The second omnibus of James White’s Sector General books is Alien Emergencies, which includes Ambulance Ship, Sector General, and Star Healer. (The first omnibus was Beginning Operations.) Despite all the little things that bother me about these books, they’re still up at the top of my comfort reading list.
I hadn’t read any of these before, but unfortunately I knew the punchline to several from subsequent books. This tends to remove some of the interest, which isn’t helped by the larger-than-usual suspension of disbelief required for a couple of these stories. (If you haven’t read the short story “Spacebird” before, don’t read the introduction to Ambulance Ship. The introduction sums up Sector General as it was at that point, and was written for a collection that didn’t include “Spacebird”; it thus spoils the story quite thoroughly.) Of the ones I didn’t know the solution to, I particularly liked the opening story in Sector General, a story of the hospital’s inspiration that, not surprisingly, takes a strongly integrationist stand on learning to deal with The Other. The concluding story of that book, one of the large-scale problems Sector General is sometimes faced with, is also quite fun. I also really enjoyed just about all of Star Healer, which is Conway learning to be a Diagnostician. (The bit I didn’t like is when it extends the weird sexism of an earlier book to all females, not just Earth-human ones; this gets ignored late in the series, suggesting that White Had a Better Idea.)
Reading a number of these brings up problems besides spoilers. The stories were obviously meant to stand alone; this is completely understandable, but it means that the classification system (why humans are DBDGs), and Rhabwar, and the Monitor Corps, and Sector General itself, have to be explained in each story (not each book; it looks like they don’t stop being fixups until Star Healer). And White does not shy from blatant infodumping, often in language nearly-identical to the last several times someone had to explain it.
Character development is, frankly, a little sketchy as well, but improves somewhat in these books. The series progresses in real time, which isn’t immediately obvious (yes, Conway and Murchison are smart, but they’re not so smart that it hasn’t taken them twenty-odd years to get near the top of their fields). I think the aging of the characters either gives a little more opportunity for us to learn about them, or gave the author a plausible reason to tweak or fill in some details. Or both.
Even with those caveats, I’m still very glad to have read this. Kudos to Tor for getting and keeping this in print via their Orb line. Now if only I could find myself that copy of Code Blue—Emergency I’ve been looking for . . .
We’ll do a third omnibus next year, comprising Code Blue–Emergency and The Genocidal Healer. At which point, between our three Orb omnibuses and the four SG novels Tor published originally, the entire SG series will be in print, hooray.
Hooray indeed–that’s great news. For some reason I thought there would only be two collections; thanks for correcting my misapprehension.