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newnumber6So, I sit here, bored, waiting for my last 3 hour class of the day, so I can get home. To occupy my time, I figured I'd share about the right now. It's called General Practice, and is actually a collection of two books in the Sector General series. The series as a whole is set in a hospital on the edge of the galaxy (or on its doctors on missions elsewhere), which, in addition to treating all kinds of things, also often serves as a 'first contact' point (Because often the first contact with a new alien race is from an ambulance ship responding to a distress call). It's a bit old-fashioned, as SF goes, the writing isn't stellar, some of the characters are a bit cardboard (the main character of the first few books didn't get a first name for quite some time), and so on with a few other flaws... yet nevertheless, I find it's got an odd appeal, a relentless charm, which I attribute to a couple of factors... one being the biology/sociology of the alien species... It's a personal fascination of mine to read about aliens and bizarre life forms and how their biology affects their personalities, and this has that in spades, with many different aliens, from a wheel-shaped creature which must remain in constant motion just to stay alive, to creatures which are perceived as relentless tactless because, to their own species, they are incapable of lying as their emotional states are reflected in unconscious ripplings of their fur.
The other factor is the sort of charming optomism... that radically different peoples can get along, and that intelligent life is basically good. It's one of the few SF series I've read with a pretty well completely pacifistic main character, although given he's a doctor, that's not surprising (the other that always comes to mind, is the Star Pilot Grainger series, by Brian Stableford, which is also relentlessly entertaining and shares some of the same qualities of biological speculation, but is much more cynical overall, although the protagonist is not a doctor, nor does he have any natural reason beyond distaste for violence for being pacifistic)....
Anyway, the Sector General series is by James White....
And that ate up about 10 minutes of time.
The other factor is the sort of charming optomism... that radically different peoples can get along, and that intelligent life is basically good. It's one of the few SF series I've read with a pretty well completely pacifistic main character, although given he's a doctor, that's not surprising (the other that always comes to mind, is the Star Pilot Grainger series, by Brian Stableford, which is also relentlessly entertaining and shares some of the same qualities of biological speculation, but is much more cynical overall, although the protagonist is not a doctor, nor does he have any natural reason beyond distaste for violence for being pacifistic)....
Anyway, the Sector General series is by James White....
And that ate up about 10 minutes of time.
