Hospital Station

I have not been into medical fiction - not in a long, long, long time, at any rate. The first time I attempted to read medical fiction, I'd grabbed the first Robin Cook novel I laid eyes on, and after three chapters I gave up on it. It could simply have been that I picked the wrong book, or that I picked the wrong author, but it kind of turned me off of medical-related fiction for a good long while. To be fair, it might have just been because I was twelve or thirteen at the time, and hence really not all that appreciative of medical fiction in the first place - despite a (slowly-fading) desire to be a doctor at the time.

Recently, though, I discovered James White's Sector General series, mostly because I stumbled on the short story collection Hospital Station. I'd just gotten back into old-school sci-fi thanks to reading Ender's Game, so I was already on the lookout for relatively similar material, and also the idea behind the series intrigued me: a giant space hospital staffed by a wide (and I do mean wide) variety of doctors and other medical staff, who service an equally wide variety of patients.

Hospital Station isn't precisely a novel: in fact, it's a collection of five short stories set in the Sector General world, which White published in New Worlds magazine. It might seem odd to start a series with a collection of short stories, but I think there could be no better way to do it - or at least in the case of the Sector General series, White uses the short story form to great advantage to introduce his world to the reader without dumping too much information on the reader's head. There is so much to learn, after all, about how the world of Sector General works, that a novel that explains the whole thing might get bogged down in too many explanations. A handful of short stories offering insight into the inner workings of this new world seems a lot more comfortable to the reader than one whole novel.

And a fine, intriguing introduction it is. The sheer variety of doctors, patients, and corresponding habits and habitats is so wide and interesting that the reader just wants to keep on going, if only to find out what sort of “strange beastie” (to quote Major O'Mara, a crucial character in the series) will come through the hospital's space locks next, and how the doctors of Sector General will respond. Although the hospital's population of both doctors and patients covers a wide range of species, entirely new species will often come through the locks looking for medical help, and then the doctors have to go in blind, trying to figure out how to help a species they know nothing about.

Another hallmark of this book (and of the rest of the series, apparently) is the deep dedication to pacifism that many of the characters adhere to. Many real-life doctors are opposed to the idea of war on principle, but it's how Sector General seems willing to open its locks to absolutely anyone that really fascinates me. As I mentioned earlier, it doesn't matter to the doctors of Sector General what species the patient is; what matters more to them is saving the patient's life.

The main character for most of the stories except for “Medic” (which is headlined by O'Mara) is Dr. Conway, who is interesting for his ability to think quickly in many tight situations. My main problem with him, though, is that I think his leaps of logic are simply too large, and there are no proper explanations made for why he makes the conclusions that he arrives at. This could be a problem of the copy I'm reading, or it could be my lack of medical knowledge - though the latter really shouldn't be a problem, since most good sci-fi will explain things enough that the whole thing is comprehensible enough for someone who has even a basic understanding of the concept being used.

At this stage, my favorite character, hands-down, has to be O'Mara. He reminds me so much of Bones from Star Trek it makes me giggle sometimes. He's Chief Psychologist at Sector General, and is known for his blunt, abrasive, and supremely sarcastic manner when dealing with the people under his charge (meaning, the hospital's entire staff). He claims his primary job is “to shrink heads, not expand them,” and the rest of the staff liken him to “a modern-day Torquemada” (or at least those races that have an equivalent for Torquemada do so), but I think that's hardly complimentary, given who Torquemada was and what his role was in the creation and implementation of the Inquisition. Then again, those likening him to Torquemada probably weren't being complimentary.

All in all, this is an incredibly promising intro to a new series. I'm about to start on the second book (and first novel), Star Surgeon, and already I'm looking forward to how Dr. Conway, Major O'Mara and the rest of the people at Sector General handle the cases headed their way. Hopefully the experience will be just as much fun as this first one.