nightmare struggle with intractable wreckage in an increasingly toxic atmosphere, crystallize the need for medical and paramedical expertise that extends over many different physiologies and biochemistries. This plants theseed of Sector General, and of the recurring notion—found also in James’s non-series stories—that being able to give medical assistance to a distressed alien brings a priceless bonus of goodwill to the ever-tricky SF situation of First Contact.
As already indicated, James White was a highly popular SF author and convention guest whom everyone liked and whose kindliness extended even to such loathed creatures (“straight Z’s to ten or twelve places”) as parodists and critics. I happen to know this, because in my wickedness I wrote both a Sector General parody and a critical essay on the series, and each time James replied with a letter too embarrassingly generous for even such an egotist as David Langford to quote.
His death from a stroke in 1999 came too soon—he was seventy-one—but was mercifully quick. A lot of us miss him badly. Reading the Sector General books yet again brings back so many happy memories. It’s hackneyed but entirely true to say that I envy readers who are meeting them for the first time.
The Secret History of Sector General
[Note: This was Originally Written as an Introduction to Ambulance Ship.— Ed.]
For a series that began twenty years ago and has so far run to over a quarter of a million words, Sector General got off to a very shaky start. In fact, had the late and sadly missed Ted Carnell, who was at that time the editor of the British SF magazine, New Worlds , not been desperate to fill a 17,000-word hole which had opened up in his November 1957 issue, the first novelette in the series, “Sector General,” would not have been accepted without literary surgery of a drastic nature.
The birth of the Sector General idea was a natural, if perhaps a premature, occurrence. I had been writing professionally for just over four years and the joins were still showing in my work. But even in those early apprenticeship days I had a strong preference for medics or extraterrestrials as the chief characters in my stories, and gradually both types began appearing in the same stories. For example, in the Ballantine collection The Aliens Among Us there was a story called “To Kill or Cure,” which dealt with the fumbling attempts of a navy doctor from a rescue helicopter to give medical assistance to the survivor of a crashed extraterrestrial spaceship. So it was only natural that a story that dealt with the problems inherent in human beings treating large numbers of extraterrestrial patients in hospital conditions, and aliens treating humans, would evolve.
The novelette “Sector General,” however, had flaws. Ted Carnell said that it lacked a coherent plot; that the principal character, Doctor Conway, simply drifted into and out of medical situations without solving his main problem—the ethical conflict in his mindbetween the militaristic Monitor Corps, which maintained the hospital, and its intensely pacifist medical staff; and that the whole thing was so episodic that it resembled an interstellar Emergency Ward 10 , a very corny British TV hospital series of the time. Comparing that series to my story was surely the unkindest surgical incision of all! He also said that I had spelled efficient two different ways in the story, and both ways were wrong. There were other flaws that became apparent only with hindsight, but these were corrected in the later stories of the series.
But Ted did like the basic idea. He said that the background of the huge hospital in space was one that I should keep going, if only occasionally. He also said that Harry Harrison had called him at his office and was somewhat irritated with me for beating him to the punch with the interstellar hospital idea, because he had been planning a series of four or five short stories with just such a
As already indicated, James White was a highly popular SF author and convention guest whom everyone liked and whose kindliness extended even to such loathed creatures (“straight Z’s to ten or twelve places”) as parodists and critics. I happen to know this, because in my wickedness I wrote both a Sector General parody and a critical essay on the series, and each time James replied with a letter too embarrassingly generous for even such an egotist as David Langford to quote.
His death from a stroke in 1999 came too soon—he was seventy-one—but was mercifully quick. A lot of us miss him badly. Reading the Sector General books yet again brings back so many happy memories. It’s hackneyed but entirely true to say that I envy readers who are meeting them for the first time.
The Secret History of Sector General
[Note: This was Originally Written as an Introduction to Ambulance Ship.— Ed.]
For a series that began twenty years ago and has so far run to over a quarter of a million words, Sector General got off to a very shaky start. In fact, had the late and sadly missed Ted Carnell, who was at that time the editor of the British SF magazine, New Worlds , not been desperate to fill a 17,000-word hole which had opened up in his November 1957 issue, the first novelette in the series, “Sector General,” would not have been accepted without literary surgery of a drastic nature.
The birth of the Sector General idea was a natural, if perhaps a premature, occurrence. I had been writing professionally for just over four years and the joins were still showing in my work. But even in those early apprenticeship days I had a strong preference for medics or extraterrestrials as the chief characters in my stories, and gradually both types began appearing in the same stories. For example, in the Ballantine collection The Aliens Among Us there was a story called “To Kill or Cure,” which dealt with the fumbling attempts of a navy doctor from a rescue helicopter to give medical assistance to the survivor of a crashed extraterrestrial spaceship. So it was only natural that a story that dealt with the problems inherent in human beings treating large numbers of extraterrestrial patients in hospital conditions, and aliens treating humans, would evolve.
The novelette “Sector General,” however, had flaws. Ted Carnell said that it lacked a coherent plot; that the principal character, Doctor Conway, simply drifted into and out of medical situations without solving his main problem—the ethical conflict in his mindbetween the militaristic Monitor Corps, which maintained the hospital, and its intensely pacifist medical staff; and that the whole thing was so episodic that it resembled an interstellar Emergency Ward 10 , a very corny British TV hospital series of the time. Comparing that series to my story was surely the unkindest surgical incision of all! He also said that I had spelled efficient two different ways in the story, and both ways were wrong. There were other flaws that became apparent only with hindsight, but these were corrected in the later stories of the series.
But Ted did like the basic idea. He said that the background of the huge hospital in space was one that I should keep going, if only occasionally. He also said that Harry Harrison had called him at his office and was somewhat irritated with me for beating him to the punch with the interstellar hospital idea, because he had been planning a series of four or five short stories with just such a
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