Jilly Paddock's Blog: Firebird and Brimstone - Posts Tagged "james-white"
Like a giant Christmas tree hanging in space
I'm re-reading the James White Sector General books, having found the omnibus editions. I first read these when they were short stories in New Writings in SF edited by John Carnell in the 70s - I'd buy each book as it came out and devour the latest offering in the saga. I remembered Hospital Station and Major Operation pretty well, but Star Surgeon hardly at all.
For those of you who haven't read them they're about a vast hospital that caters for all the intelligent lifeforms in the galaxy, from water-breathers and sentient plants to beings that exist in frozen methane or eat hard radiation. The central character is Dr Conway, a human who prefers the company of ETs to that of his own kind and has a talent for solving the strange medical problems that get dropped in his lap, from teaching a brontosaurus to fly to curing a continent-sized being of skin cancer. One of the joys of the books is the four letter classification system used to describe the aliens - humans are DBDG, which indicates oxygen breathers and describes the arrangement of limbs, sensory organs, etc. There's a cast of recurring characters, some human, some not, and each tale has a medical mystery to be solved.
James White has a clear, concise style, but I sometimes wish for more description. He was working in a very confined medium - short stories at that time were usually very short - and there are chunks of repeated text to help new readers understand the hospital and how it works, but I don't mind that. The tech level is interesting; the early stories were written long before personal computers and mobile phones, and communication within Sector General is by landline-style phones wired to the wall, and path reports and files are printed on paper. I'm on the fourth book in the series, Ambulance Ship, and people have just begun to talk to each other on screens.
I still love these books and I'm very fond of characters like Prilicla, the fragile, insectile empath and Thornastor, the six-legged, elephantine Tralthan who's head of Pathology. I can see that the tales of Sector General were a big influence on my own writing, colouring the way I deal with aliens in my own books.
I met James White once, at an SF Worldcon in Brighton. I remember being red-faced and tongue-tied, blurting out how much I loved his books and thanking him for them. He was professional enough to smile and be kind - a lovely man, whose work doesn't get as much appreciation as it ought to these days. I wish they'd make Sector General into a film or TV series. With current CGI they could do a spectacular job.
For those of you who haven't read them they're about a vast hospital that caters for all the intelligent lifeforms in the galaxy, from water-breathers and sentient plants to beings that exist in frozen methane or eat hard radiation. The central character is Dr Conway, a human who prefers the company of ETs to that of his own kind and has a talent for solving the strange medical problems that get dropped in his lap, from teaching a brontosaurus to fly to curing a continent-sized being of skin cancer. One of the joys of the books is the four letter classification system used to describe the aliens - humans are DBDG, which indicates oxygen breathers and describes the arrangement of limbs, sensory organs, etc. There's a cast of recurring characters, some human, some not, and each tale has a medical mystery to be solved.
James White has a clear, concise style, but I sometimes wish for more description. He was working in a very confined medium - short stories at that time were usually very short - and there are chunks of repeated text to help new readers understand the hospital and how it works, but I don't mind that. The tech level is interesting; the early stories were written long before personal computers and mobile phones, and communication within Sector General is by landline-style phones wired to the wall, and path reports and files are printed on paper. I'm on the fourth book in the series, Ambulance Ship, and people have just begun to talk to each other on screens.
I still love these books and I'm very fond of characters like Prilicla, the fragile, insectile empath and Thornastor, the six-legged, elephantine Tralthan who's head of Pathology. I can see that the tales of Sector General were a big influence on my own writing, colouring the way I deal with aliens in my own books.
I met James White once, at an SF Worldcon in Brighton. I remember being red-faced and tongue-tied, blurting out how much I loved his books and thanking him for them. He was professional enough to smile and be kind - a lovely man, whose work doesn't get as much appreciation as it ought to these days. I wish they'd make Sector General into a film or TV series. With current CGI they could do a spectacular job.
Firebird and Brimstone
Being the blog of Jilly Paddock, writer of S-F and fantasy.
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