Alien Emergencies - James White [2]
Meanwhile Conway’s closest friend is the universally popular Dr. Prilicla, a fragile GLNO e-t who resembles a giant and beautiful dragonfly, carries diplomacy to the point of fibbing since its empathic talent makes it cringe from hostile emotion, and likes to weave its canteen spaghetti into an edible cable to be chomped while hovering in mid-air. Sector General’s staff and wards contain countless further aliens, each with their own quirky charm—engaging stock characters in a comedy of humours shaped by exotic racial traits. It’s a running joke that the hottest hospital gossip concerns sexual antics in the methane level whose ethereal, crystalline SNLU patients live at 120–140 degrees below zero.
Thus the sequence offers copious fun and a warm feeling of extended community in addition to its xenobiological cleverness. “Almost wilfully upbeat,” wrote John Clute in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. What it also contains—showing clearly through transparent storytelling that puts on no literary airs—is the compassion and rare anger of a good man. From that first novella in 1957 to Double Contact forty-two years later, it is repeatedly stressed that xenophobia in all its forms is a loathsome disease requiring salutary treatment. The Monitor Corps, this loose interstellar Federation’s tough but kindly police force, hates war and stamps it out ruthlessly with nonlethal weapons like intimidation and sleepy gas. At Sector General’s bleakest hour in Star Surgeon, when the hospital is besieged by a space fleet and under missile attack, the defending Monitors grit their teeth and accept that “fanatically tolerant” medical staff will—must—give enemy casualities the same degree of care as their own wounded.
It’s impossible not to see these gentle stories’ deep horror of war as fuelled by the author’s revulsion at events in his home town of Belfast. Generally he downplayed his feelings, but the shades of melancholy emerged in his 1975 fanzine contribution “The Exorcists of IF,” which miraculously preserved a light touch while mourning the ghosts of an older IF (Irish Fandom) then partly sundered by the Troubles, and which has with some justice been called the finest piece of fan fiction ever written. It is collected in The White Papers (1996).
On a related note, I have a vivid memory of James at the 1992 British national SF convention “Illumination,” held in a Blackpool seafront hotel and featuring a hugely noisy fireworks display on the adjacent beach. Thunderous detonations of mortar shells could be felt as visceral jolts; the vibrations set off car alarms all around the hotel. Amid these terrific bangs and flashes and siren-wailings, James’s plaintive Irish voice murmured into my ear: “They’re trying to make me feel at home.”
A later Sector General volume makes a deadpan gesture to the death-or-glory school of military SF, with war and violence being presented as a sick, enfeebled species’s last remaining means of sexual stimulation. The Marquis de Sade might recognize his own face in that mirror. One early story spoke wistfully of “the diagnosis and treatment of a diseased interstellar culture, entailing the surgical removal of deeply rooted prejudice and unsane moral values…” If only.
It’s worth noting that in the James White universe, outright villains are extraordinarily few. Even that “diseased culture” which despicably attacks the hospital (via armed forces duped into believing it a prison and torture chamber) is rotten only at the top, and