James White (1928-1999) was a science fiction author from Northern Ireland active from the 1940s to the 1990s, starting with writing science fiction fanzines and then publishing his own stories. He was best known for his Sector General short stories and novels, a Medical Drama series based around a hospital space station in a Space Opera setting.
White wrote primarily stories set in outer space in distant futures, but also wrote some near-future settings and science fiction alternate histories. As a committed pacifist living in Belfast during The Troubles; White deliberately structured many of his stories around medical emergencies and other crises to create dramatic tension not based in violent conflict, often with doctors as the protagonists.
Works by White with their own trope pages include:
Other works by White provide examples of:
- Alternate History: The Silent Stars Go By and also a downplayed Secret History in The Watch Below.
- Artistic License – History: Several instances in The Silent Stars Go By. For example: In a timeline that diverged from reality in the 1st century; countries overlapping with the locations of the real current China and Japan are referred to as "Cathy" and "Nippon" respectively, despite those names not being used in reality until most of a millennium later. Since White's characters are supposed to actually be speaking a diverged form of Archaic Irish Gaelic, this might be excused as a Translation Convention.
- Big Dumb Object: All Judgment Fled is about one appearing in the inner solar system.
- Bizarre Alien Biology: Shows up in All Judgement Fled, The Escape Orbit, Federation World, The Silent Stars Go By, and The Watch Below as well as being the basis for many plots in Sector General (White once complained that whenever he invented a really alien alien "it promptly gets sick and gets admitted to Sector General").
- Crapsack World: Featured for the future Earth settings of Underkill and The Dream Millennium.
- Dyson Sphere: The setting for part of Federation World.
- Escape Pod: Lifeboat tells the story of an emergency evacuation of a passenger spaceship flying to Ganymede and the efforts of the ship's physician to keep the passengers alive and safe in their escape pods until they can be rescued.
- FTL Travel Sickness / Go Mad from the Revelation: Tomorrow Is Too Far features the secret development and testing of a faster-than-light spaceship drive where the test pilots keep coming back in acute psychological crisis.
- Great Escape: The Escape Orbit (also published under the title Open Prison) is about a group of prisoners from an interstellar war trying to escape a prison planet.
- Humans Are Special: In The Secret Visitors, Earth is the only planet in the entire galaxy with axial tilt, changing seasons, and interestingly varied scenery. Human art and music is renowned and envied for its variety and emotional resonance. A human doctor who can perform surgery is also considered a miracle worker in an alien culture that has long prioritized preventing injuries over treating them.
- This contrasts to White's deliberately averting this trope in 'Sector General''. Refer to the series' page for discussion.
- Nuclear Torch Rocket: Featured by White in several of his stories; with the radioactive and explosive potential failure modes invoked in Lifeboat to justify the passengers and crew needing to abandon ship until an automated rescue vessel can reach them.
- Orion Drive: Used in The Silent Stars Go By to propel a Sleeper Starship. It still takes centuries to travel between stars.
- Patchwork Story: White's earlier novels were first published as standalone stories and serials, then later reprinted as fix-ups.
- Point of Divergence: The Silent Stars Go By has as its point of divergence an Irish emissary from the King of Tara visiting Roman Alexandria in the mid-1st-century CE and recognizing the potential of Hero of Alexandria's real-life "aeolipile" primitive steam engine. Ireland / Tara has an industrial revolution and becomes the most powerful nation of the next millennium. By the alternate 1492, technology has progressed to the point of launching ships to habitable planets around other stars.
- Sapient Eat Sapient: In The Silent Stars Go By, Nolan's group is chronically on the edge of starvation as they travel across the new planet to the main human base. They cook the recently dead body of an animal they have not encountered before and start eating it. Then its friends show up.
- Sleeper Starship: White used this trope a lot:
- The Dream Millennium is about the crew and passengers of a starship on a thousand-year-long voyage between several star systems. They are periodically awakened by the ship's autopilot to make command decisions and make sure they have not been victims of Cryonics Failure. But then they start dreaming during the freezing and thawing process...
- In The Silent Stars Go By, a global confederation launches a starship with tens of thousands of passengers in suspended animation monitored by crew members who do two-year-long shifts before returning to sleep themselves.
- In The Watch Below, aquatic aliens fleeing the destruction of their world arrive on Earth. There is conflict between those who spent the centuries-long trip sleeping and the Generation Ship crew.
- Twist Ending: At the end of The Silent Stars Go By, we learn that the prototype faster-than-light drive the starship's captain built but has not yet used actually displaces you both in space and between timelines.
