No. Not the Nigerian Short story, or the novel by James White, or maybe just a reference to the way sf and futurists usually get it wrong. From Malthus to Gore, from Verne to Stephenson… There may be snippets of truth, but we’re good at getting it wrong.
James White – whose ‘Sector General’ stories I quite enjoyed from the medical point of view, was a hardcore pacifist, so he and I were never going to be philosophically on the same page, had some fascinating concepts — the idea of time travel being a way of space-travel for one, and the idea behind ‘THE WATCH BELOW (even if it was too much like perpetual motion for me) and many of ideas of alien physiology and medicine in the Sector General stories fascinated me. I just wanted an execution more in line with my viewpoints.
I am idly curious: is there a medical sf subgenre beyond White? Is there a rural sf (or fantasy – that is not historical) subgenre – outside of Simak and me (and few Heinlein books)?
I have the feeling that fragmentation may be a coming thing – it’s always been FINDING your niche readers (or writers) that has been hard. Maybe AI – which is good at tailoring will change that.
I’d kind of like Ambulance stories with aliens.
7 responses to “Tomorrow is too far”
I would very much like ambulance stories with aliens. Dad was a medic for thirty years, and told stories, sometimes. I really enjoyed the Sector General books, but no, I don’t think I’ve seen anything else quite like them.
I write rural fantasy. SF is harder to do rurally, unless you count one small tradeship on it’s route as rural… in which case I’ve written that too.
The Stardoc books by SL Viehl are ostensibly about a girl boss practicing xeno medicine, but it seems like they veered away into pulpier plot developments as they went along.
Murray Leinster’s Med Ship stories from the 1960s-1960s with Calhoun and Murgatroyd the tormal. (A beast that provided antibodies for vaccines). You can find them on Gutenberg.
In this century there is Patrick Chiles Interstellar Medic series. I reviewed Chiles here and here.
I am a sucker for the genre.
The only other medical SF series I’m aware of predates Sector General: Murray Leinster’s Med Ship stories. Baen has a collection of them all, but most are in the public domain, and most of those are on Gutenberg. They’re fun puzzle-mysteries, for the most part, though a touch simplistic in their construction (even the novel), and repetitive in terms of describing the Med Ship man’s life and experiences (Leinster knew how to write to the pulp market, and apparently didn’t want to waste time finding new ways to orient new readers to the series premise0.
Jody Lynn Nye has the Taylor’s Ark series which is environmental medicine focused.
There’s Michael Crichton, of course, who drew upon his own training in medicine to write SF. And Rick Raphael’s Code Three is about an ambulance crew on an unlimited speed superhighway.
As far as Rural SF/F, most of my Horror collection, An Atlas Of Bad Roads, falls in that category, and I have an upcoming collection of stories that are mostly set in the Rural Midwest. Outside of myself, there’s this chap named Bradbury you may have heard tell of.
I’m personally very excited by the future of publishing and of niche genres in SF/F. I think that the hammerlock that trad publishers held for so long artificially restricted what was considered acceptable and now that’s fading away authors will be inclined to experiment more. Granted, it may take a while–we’ve been penned in for so long that only the bravest are currently wandering past where the fence once was. But there are already vibrant sub-genres that have grown up during the self-publishing revolution and there are sure to be more. Ambulances & Aliens? Sure, why not.
*shows up here to wave her Dreamhealers series*
Inspired by Sector General, but for xenopsychology rather than biology. Even did some case study shorts.