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rushthatspeaksYet another of James White's Sector General books. These novels set in a multi-species space hospital and centered around problem-solving through intelligence and compassion have quickly become a comfort-read mainstay for me.
This one is unusual in that in the other Sector General books I have read, the protagonist has been a medical professional or a member of the staff in some other capacity. Here, the protagonist is a patient-- a human patient, which is also odd, as Sector General protagonists are frequently something different-- and his medical problem is so outré that he's gone more than half his life with everyone telling him it's all in his head. In addition to his understandable annoyance at the entire medical profession and everyone associated with it on those grounds, he's never interacted with aliens before coming to Sector General, and finds them both frightening and distressing.
In fact, he's the most unsympathetic protagonist I have yet seen in one of these, because he spends a lot of his time being extremely rude either on purpose or accidentally. But White makes him comprehensible enough not to be annoying, or at least only as annoying as he is to the people around him.
The medical problem, as usual, is complex and interesting and requires a lot of thinking around corners; unusually, it's sufficiently complex that the book has no subplots, meaning that unlike several others in the series it must have been conceived as a novel and not a fix-up.
I enjoyed it, of course, although it's certainly not as good as The Genocidal Healer, but saying that something is not as good as an author's best book does not mean it isn't good. It struck me as mid-range, pleasant, reliable performance of the ground White traditionally covers, and if you like his others you will like it. If you don't know whether you like White, I'm not sure this is where you start; my suggestion there is probably Code Blue: Emergency, which will give you White's strengths and weaknesses without having the reading-an-author's-best-book-first-so-it's-all-downhill-from-here problem.
This one is unusual in that in the other Sector General books I have read, the protagonist has been a medical professional or a member of the staff in some other capacity. Here, the protagonist is a patient-- a human patient, which is also odd, as Sector General protagonists are frequently something different-- and his medical problem is so outré that he's gone more than half his life with everyone telling him it's all in his head. In addition to his understandable annoyance at the entire medical profession and everyone associated with it on those grounds, he's never interacted with aliens before coming to Sector General, and finds them both frightening and distressing.
In fact, he's the most unsympathetic protagonist I have yet seen in one of these, because he spends a lot of his time being extremely rude either on purpose or accidentally. But White makes him comprehensible enough not to be annoying, or at least only as annoying as he is to the people around him.
The medical problem, as usual, is complex and interesting and requires a lot of thinking around corners; unusually, it's sufficiently complex that the book has no subplots, meaning that unlike several others in the series it must have been conceived as a novel and not a fix-up.
I enjoyed it, of course, although it's certainly not as good as The Genocidal Healer, but saying that something is not as good as an author's best book does not mean it isn't good. It struck me as mid-range, pleasant, reliable performance of the ground White traditionally covers, and if you like his others you will like it. If you don't know whether you like White, I'm not sure this is where you start; my suggestion there is probably Code Blue: Emergency, which will give you White's strengths and weaknesses without having the reading-an-author's-best-book-first-so-it's-all-downhill-from-here problem.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-16 12:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-16 02:21 am (UTC)The one that would probably set it off least would be Mind Changer, because the protagonist is a psychologist, so he does not interact with physical ailments; the second most okay is probably The Galactic Gourmet, because the protag of that is a chef trying to improve the hospital food, though he does interact with patients in the course of doing that. Either of those would give you enough of a sense of the writing style to know more, I think.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-16 06:10 pm (UTC)