Alan E. NourseBesprekingen

Alan Nourse was a science fiction writer with a day job as a practicing physician. He began writing science fiction to help pay for his medical education and continued writing in the genre for over 30 years. In his first novel, Trouble on Titan (1954), a boy travels to Titan with his stiff-necked military father. He makes friends on Titan and helps his father deal with a dangerous rebellion. There are other surprises as father and son each have things to learn. The adventure keeps moving, and the science elements are not as dated as one might expect, with one glaring exception--no one would use wood to shore up a mine tunnel on Titan. Nourse and Robert Heinlein were friends for decades, and Trouble on Titan reads like an early Heinlein juvenile, which is not a bad thing.½

I remember reading Intern either during first year of medical school or the summer before. It scared me to death, thinking this was what I had to look forward to. But later in the midst of it I loved every minute.

I graduated from Med school in 1978 and many of the procedures and treatments Doctor X details here were just starting to become obsolete. It is a VERY realistic picture of hospital medicine before technology. My father was an intern in 1946, so much of Doctor X experiences were novel, although they were both on call from Friday morning to Monday.

Anyway this is a well written description of medicine at the dawn of the “ we can do something for this patient other than morphine” age, and before CT scans ( I saw the first CT scan on one of my patients at Hopkins)

This book is important for another reason. Despite all the technology, what makes a great doctor hasn't changed. Just reading his introduction to Pediatrics brought tears to my eyes. . He and the nurses recognize kind compassionate and expert docs when they see them , and you will too.

This is a very diverse collection for a single author anthology. The range is particularly impressively given that this is not a career retrospective but covers just the few years from 1952 through 1956. "Second Sight" is a solid early entry to the Hoffman Medical Center "Psi High" stories, though not listed as such in the Internet SF Database. It makes for an interesting almost sequel to "My Friend Bobby", the best story in the book, on how telepathy can breed monsters on both sides of the parent-child relationship. "The Canvas Bag" is a quiet mood piece from F&SF. "An Ounce of Cure" and "Meeting of the Board" are overdone comic inferno stories. "The Counterfeit Man" is an overwrought variation on Campbell's "Who Goes There" where the main character spins an incredibly complicated -- but true -- hypothesis about shape-changing aliens based on no evidence at all. "The Expert Touch" is a forced, predictable story about psychological manipulation, salvaged slightly by just the right closing line. The other stories, including "The Link" and "Circus" that are original to the collection, are similarly contrived idea stories.

Other than "My Friend Bobby" and "Second Sight", there's not much here for the modern reader, but this is a solid and representative collection for fans of 1950s American SF.½

paperback

One of the old (not to say classic) science fiction books in the Sci Fi Stockpile collection, over 10,000 pages long, that I downloaded from somewhere. This one's from 1959 and shows its age, both in ancient technology (spaceships communicate by TELETYPE!) and in heavy-handed preachiness. Still, an interesting look back at the kind of books I devoured in high school. Not a bad story at all, just a bit dated.

Nourse, Alan E. Star Surgeon. 1959. E-book edition, Start, 2012.
Alan E. Nourse paid some of his medical school bills by writing science fiction, so science fiction about future medicine was a natural fit for him. In Star Surgeon, he imagines a future in which humanity hopes to make its place in the interstellar community by making medicine the Earth’s chief industry. Dal Tingar is a humanoid ET who has just earned his medical degree in surgery from Hospital Earth and is eager to be posted to an ambulance ship. As the only non-human in his graduating class and the first in surgery, he faces prejudice that compounds his own feelings of inadequacy. I think James White must have been a fan of this novel, because he used its title for one of his Sector General novels. 3.5 stars.½

Scavengers in Space is the kind of near-future space opera I was always looking for when I rifled through the library stacks and drugstore racks in the 1960s. It had relatable characters, an engaging plot with plenty of action, and some satisfying space science and engineering. Two twin brothers who don’t always get along avoid the space patrol, pirates, and corporate baddies to find a treasure their father found just before he died in the asteroid belt. Books like this established the tradition that eventually led to works like the Expanse series. 4 stars, for nostalgia if nothing else.

Nourse, Alan. The Coffin Cure. Galaxy, April 1957. E-book ed., Project Gutenberg, 2008.
Chauncey Patrick Coffin develops a cure and vaccine for the common cold that inevitably becomes known as the “Coffin Cure.” But it has an unexpected side effect. This short piece was way before its time. It should have been written during the COVID pandemic. 4 stars and a chuckle after all these years.

Pretty good s-f novel of my youth.

A decent story, though rather artlessly told. Prescient in many ways.

Solid 64 page book for the interested adult.

Very predictable YA SF by Nourse. A medical student who wants to be the first alien to become a surgeon for Hospital Earth faces prejudice from humans. He has to prove himself on the interstellar equivalent of an internship with two other med students that plays just like every Tom Corbett, Space Cadet novel. The senior doctor who most stands in the way of this young surgeon has a bad heart. You'll never guess what happens!

The one saving grace is a nice medical mystery and resolution worthy of Sector General.

But overall, not recommended.

A graduating medical student of alien decent teams up with two human grads for his initial proving-ground assignment.

This is a YA or a juvenile as it was probably called when it came out. Graded on that curve it is okay. Graded as standard scifi, it is a little light and sterile. The one and only actual alien medical case is interesting, but solved too easily, and then forgotten for the overarching 'kid has to stand up for himself' plot.

This is apparently 3rd in a series, but I see nothing you would need to know from the other books except probably background about hospital earth. Unfortunately, I don't think this book was near good enough warranting hunting down the first two books.½

Both these books are amongst the earliest science fiction books I ever read.
The first book (in order of reading) is Andre Norton's 'The Last Planet', which is pretty much set in the same universe as much of her future history books - we have a Galactic Patrol, with Humans and Zacathans. It may be slightly different in that there used to be a Central Control that had more of an overreaching control than the Patrol in most of her space born tales. The basic premise is the same, however, Central Control is an ancient power that has lost much of its authority and there are civil wars breaking out all over. The crew of the Starfire were a remnant of the Patrol loyal to their old oaths, ordered out to seek out new worlds and... well, basically die in the doing. So when the ship came down too hard on a landing, she's pretty much written off so the crew split in two - regular Patrol, and the Rangers whose job it was to explore those new worlds they were supposed to be finding. The regular crew pretty much refused to admit the ship was finished but there's no denying the facts and they're all set to make camp in the wilderness until the lights from a mysterious city were spotted from over the horizon. Tasked to see what's going on, Ranger Sergeant Kartr and one of his squad make contact with the survivors of an earlier crashlanding and are invited to join them with, not precisely open arms.. A rebellion amongst the survivors sees Kartr's mind taken over by losing commander of the survivors and the next thing he remembers is being picked up by his team out in the wilderness. The patrol had basically beeen driven out of the city but had met up with a smaller group of survivors, bemmys all. Kartr had to hunt down the former leader before he could build up a new power base amongst the native population but a transferred disease breaks the belief of the natives in the godhood of the offworlders. Kartr and his group find themselves watching the natives as the congregate in front of a building that one of the other spacers swore was the spitting image of the Hall of Leave Taking, one of Humanity's oldest shrines. This was not a copy, however...
Rather against the usual for the period, the message of this book is that diveresity is good, and the best way to get along.
Alan E Nourse's 'A Man Obsessed is a more typical book about a man hunt but the hunter finds that the person being hunted was not the man he was after. This was a bit strange and I had to smile a bit at the descriptions of examining Jeff's mental state, and the electronic sorting machines that passed for computers when the book was written. I shouldn't really laugh too hard about the medical stuff - Nourse was a medic, turning to writing to help pay off his college fees

This is pretty typical space opera science fiction of the late fifties and early sixties. It's also a Juvenile Science Fiction though this doesn't detract from the enjoyment. Rather more unusual for the times (and especially the present!), the United Nations are on the Good Guys side.
Tom and Greg are just barely past their eighteenth birthdays when they learn their father had been found dead in the Outer Belt where he'd been working alone to stake a claim in the riches of the belt. The just know that Jupiter Equilateral, the big bully boy organisation is behind this bereavement. But the local UN representative isn't, officially, so sure. The boys are confronted by JE's local representative who offers a ridiculously high price for their father's claim, which makes them even more certain that JE is behind the death of their father so they hire a ship of their own to go and do their own investigating. But they'd forgotten one thing; out in the belt, the law is what the organisation with the biggest gun says it is. Can they survive the dangers of space and greed?
Okay, it is somewhat naïve by today's standards, but it doesn't hurt to read books with an optimistic feel to them, though it's made clear there are pressures on the current system shown in this book

Read the free Kindle story and listen to the free audio on YouTube.

Nobody says anything, they growl or mutter or grate. Nothing's really far away, it's unthinkably far. How, as a matter of interest, does one "breathe impatiently"? I want to take the dead author's thesaurus away and clonk him with it.

It was 1953, but we already knew about physics then; grappling a ship moving at a substantial fraction of light speed as a stationary object? Oh nay nay nay. Mayhem. Carnage. Destruction.

And Brownie, the coded-by-50s-stereotypes-queer little wimpy engineer, versus the vicious thuggish mate? Yech. Noir stereotypes and not particularly well done...not like Peter Lorre and Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon. The anti-Government paranoia and fascist security state? Close to home, and the grim reality of 2020 seems to me to be taking us down Nourse's grim future-history path.

The ending is really really really bleak. Really. So very grim. I hate the evil world of Nourse's last-ditch shouting against the Security State's inevitable horrors. I don't like the writing. I don't like the story. But I can't forget it.½

Ex-lib. Geneva Free Library

In some respects, this account of an intern's year at a (disguised) hospital is out of date, with medical technology having dramatically changed, even since the time the book came out in the 1960s. On the other hand, one suspects that much of the pressure-cooker atmosphere remains, and the thin margin of life-and-death decision making, and the sheer exhaustion, remain evergreen. In any event, a very interesting and either well-read or well-edited book. Of note is that Nourse was also a skilled writer of science fiction, which may well account for something. Recommended.

Note that these essays have been irregularly updated
TIME/LIFE Books; Life Science Series, the Body # 1; essays

Good 1950s SF by Nourse.

Alen E. Nourse wrote more than a dozen SF novels, this one being the first. He never won any awards but was a physician so he already had a profession.

This juvenile fiction is pretty good for a first novel. I give it three stars for being average but it would get more if I was 14. I'll look for more of his books and hope his later works are better. He does not make my list of undiscovered gems with this one.

Verde 118

This book really deserves to be known for something other than lending its title to a movie....

It's a good story, set in our present (2017, apparently), about the impact "free" "universal" health care, written forty-some years ago. I don't see any need to recount the story; almost any summary would give away key plot details.

I do want to comment on Nourse's development as a writer, however. I've read three of his books in the past few days. His first novel (speaking loosely), The Universe Between, is an interesting idea written in the general style of early Robert Heinlein. The story's got some flaws, but it's well plotted and intellectually interesting. The second novel, Raiders from the Rings, is a piece of 50s SF junk that really needed a copyeditor to clean up the loose ends; typical pulp fare, really.

This one's well written, carefully plotted, and well thought out. The characters are better-rounded and far more convincing, and the story's better grounded in both life and politics. It's really hard to isolate the sources of improvement--some of it's probably experience, and some's probably because the subject's on Nourse's home turf (he was an MD).

Regardless, an excellent novel. Well worth reading.

First read this nearly fifty years ago, when I was in fifth grade. 'Twas one of the first SF books I read.

Disappointing's a good description. It's painfully bad--the very definition of a pulp novel. While the plot's more or less plausible, the resolution seems far too easy. And the editors should have forced Nourse to attach names to some of the book's characters.

I'd like to think I'd have spotted the flaws in 1959, but I likely didn't.

Hmmm. Not really a review; just a few comments.

Bought the (e)book by accident (misplaced click), but at the price I decided to keep and read it.

Hadn't read this one before, and it's been decades since I last read something by Nourse. Three closely-related stories, here; set in January of 1979, May of 2001 (I think; the hint's ambiguous), and sometime in 2006 ("five years later"). The middle one's a novella; it's flanked by shorts. Most of the main characters are in all three. I assume they were originally published in one of the pulps.

The story's last page is a gimmick, and includes a detail that suggests a slight revision that isn't reflected in the copyright.

The book reads a lot like very early Heinlein. I've seen Nourse described as a "late Golden Age of SF" author, which seems a stretch both in time and impact, but I suppose I could defend the description if I had to because of the Heinlein similarities. I'd probably call him a pulp writer, m'self; since I spent the 60s reading the pulps, that's not a slam.

It's an interesting story about intersecting parallel universes, and mostly-accidental conflicts between them. The main issue driving the story is one universe using another as a shortcut route between Earth and other places. Complications ensue. The characters are mostly pretty thin, though well-defined; a couple are well-drawn. One of the well-drawn characters is a bit of an asshole, which seems odd.

It's...not bad, not wonderful. An odd combination of pulpy SF and striving for human improvement - the Raiders are the people who have been driven away from Earth, and have to raid the planet to survive. Fearmongering on both sides has finally risen to the point of total war - and the Grays intervene (I wonder if this was the first/an early portrayal?), to persuade both sides that there's a better way. The magic belt reminds me rather of Lucky Starr, though its powers are much less; Joyce is pretty much a cipher, though she does speak up from time to time. Most of the story is Ben, with help from Tom. The limitations of their science are fascinating - null-grav engines that reduce the pressure of acceleration, but the ships are rockets; and the fastest way to get a message from Earth to Mars is via ship, radio (short-wave) won't cut it. I'm very glad I read it, it was fun, I doubt I'll read it again.