Not Just E.R. With Aliens
Nov. 22nd, 2005 10:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvessel23 Oct 2005
Double Contact - James White - Tor, 1999
* * * * *
This is the second of my US imports. James White is another of those writers whose books, like Lois McMaster Bujold's, are readily available in any US bookstore but for some unaccountable reason are almost unobtainable here. He was a Northern Irish author who started in the golden age of science fiction in the 1950s and is most famous for his sequence of novels about Sector General, a huge multi-species space hospital which, to quote Dave Langford, "is one of the few places in SF that one would really, really like to exist". The reason for this is the harmonious and funny interactions between the aliens that make up Sector General's medical team and the optimistic idea that all intelligent, civilised species would turn out to share a common sense of decency and moral standards - once some initial communications and practical difficulties have been overcome, that is. Those difficulties form the motor of this, the last Sector General book that White would live to write.
The chief viewpoint character is Prilicla, a fragile cinrusskin whose unique survival mechanism is an ability to detect and respond to emotional radiation. This makes him an extremely effective diagnostician but also a total coward with a dislike of intense emotion. When two distress beacons are received from the same area of space, Prilicla is dispatched in the emergency ship Rhabwar with a human pathologist (Murchison), a shape-changer nurse and a Kelgian who is completely incapable of lying. What they encounter is the human survey vessel Terragar which, despite apparent malfunction and serious injury to the crew, unaccountably does not want the Rhabwar to approach. The crew even goes so far as to send their ship into a fatal dive through the atmosphere of a nearby planet when the Rhabwar tries to lock on to them. And there is also an unknown alien ship which is in need of help...
The Terragar crew's apparently suicidal behaviour is just the first of a number of mysteries about the situation that Prilicla and his crew must investigate. Each is skilfully introduced and resolved; White is particularly good at creating mini-cliffhangers at the end of each chapter that make the book very hard to put down. Prilicla must use all his diplomatic and empathic skills to resolve tensions between the new aliens, the Terragar humans and his own crew, particularly Fletcher, the ship's commander, who has a different agenda from the medical team. Prilicla's diplomatic subtlety is convincing , coming as it does from the character conception and our understanding of his point of view that arises from the fact that most of the book is seen through his eyes and thoughts. This makes for some nice science-fictional surprises as of course Prilicla does not share our interest in human appearance or behaviour - to take a minor example, earth human genders mean very little to Prilicla (who refers to all humans as "it"), so when in the course of an altercation Fletcher calls Murchison "Ma'am" I suddenly had to rearrange my mental image from male to female. In the process making me aware of my inbuilt gender assumptions. It's not often that you see non-SF writers managing to pull off such a trick, and only then by some usually tricksy and pretentious writing.
James White's style, while somewhat rough-hewn and inelegant like that of Asimov, Clark and other golden age SF writers, is full of dry humour - "the captain used an earth-human expression that his translator refused to accept" - which disguises the fact that this is a strongly moral book. White's position is that xenophobia of any sort, whilst a natural product of evolution and history, is a loathsome evil that has to be eradicated and that anyone who wishes to be called civilised and decent must fight against it. The Sector General universe appears to have a benign and peaceful government (at least in this book), but its exploratory division, the Monitor Corps, will not hesitate to quarantine a xenophobic species until it no longer poses a danger to other beings. This view must have been inspired by White's experiences in his home country, where too many people still believe that "the other" is your Protestant or Catholic neighbour, but also has scary relevance to our relations with the Islamic world.
So this is not just E.R. with aliens - lurking behind the humour and the story there is a message, which is that if we want to progress as a society or a species, we should all employ our emotional intelligence and learn to get along with the other.
Double Contact - James White - Tor, 1999
* * * * *
This is the second of my US imports. James White is another of those writers whose books, like Lois McMaster Bujold's, are readily available in any US bookstore but for some unaccountable reason are almost unobtainable here. He was a Northern Irish author who started in the golden age of science fiction in the 1950s and is most famous for his sequence of novels about Sector General, a huge multi-species space hospital which, to quote Dave Langford, "is one of the few places in SF that one would really, really like to exist". The reason for this is the harmonious and funny interactions between the aliens that make up Sector General's medical team and the optimistic idea that all intelligent, civilised species would turn out to share a common sense of decency and moral standards - once some initial communications and practical difficulties have been overcome, that is. Those difficulties form the motor of this, the last Sector General book that White would live to write.
The chief viewpoint character is Prilicla, a fragile cinrusskin whose unique survival mechanism is an ability to detect and respond to emotional radiation. This makes him an extremely effective diagnostician but also a total coward with a dislike of intense emotion. When two distress beacons are received from the same area of space, Prilicla is dispatched in the emergency ship Rhabwar with a human pathologist (Murchison), a shape-changer nurse and a Kelgian who is completely incapable of lying. What they encounter is the human survey vessel Terragar which, despite apparent malfunction and serious injury to the crew, unaccountably does not want the Rhabwar to approach. The crew even goes so far as to send their ship into a fatal dive through the atmosphere of a nearby planet when the Rhabwar tries to lock on to them. And there is also an unknown alien ship which is in need of help...
The Terragar crew's apparently suicidal behaviour is just the first of a number of mysteries about the situation that Prilicla and his crew must investigate. Each is skilfully introduced and resolved; White is particularly good at creating mini-cliffhangers at the end of each chapter that make the book very hard to put down. Prilicla must use all his diplomatic and empathic skills to resolve tensions between the new aliens, the Terragar humans and his own crew, particularly Fletcher, the ship's commander, who has a different agenda from the medical team. Prilicla's diplomatic subtlety is convincing , coming as it does from the character conception and our understanding of his point of view that arises from the fact that most of the book is seen through his eyes and thoughts. This makes for some nice science-fictional surprises as of course Prilicla does not share our interest in human appearance or behaviour - to take a minor example, earth human genders mean very little to Prilicla (who refers to all humans as "it"), so when in the course of an altercation Fletcher calls Murchison "Ma'am" I suddenly had to rearrange my mental image from male to female. In the process making me aware of my inbuilt gender assumptions. It's not often that you see non-SF writers managing to pull off such a trick, and only then by some usually tricksy and pretentious writing.
James White's style, while somewhat rough-hewn and inelegant like that of Asimov, Clark and other golden age SF writers, is full of dry humour - "the captain used an earth-human expression that his translator refused to accept" - which disguises the fact that this is a strongly moral book. White's position is that xenophobia of any sort, whilst a natural product of evolution and history, is a loathsome evil that has to be eradicated and that anyone who wishes to be called civilised and decent must fight against it. The Sector General universe appears to have a benign and peaceful government (at least in this book), but its exploratory division, the Monitor Corps, will not hesitate to quarantine a xenophobic species until it no longer poses a danger to other beings. This view must have been inspired by White's experiences in his home country, where too many people still believe that "the other" is your Protestant or Catholic neighbour, but also has scary relevance to our relations with the Islamic world.
So this is not just E.R. with aliens - lurking behind the humour and the story there is a message, which is that if we want to progress as a society or a species, we should all employ our emotional intelligence and learn to get along with the other.