Customer Reviews

Doctor To The Stars

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Doctor to the Stars is a collection of three stories by Murray Leinster. The stories are about a medical doctor who travels between planets solving problems. Calhoun, the hero, is smart and able use his knowledge of medicine to figure out what is going on and what needs to be done. The stories written in the 1950s, and so they are a little dated.

In "The Grandfathers' War" Calhoun tries to stop the ultimate parenting problem when the parents have decided they have to go to war with their children, to save their children. With "Med Ship Man" Calhoun is able to salvage a con man's attempt to buy land cheap when the con man almost destroys a colony. Tallien Three is a bit of a horror story where humans seem to be turning into a creature like a zombie.

The stories are pleasant and well told. They move along and are entertaining. They aren't great, but I enjoyed them. If you want to enjoy average good science fiction from the 1950s, then check out "Doctor to the Stars."

I agree with Paul, this book rates three stories

Murray Leinster's Med Service stories weren't the first science fiction medical series. (L. Ron Hubbard had preceeded him with the Ol' Doc Methuselah yarns.) Nor were they the best. (James White's Sector General stories were much more imaginative and better written.) But they remain well-crafted stories that give the reader a certain level of satisfaction.

_Doctor to the Stars_ contains three Med Service novelets: "The Grandfather's War" (_Astounding_, 1957), "Med Ship Man" (_Galaxy_, 1963), and "Tallien Three" (_Analog_, 1963 as "The Hate Disease"). I believe that the best Med Service stories are the early, theme-related tales with the fictitious chapter headings. They are a bit more substantial than the later, action-oriented stories that Leinster wrote in the sixties. There is only one of these stories in this crop, "The Grandfather's War," which manages to say quite a bit about the conflict between generations and the insanity of war.

But "Tallien Three" is almost as good as "The Grandfather's War." It successfully uses disease as a metaphor for social insanity. Both stories contain puzzles that are fairly, but not obviously, solved.

The same cannot be said of "Med Ship Man," easily the weakest of all of the Med Service stories. The solution to the story is telegraphed to the reader, and the problem itself is rather dull. I have some sympathy for Leinster's satire of business ethics in the story, but the satire is heavy-handed.

On the balance, this collection is worth reading. Nothing classic-- but good craftsmanship is not to be sneered at.