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wandering_not_lost's review
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0
Solidly interesting extraterrestrial medical drama...for its time. The thing I love about these books is that despite the semi-permanent 1960-70s views on the human species, the author comes up with continually interesting alien physiologies that the main characters have to untangle. The book is a collection of linked novellas about the characters' episodic adventures attending to interstellar emergencies, and they're comfortable in that you know exactly what you're going to get: disaster/distress call strikes, medical ship rushes to the scene and needs to figure out what the aliens involved need in order to help them. The fun, like a murder mystery, is in figuring out before the main character what the explanation for the aliens' strange behavior or physiology means. Usually it's something bizarre, and that's kind of fun to unravel. The author even makes side mentions that try to break out of human constructs like the gender binary (a character mentions a pregnant individual of a new species, and then corrects the doctor when he refers to them as the "female": "I never said they were female") and disabilities (there's a story about a blind race, though it does focus on them trying to find a seeing race to help them understand the universe, so...eh. )
As with previous books in this series, though, you have to be able to overlook the now-anachronistic way that the far-future hospital and medical corps doesn't have any female doctors or officers (Murchison has now been promoted to pathologist, though I assume her poor female brainmeats still can't handle the species "tapes" that are required for doctors, though...) or hardly anyone without an Anglo-Saxon last name (this one did have a member of the ship crew named Chen, though, so...progress?) Also the way that the men in charge get kind of casually, vocally, irrationally angry every now and then just because they are frustrated or someone proves them wrong. That doesn't age well, but Conway at least notices he does it and apologizes, mostly.
As with previous books in this series, though, you have to be able to overlook the now-anachronistic way that the far-future hospital and medical corps doesn't have any female doctors or officers (Murchison has now been promoted to pathologist, though I assume her poor female brainmeats still can't handle the species "tapes" that are required for doctors, though...) or hardly anyone without an Anglo-Saxon last name (this one did have a member of the ship crew named Chen, though, so...progress?) Also the way that the men in charge get kind of casually, vocally, irrationally angry every now and then just because they are frustrated or someone proves them wrong. That doesn't age well, but Conway at least notices he does it and apologizes, mostly.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Medical content
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