Review: Star Healer, by James White

[Russ Allbery]

Star Healer
by James White

Series:    Sector General #6
Publisher: Orb
Copyright: 1984
Printing:  2002
ISBN:      0-312-87770-6
Format:    Trade paperback
Pages:     206

Star Healer is the sixth book of the Sector General series, and I think
it may be the first novel in the series that was written as a novel
instead of a fix-up of short stories. That makes it not a bad place to
start in the series if one would rather not deal with fix-ups or
barely-disguised short story collections. There isn't a huge amount of
character development over the course of this series (at least to this
point), so the main thing you would lose by starting here is some
built-up reason for caring about the main character.

This is the third book in the Alien Emergencies omnibus (the book
referenced in the publication information here).

Most of the previous stories have focused on Conway, a Senior Physician
in the sprawling and wonderfully well-equipped multi-species hospital
called Sector General and, in recent stories, the head physician in the
hospital's ambulance ship. Becoming a Senior Physician at Sector
General is quite the accomplishment, and a fine point to reach in the
career of any doctor specializing in varied life forms, but there is
another tier above: the Diagnosticians, who are the elite of Sector
General. The difference is education tapes.

Deep knowledge of even one specific type of life is a lot to ask of a
doctor, as shown by the increasing specialization of human medicine.
Sector General, which deals with wildly varying ailments of thousands
of species including entirely unknown ones (if, admittedly, primarily
trauma, at least in the stories shown), would be an impossible task.
White realizes this and works around it with education tapes that
temporarily embed in a doctor's head the experience of a doctor of
another species entirely. This provides the native expertise missing,
but it comes with the full personality of the doctor who recorded the
tape, including preferences for food and romantic attachment that may
be highly disorienting. Senior Physicians use a tape at a time, and
then have it erased again when they don't need it. Diagnosticians
juggle four or more tapes at the same time, and keep them for long
periods or even permanently, allowing them to do ground-breaking
original research.

The opening of Star Healer is an offer from the intimidating Chief
Psychologist of Sector General: he has a shot at Diagnostician. But
it's a major decision that he should think over first, so the next step
is to take a vacation of sorts on a quiet world with a small human
scientific station. Oh, and there's a native medical problem, although
not one with much urgency.

Conway doesn't do a lot of resting, because of course he gets pulled
into trying to understand the mystery of an alien species that is
solitary to the point of deep and unbreakable social taboos against
even standing close to other people. This is a nice cultural puzzle in
line with the rest of the series, but it also leaves Conway with a new
ally: an alien healer in a society in which being a doctor is difficult
to the point of near hopelessness.

It's not much of a spoiler to say that of course Conway decides to try
for Diagnostician after his "vacation." The rest of the book is him
juggling multiple cases with his new and often conflicting modes of
thinking, and tackling problems that require a bit less in the way of
puzzle-solving and a bit more in the way of hard trade-off decisions
and quick surgical action. Senior Physicians may be able to concentrate
on just one puzzle at a time; Diagnosticians have to juggle several.
And they're larger, more long-term problems, focusing on how to improve
a general problem for a whole species rather than just heal a specific
injured alien.

One interesting aspect of this series, which is very much on display
here, is that Sector General most definitely does not have a Prime
Directive. They are cautious about making contact with particularly
primitive civilizations for fear that spacefarers would give them an
inferiority complex, but sometimes they do anyway. And if they run into
some biological system that offends their sensibilities, they try to
fix it, not just observe it. White frequently shows species caught in
what the characters call "biological traps," unable to develop farther
because of some biological adaptation that gets in their way, and
Sector General tries to fix those. It's an interesting ethical problem
that I wish they'd think about a bit more. It's not clear they're
wrong, and I think it's correct to take an expansive view of the
mission to heal, but there's also a sense in which Sector General is
modifying culture and biology to make aliens more like them.

(The parallels between this and all the abusive paternalism that human
cultures do around disability is a little too close to home to be
comfortable, and now I kind of wish it hadn't occurred to me.)

The gender roles, sadly, continue to be dire, although mostly ignorable
because the one major female character is generally just shown as
another doctor with little attention to sex. But apparently women (of
every species!) cannot become Diagnosticians because they have an
insurmountable biological aversion to sharing their minds with a
learning tape from any doctor who doesn't find them physically
attractive, which is just... sigh. It's sad that someone who could
write an otherwise remarkably open-minded and pacifist series of
stories, in sharp contrast with most of SF history, would still have
that large of a blind spot.

Apart from the times gender comes up, I liked this book more than the
rest of the series, in part because I strongly prefer novels to short
stories. There's more room to develop the story, and while
characterization continues to not be White's strong point and that
space mostly goes to more puzzles instead, he does provide an
interesting set of interlocking puzzles. The problem solved by the
aliens Conway meets on his "vacation" isn't fully resolved here
(presumably that's for a future book), but he does solve several other
significant problems and develops his own problem-solving style in more
depth than in previous stories.

Mildly recommended, particularly if you like this series in general.

Followed by Code Blue - Emergency.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2017-06-05

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>