Lifeboat [Mass Market Paperback]

James White - Dark Inferno

James White is probably best known for his Sector General stories, but his long and varied career included quite a variety of sf, and this is a nice example of the other material. It's hard sf with beautifully drawn characters and social background, a combination which is rarer than I'd like.

The story is set in the relatively near future, during the time of colonisation of the solar system. Mercer reports to his first post as a ship's medical officer, on board a passnger ship bound from Earth to the Jovian colonies. To the passengers he has status as a crew member. In reality the medical officer is considered no more than a glorified steward by the rest of the crew, because that is normally all his job entails on a ship whose passengers are carefully screened for medical problems. But this trip is different, because the unthinkable happens as Mercer puts the passengers through their orientation lectures -- a genuine and very dangerous accident, requiring everyone to take to the lifeboat capsules before the ship's reactor explodes. Now Mercer has to do the part of the job nobody ever expected to be needed -- he has to try to keep the passengers not just alive but sane as they drift in three person plastic bubbles, with no prospect of rescue for several days. Tempers fray as conditions in the pods grow ever more hellish, and Mercer has nothing but a radio channel and a psych manual to help him keep people under control...

The description of the space flight itself is excellent, with some very nice touches such as the scene where Mercer is instructing the passengers how to manually orientate their pods so that they can use the one shot motor to regroup at the designated meeting point. It creates a very believable picture of what might be a real journey. But along with the hard sf there is an interesting plot and superb character building, beginning with Mercer himself, and then gradually introducing the crew and some of the passengers. Most of the book is from Mercer's perspective, but once the main characters are established there are occasional sections from the points of view of other characters, showing the psychological effects of both the unpleasant and worsening physical conditions, and the fear that the rescue ship will not arrive in time. The developing emotional relationship between Mercer and a young widow and her son is particularly nicely done. It's clear at the end of the book that with time they'll probably become romatically involved, but White never pushes the pace of the relationship beyond what's plausible in the situation he describes.

There's some quiet commentary on various social issues of the time this book was published (1972) which are still relevant today. This ability to slip in social commentary without resorting to blatant preaching was one of White's strengths as a writer.

An excellent book, and well worth seeking out.

"It's supposed to be cold and dark, they told us. But this...it's like a black inferno. I keep wanting to tear a hole in the plastic and climb out - it would be worth asphyxiating just to be cool for a few seconds."

- evacuated passenger, herein

White, as a committed pacifist, made a career-long effort to find clever ways of injecting dramatic tension into his plots without glorifying violence. LIFEBOAT, like many of his books, does this partly through having a medic as the chief character - here Mercer, the new ship's doctor of the EURYDICE, one of a handful of ships that make regular runs from Earth to the moons of Jupiter carrying immigrants to a growing colony on Ganymede and materials to Earth's permanent space stations.

Space travel in this near-future has been classified as safe, where old-fashioned fussbudgets like Prescott, the first officer notorious for checking all possible anomalies, are considered tiresome nuisances - until EURYDICE terms out to have a fatally sick component installed as part of its propulsion system, and the drills for evacuating passengers to the escape pods become vital. (The diagnosis of EURYDICE's problem is very well written, from the crew's professionalism to the first cause, which turns out to be that a component of the wrong size was installed - such a major error that once it slipped through inspection, nobody noticed until it malfunctioned.)

The first third of the book introduces the ship, passengers, and problem, up to the evacuation of the EURYDICE. The remaining two thirds cover the problems of having a ship full of passengers stuffed at random into fourteen transparent lifepods, with limited air, merciless exposure to sunlight, and one-way radio communication with the Captain's pod (shared by Mercer, since the Captain is suffering from radiation poisoning that requires immediate treatment to prevent permanent damage). Mercer has to continually cajole, counsel, and comfort the passengers verbally without being able to directly intervene, and without being able to communicate privately with any of them, which is tricky considering some of the human complications of the evacuation.

One pod, for example, is occupied by one man and three young women, while another is occupied by the now-single Mrs. Matthewson and two increasingly aggressive men - and thanks to the transparent pod casings, none of them have any privacy or any escape from continual exposure to heat and light except by shedding excess clothing. Another pod's sole occupant is Mrs. Matthewson's ten-year-old son. Most of the married couples on the trip are split up into separate pods, just to make life a little *more* complicated. Mercer's communications with the passengers have to be *very* diplomatic indeed.

And, of course, the pods have to get clear of the dying EURYDICE, make course corrections at the hands of unskilled occupants, and await rescue without anyone losing control and causing either a fatal accident or a course adjustment that would amount to the same thing.

A lot of background detail has been provided to flesh out the characters. For instance, the late Mr. Matthewson was addicted to a drug that caused something like multiple personality disorder, so that his wife and son are still quite edgy. The Corries lost their own child to a fatal accident (an image that turns up in more than one of White's novels, including THE DREAM MILLENIUM) and are taking jobs on Ganymede to help them forget their troubles. Captain Collingwood's wife also works for the corporation, but back on Earth's launch facility, so Mercer knows exactly how much the Captain has to live for. As for Mercer himself, he's adjusting from being an almost-optional brand-new member of the ship's crew to being essential to everyone's survival.

The front cover reads: `It was just a simple trip to Ganymede and no one paid much attention to the safety rules.'

And the back cover reads: `Disaster! The passengers were the usual varied lot, some nervous, some boisterous, some smart-aleck, some quiet. The ship's Medical Officer was brand new and didn't anticipate having to do much more than take care of a few queasy stomachs and bruises among this charges - from learning how to handle weightlessness. It was a routine trip. And so was the safety drill. Until the disaster call went out.'

While James White is renowned for his Sector General series, this book is not in the same series but also revolves around a doctor character. Only 186 pages, the book should be a quick read but is dragged down by the plot, which reads much like an airline safety pamphlet and is as equally as exciting, poetic and deep. Even when the ship is about to blow and the passengers fleeing to their lifeboats, there is no sense of urgency or excitement. The writing isn't fancy, but rather reads like a teen-agers sci-fi novel with a few big words thrown in to impress those of the directed age group. There is also very little character depth in the main characters (with the exception of Mrs. Mathewson). Taken altogether, the novel is boring as it lacks an artist's or visionary's touch.

At times, there are conflicting statements in the paragraphs like when describing a zero-G water tank with `solid clumps of water' or describing a partition as being `opaque but translucent' or describing centrifugal forces as artificial gravity. The writing seems to have very little reflection and was simply hammered out with attention to detail in one area alone- the flight safety manual. In that sense, the novel was successful is you can look past the lack of climax, prose and depth.