I was home sick Thursday, without sufficient brain power to read anything new or difficult, but wanting something I could dive into to take my mind off being sick. I started with the seventh and eighth of James White’s Sector General novels, Code Blue—Emergency and The Genocidal Healer (in the omnibus General Practice), and ended up plowing my way through all the rest of them: The Galactic Gourmet, Final Diagnosis, Mind Changer, and Double Contact.
They are, as you can see, very fast re-reads for me.
One thing I noticed on this re-read is the voice. Though the trappings of tight-third POV are there, such as a non-Earth-human noticing that an Earth-human’s face “deepened in color” instead of “reddened with anger,” the tone of the narration seems basically constant to me. This isn’t a criticism, just something that contributes to the speed of my re-reading.
I’m inclined to call Code Blue—Emergency and The Genocidal Healer the series’ high point. Previously, the principal POV character was Peter Conway, an Earth-human doctor; and while I like Conway fine, the two POV characters here are much more interesting (as I’ve discussed previously). After these two books, the series starts getting a trifle repetitive. The Galactic Gourmet is fun, told from the POV of a famous chef who decides to make Sector General’s hospital food good; but its ending section feels a bit overlong. The last three all revisit or repeat prior books; unfortunately, it would be spoilery to say how except for the middle one, Mind Changer, which is O’Mara reflecting on his career as Chief Psychologist of Sector General.
Even with the repetition of exposition as well as plot (and the uncomfortable sexist bits), they’re still great comfort reads, obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t have blown through six of them in a day. I didn’t even think about the curing-the-sick aspect when I picked them up; it’s how the characters make the universe better through determination, intelligence, and empathy.