Alien Emergencies - James White [0]
Introduction by David Langford
The Secret History of Sector General
Ambulance Ship
Part 1: Spacebird
Part 2: Contagion
Part 3: Quarantine
Part 4: Recovery
Sector General
Accident
Survivor
Investigation
Combined Operation
Star Healer
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Introduction
By David Langford
Sector Twelve General Hospital is one of the most charming and intelligently wish-fulfilling conceptions in science fiction, and its Irish creator James White—tall, bespectacled, balding, soft-spoken and eternally self-deprecating—was himself something of a charmer. Not merely a nice man, he was the cause of niceness in others. No one in the SF community could ever dream of being horrid to James.
While others joined literary or fan factions and entangled themselves in heated feuding, James could be found at British conventions solemnly inducting qualified attendees—those who like himself were several inches over six feet—into the S.O.P.O.A.H. or Society Of Persons Of Average Height. A luckily short-sighted few had the further credentials required for admission to the inner circle, the S.O.P.O.A.H. (W.G.) (With Glasses). Naturally James continued to treat the inner circle, the outer circle and the great unwashed masses beyond with identical benevolence, which somehow lent all those other embattled in-groups the same aura of gentle silliness.
James was and is much loved as a science fiction writer. I fondly remember scouring British bookshops in the 1960s for instalments of his Sector General space-hospital saga, which in those days was appearing in maddeningly brief instalments in E. John Carnell’s original anthology New Writings in SF, later edited by Kenneth Bulmer. The last to feature there was the first story in this volume, “Spacebird” from Bulmer’s New Writings in SF 22, published in 1973. British fans of Sector General had a long wait for this xenobiological extravaganza’s inclusion in the 1980 Ambulance Ship. Americans had to wait longer still—until now, in fact—since the 1979 US version of Ambulance Ship omitted “Spacebird.”
As every SF reader should know, Sector Twelve General Hospital is a huge interstellar construction built in a spirit of glorious idealism by many co-operating galactic races, with its 384 levels equipped to simulate the home environment of any conceivable alien patient. Conceivable, that is, to the builders’ imaginations. From the outset James gleefully harassed his Sector General medics with a steady stream of inconceivables and seeming-impossibles, ranging in size from an intelligent virus and spacefaring barnacles, via beasties without hearts who must keep rolling forever to prevent their circulation from halting, and a levitating brontosaur called Emily, to “macro” life-forms like the miles-long Midgard Serpent which is discovered scattered through space in dismantled form and must be painstakingly reassembled, or the continent-sized inhabitant of planet Meatball whose treatment in Major Operation requires not so much surgery as military action.
In short, Sector General is the definitive medical SF series. Its precursors include L. Ron Hubbard’s moderately dire Ole Doc Methuselah stories and the competent hackwork of Murray Leinster’s Med Service tales. It may perhaps have helped inspire Piers Anthony’s amusing exploits of an interstellar dentist in Prostho Plus. Nothing else in the genre is at all comparable.
To call these stories’ repeated pattern of medical mystery and elucidation a formula is far from being a put-down. As with detective fiction, the basic pattern offers scope for endless variations limited only by ingenuity and narrative sleight, with James’s lifelong fascination with medical techniques clearly visible throughout. There’s even room in Sector General for G. K. Chesterton’s favourite mystery trope of the Happy Surprise, whereby suitable