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rushthatspeaks) wrote2011-04-12 03:17 am
rushthatspeaks) wrote2011-04-12 03:17 am
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The Genocidal Healer, James White (365 Books, Day 225)
Multiple people have told me on multiple occasions that this is the best of James White's Sector General series, and I have to say I agree. This is a lovely book.
The title is misleading, but I have no idea what else it could be called. At the Sector General Hospital, which is a hub of medicine for many, many species, the brilliant doctor Lioren has to deal with having made a mistake which did, in fact, basically wipe out a planet. He wants to die, but the courts refuse to kill him. The book's primary concern is Lioren trying to figure out what to do with himself, now, and what to do with his guilt, and the way everyone treats him. And Lioren isn't human, either, he's an alien and he has a plausibly alien mindset, which means he's not dealing with this quite the way a human being would.
This has all the pleasures of the two other books in its series I've read (The Galactic Gourmet and Code Blue: Emergency). I recommend reading both of those first, because there are recurring characters who were lent emotional resonance here by my previous awareness of them, but you could certainly read this as a standalone and I don't think that would actively hurt anything. It has the alien medicine with its unique and peculiar issues (how do you do surgery on an octopus the size of the Titanic?), the sense of problems as solvable, the large and complex wrangle of cultures: but unlike the other two, this one also has at its heart a genuine moral dilemma without an immediate answer, and I found the ending both unexpected and obviously right.
This is also structurally more of a piece than the other two, more evidently constructed as a novel instead of a fixup from short stories, and as a result its pacing is genuinely good. It manages the trick several times of switching ongoing problems suddenly without resolving the initial set of issues-- so that it feels as though this ought to be a series of cliffhangers, except that the new things that start happening are so interesting that it isn't annoying to wait for more about the previous, and therefore the resolutions to the various problems can cascade and interlock. I frequently find structures that depend on repeated cliffhangers aggravating because usually one thread is more intriguing or suspenseful and you have to wait for it to come round again, but not here.
It's fascinating seeing a difference in quality like this in the same writer, the same series, the same characters-- it's as though someone gently turned a dial somewhere from the setting marked Awesome Comfort Read to the setting marked Actual Novel. Of course that someone was James White, and I'm glad he did it, once. This book makes me happy.
The title is misleading, but I have no idea what else it could be called. At the Sector General Hospital, which is a hub of medicine for many, many species, the brilliant doctor Lioren has to deal with having made a mistake which did, in fact, basically wipe out a planet. He wants to die, but the courts refuse to kill him. The book's primary concern is Lioren trying to figure out what to do with himself, now, and what to do with his guilt, and the way everyone treats him. And Lioren isn't human, either, he's an alien and he has a plausibly alien mindset, which means he's not dealing with this quite the way a human being would.
This has all the pleasures of the two other books in its series I've read (The Galactic Gourmet and Code Blue: Emergency). I recommend reading both of those first, because there are recurring characters who were lent emotional resonance here by my previous awareness of them, but you could certainly read this as a standalone and I don't think that would actively hurt anything. It has the alien medicine with its unique and peculiar issues (how do you do surgery on an octopus the size of the Titanic?), the sense of problems as solvable, the large and complex wrangle of cultures: but unlike the other two, this one also has at its heart a genuine moral dilemma without an immediate answer, and I found the ending both unexpected and obviously right.
This is also structurally more of a piece than the other two, more evidently constructed as a novel instead of a fixup from short stories, and as a result its pacing is genuinely good. It manages the trick several times of switching ongoing problems suddenly without resolving the initial set of issues-- so that it feels as though this ought to be a series of cliffhangers, except that the new things that start happening are so interesting that it isn't annoying to wait for more about the previous, and therefore the resolutions to the various problems can cascade and interlock. I frequently find structures that depend on repeated cliffhangers aggravating because usually one thread is more intriguing or suspenseful and you have to wait for it to come round again, but not here.
It's fascinating seeing a difference in quality like this in the same writer, the same series, the same characters-- it's as though someone gently turned a dial somewhere from the setting marked Awesome Comfort Read to the setting marked Actual Novel. Of course that someone was James White, and I'm glad he did it, once. This book makes me happy.
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I'll want to read this.
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