White copied and pasted certain descriptions and explanations from one story to the next, and sometimes multiple times in a single story.

The mentions of Murchison's attractiveness thankfully eventually decreased in frequency, but there were still moments that made me angry enough that I needed to take a break. The one that sticks in my mind the most was the way Murchison's request to use an Educator tape was handled. Here is what she was told:

“'Absolutely not, Pathologist Murchison! I am well aware that the Educator tapes would assist you in your work. But you and the other females or extraterrestrial female equivalents on the staff will have to continue using your brains, such as they are, unaided. It is regrettable, but you females have a deep, ineradicable and sex-based aversion, a form of hyperfastidiousness, which will not allow you to share your minds with an alien personality which is unaffected by your sexual...'” (375)

Either O'Mara was about to say that women (human or otherwise) couldn't use Educator tapes because they couldn't handle carrying around minds that wouldn't find them attractive, or he was about to say that one gender (female) couldn't comfortably accommodate the mind of another gender (male). Either interpretation is upsetting, the first because it presents women as beings that care more about whether they're considered attractive than men do, and the second because it indicates unexamined problems with the Educator tapes themselves. Did White mean to say that the Sector General universe didn't have a single talented and knowledgeable female doctor who could contribute an Educator tape? At the very least, there could have been OB/GYN-specific Educator tapes provided by female medical professionals whose species aren't always comfortable with males providing that kind of care.

Another area that I didn't think White had thought through very well was the Monitor Corps. Maybe this was addressed in the first omnibus, but I thought it was odd that, in a universe where humans weren't considered the superior beings, the intergalactic police force was composed almost entirely of humans. Why wasn't the Monitor Corps as diverse as Sector General?

So, yes, I had some issues with this series, but I still plan to read more of it. "Doctors in space" really works for me.

Extras:

The book includes two introductions, one by David Langford and one by the author. A word of warning: one of these (I can't remember which) majorly spoiled the very first story in the book and probably several in omnibus volumes I haven't yet read. They were very much written for people who were already fans of the series, so, while they did contain some helpful and/or interesting information, I'd recommend that newbies like myself skip them and read them later.

(Original review, with read-alikes, posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)