The doctor and the planet

kw: book reviews, science fiction, medicine, space aliens, space fiction

The third novel in the omnibus volume Beginning Operations by James White, Major Operation, opens with a careful doctor suddenly becoming error-prone. This leads to the discovery that an instrument in the operating room is either illusory or malleable in shape. Eventually, a mind-malleable "tool" is found that in some way came with a patient, an explorer who'd briefly landed on an odd planet called Meatball.

One may think that this mystery has tested Dr. Conway to the limit; it has certainly tested the quality of his relationship with the psychologist, O'Mara…but everything seems to test that. But to the author, it is just a warming-up exercise. Soon Conway, his favorite nurse Murchison (whom, we find almost accidentally, he has married) and a collection of military pilots and aides are at Meatball, where two intelligent species are contacted, although "contact" is stretching the point when the sentient creature in question is the size of Florida or India.

The continental-scale creatures happen to be suffering from radiation poisoning caused by the new technology of the other species. They've been using atomic bombs to clear areas they wish to settle. The bulk of the book details the double effort to perform continental-scale surgery—taken up by a military force under Conway's orders—while Conway himself burrows into the creature to make more definite contact and elicit cooperation. I can't imagine what kind of challenge might top this one, but the author has a better imagination than I do: after this 1971 novel, he published nine more until his death in 1999.

Having gotten a grounding in the Sector General universe, I find several ideas that seem to be unique to James White. First is a well-worked out classification scheme for sentient species. It revolves around a four-letter code, and is explained at least once in each novel (of these three). The major elements are these:

• The first letter denotes the physical evolution, such as oxygen-breathing (like terrestrial animal life), water-breathing (fishlike), chlorine-breathing, and several other classifications such as superheated steam-breathing, plus the "ESP" catch-all V, for telepathic species, whatever they breathe.
• The second letter indicates the type, number and distribution of limbs (arms, legs, tentacles, wings, etc.).
• The other two letters classify the diet/metabolism and gravity/pressure requirements.

On this scale, earth humans are DBDG, although so are red-furred, bearlike (though upright) folks; AUGL refers to brainy, armored fishes the size of whale sharks. A mosquitolike empath that could have been classified with the Ixxx series, instead is a VDLG.

Second is creative use of gravity. Many writers make use of a technology that creates artificial, tunable gravity, many use force fields for repelling asteroids and other space junk, and still more imagine "tractor beams" that can attract or attach. White makes all three the product of the same technology, and provides the Rattler, a technique for rapidly switching between attractive and repulsive forces, with intensities up to 100G. It can be used to tear pieces off an enemy ship, for example, or to shake the whole ship and rattle the brains of its occupants. It is also useful for mincing almost any material. For a while it seemed the rattler violated Newton's third law, but in a late scene, the mountings of a rattler installation are being damaged, indicating that the forces felt at the "end" of the "beam" are transmitted to its source. That means you have to be heavier and stronger than something you want to shake to pieces.

Finally, the Federation culture is whole-heartedly pacifist, and its many species seem to be trained in xenophilic ways, so that Dr. Conway and the others can work with big mosquitos, six-legged elephants, hallway-filling caterpillars, brainy squids, and many-legged, chlorine-breathing aliens that most authors would dub "horrors," but who are here called "colleagues". A most amusing sequence from the second novel (Star Surgeon) involves a prune-like telepath (also prune size), whose "space suit" bears quite a resemblance to a mayonnaise jar, who is attempting to evoke the latent telepathic and teleporting talents of a brontosaurian specimen of minimal IQ. Dr. Conway must cope with the itch in his head from the telepath's attempts to "encourage" his subject. Later he learns to dodge a teleporting brontosaur who is learning to control his new skills.

One detail I find odd: to get from one section of the hospital satellite to another, one might need to pass through various environments, donning various protective suits along the way. I think it would be cheaper to have sets of parallel corridors between like environments, so that a chlorine-breathing doctor need never leave a chlorine atmosphere until her services are needed in a non-chlorine environment. And so forth.

All of the individual Sector General novels are out of print. A quick look at Amazon shows that there are several omnibus volumes that cover most of the titles, and plenty of used copies for sale. For reference of the enthusiast, the twelve Sector General titles are: Hospital Station (1962), Star Surgeon (1963), Major Operation (1971), Ambulance Ship (1979), Sector General (1983), Star Healer (1985), Code Blue—Emergency (1992), The Genocidal Healer (1992), The Galactic Gourmet (1996), Final Diagnosis (1997), Mind Changer (1998), and Double Contact (1999).