Sector General: Difference between revisions

* [[Big Creepy Crawlies]] - Averted. Stop blathering and check the wear on those mandibles.

* [[Bizarre Alien Biology]], of course. And oh, what spectacularly bizarre biology it is.

* [[Buxom Is Better]] - Again, Murchison receives attention due to her anatomy, especially when she puts on a [[Latex Space Suit|skintight diving suit]] to visit the aquatic wards. Subverted and [[Lampshade Hanging|Lampshaded]] later on, as [[Humans Through Alien Eyes|most of the aliens wonder]] how human females can stand upright, let alone walk with such a top-heavy, imbalanced design ...[[Did Not Do the Research|Despite the fact]] that adult ''men'' generally have greater upper-body mass than women and are thus literally more top-heavy.

** Yes, but it's rather differently distributed. No doubt it's the front/back asymetry of Human females that makes them look 'unbalanced' to aliens.

* [[Interspecies Romance]] - Thoroughly subverted. There are no cross-species romantic relationships, but since Educator tapes transfer the donor's personality as well as its medical knowledge, a tape carrier might find itself cued in to members of the donor's species in addition to its own. Dr. Conway runs afoul of this with a ELNT Melfan tape: "Half of (Conway's mind) insisted that the whole affair was ridiculous, while the other half thought lovingly of that gorgeously marked carapace and generally felt like baying at the moon." Cue [[Squick]] or [[Fetish Fuel|Fetish]], as appropriate.

** But see O'Mara's retirement {{spoiler|where the effects of a tape long-held show a softer side}}

** The early books explicitly state that inter-species sexual attraction is considered a mental illness, which was probably passed over later because of worries about the [[Unfortunate Implications]] if readers saw it as a metaphor for real-world inter-ethnic relations.

* [[Kraken and Leviathan]]: KRLT, which is even explicitly compared to the Midgard Serpent. It's not malevolent, but it is over five km long, and it's mentioned that it was hundreds of times longer than that.

* [[Language of Truth]] - DBLF Kelgians. Their rippling fur spells out their emotions at all times, so they just never developed the concept of the lie and are always brutally, bluntly honest.

* [[Martial Pacifist]] - Every member of the Monitor Corps we've ever met. Nobody uses lethal force, and the Monitors would much rather talk a bad guy down rather than resort to some less-savory means, like stun gas. This pacifistic attitude is even [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshaded]] in ''Star Surgeon'', where a full-blown [[Recycled in Space|nuclear war in space]], involving fifty-odd planets, one hospital station and thousands of ships, is described as a "police action."

** Later books seem somewhat cynical of the Monitor Corps defining of everything they do as police actions, up to and including the Etlan War and planetary invasions.

* [[Unspoken Plan Guarantee]] - In an unfortunate variant, Conway is known to withhold his brilliant-yet-insane plans not only from the reader but from ''his fellow doctors''. This gets dropped some distance into the series, as fairly good [[Character Development]].

* [[We Are As Mayflies]] - Some of these aliens could hardly gather the biomass involved during one human lifetime. On the other side of the scales we have a recurrent {{spoiler|sentient viral colony, which needs a host and acts as a symbiote by performing excellent maintenance. It trades up from a [[Time Abyss]] to a [[Hive Mind]], and plans to eventually obtain the longest-lived host possible by fashioning a metabolism and sentience onto a ''star''.}}

 

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