I think the only meaningful ratings on GR are *, **, and *****. Those are pretty clear: “I disliked it”, “it was okay”, and “it was amazing”. *** and **** exist in that intermediate stage between “meh” (**) and “wow” (*****). “I liked it” and “I really liked it”. WTF? How exactly do I differentiate between “liking” something and “really liking” it? A lot of how we respond to stories is so personal to what we enjoy and what we’ve read before. One thing that I usually like in books is when it throws up an idea that I’ve not come across before. That’s my little spark that can turn a “like” to a “really like”. It can be a really small thing that makes that difference and is so intimately intertwined with my personal reading history that it’s essentially meaningless for anyone else. Whatever it is, however, this book had that little difference for me. To talk about it would require me to talk about the ending, so before I get to that, a little bit about how I responded to the rest of the book. This is how it starts:The idiot lived in a black and gray world, punctuated by the white lightning of hunger and the flickering of fear. His clothes were old and many-windowed. Here peeped a shin-bone, sharp as a cold chisel, and there in the torn coat were ribs like the fingers of fist. He was tall and flat. His eyes were calm and his face was dead.That first paragraph drew me in. The images (lightning, chisel, fist) were strong and compelling. We feel the harshness and violence of his world before we are even told about it. The long, flowing, imagistic sentences at the beginning end in the flat and mimetic “His eyes were calm and his face was dead.” That’s good stuff. We’re pretty much in 2001 / Many-Coloured Land territory: the so-called next stage of human evolution. This invariably seems to involve some step up to a more powerful being, and that’s actually pretty iffy science since evolution isn’t directed and no one can tell what’s better or worse. The next step up for some reason always involves psychic powers: less body, more mind. Sturgeon’s spin on this (and not the nifty idea that I liked) is the notion of homo gestalt. It sort of makes sense: cells came together to form more complex organisms, so why not those complex organisms themselves coming together in a similar fashion:He says he is a figure-outer brain and I am a body and the twins are arms and legs and you are the head. He says the ‘I’ is all of us. Or explained in another way:I’m the central ganglion of a complex organism which is composed of Baby, a computer; Bonnie and Beanie, teleports; Janie, telekineticist; and myself, telepath and central control.The novel itself is made up of three parts. Parts two and three essentially involve a recounting of past events: the conflict is supplied by a character struggling to understand himself through an uncovering and recounting of the past. It’s a relatively brisk and efficient technique that allows a great deal of exposition to be covered in a short amount of space, while still keeping a certain amount of forward dramatic tension going. I’m not sure the story could have withstood a more detailed labouring over the details of the formation of the gestalt, so that was good too. All of this was enough for it to get the “I liked it” tag, but Sturgeon does bring one additional idea to the table that lifted it for me above “liked it”. (view spoiler)[Because you see, those four parts listed above aren’t the whole of the homo gestalt. And perhaps it’s pretty obvious what the missing part is: heart or soul, secularised here as morals or conscience. That’s pretty neat since it’s clear that for Sturgeon that is what makes a human a human, and not just an assemblage of parts. This moved me, and that brought it out of “liked it” to “really liked it”, because appropriately enough, I guess, it’s our personal emotional reactions, our affective response to something that makes us human. (hide spoiler)]
I am always amazed when I read authors from the Golden Age of science fiction. They write with economy. And tend to say more in 250 pages than many contemporary series say over a trilogy weighing in at 1,000 pages. I am thinking of masters like Bester, Le Guin, PKD, Heinlein and Clarke. And now, I can add Theodore Sturgeon to that mix. More that Human is a very interesting read. I really enjoyed the way Sturgeon tells the story. Especially in the last two parts, where the story is uncovered bit by bit as the characters come to terms with repressed memories. The technique is effective and poetic. In fact, there were times that the general style, which often runs towards the literate Gothic, reminds me a lot of Faulkner. Who said that genre writers cannot write? The big idea in Human is "homo gestalt." That we are more than the sum of our parts. And that living in a connected network will help us all "blesh" into a single entity by each individual providing exactly what he or she does best. Anyone who has worked in a large organization or played on a sports team can sense the truth of this. For example, take a simple business organization. The sales guru has not the patience to crunch the numbers. So the finance guru must set limits to the deals the salesperson is making. But cannot program the order system so it will not allow prices below a certain threshold. So the IT guy is called to code it. Etc. But, off in the wings, there's the Industrial engineer worrying about inventory levels. And the finance guru trying to work with the engineer to minimize warehousing costs. Etc. Etc. The big problem I have with the book, though, is that he makes this all a bit creepy. When he's just creating a complex, poetic "conceit" for teamwork, or Synergy. Sturgeon also seems to have the Social-Darwinian idea that Evolution is a climbing up, a bettering. When instead, Evolution tends to be random and driven by population statistics and probability. And, lastly, is the emphasis on psychic powers -- which are, to say the least, pretty non-scientific. So I class More than Human as a Scientific Fantasy, more in the lines of a Ray Bradbury, than as a Science Fiction tale proper.Quibbles aside, a very good classic Science Fiction. I almost gave it five stars it was that good. So it is highly recommended to fans of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Leo Walsh is an author living in Cleveland. Follow him at leo-walsh.com.
What do You think about More Than Human (1998)?
This is my first novel by Theodore Sturgeon and it most certainly will not be the last. I read the book in one sitting. I'm not sure now if that was a good idea but I was entranced, could not sleep, and it is rather short. I was certain the book would be listed on my favorites shelf but the ending, or certain characterisitcs of the ending, forced me to withdraw from the book and look at it from the outside, not from within as I had the majority of the story. I knew before beginning that Sturgeon initially wrote Baby is Three, the middle section of the novel. This publication and what Sturgeon was critically acclaimed for, was essentially 3 novellas combined, with the same characters but each separated by a few years. The Fabulous Idiot was added as the beginning and Morality the end. Baby is Three is my uncontested favorite and I wish I could place it solely on my favorites shelf but the work is complete and needs the other pieces to be enjoyed. The book centers around a number of neglected and abused children who eventually meet and begin to form a gestalt group. I found the idea fascinating and was blown away by the knowledge that this book was published in 1953. Sturgeon's prose was riveting and shocking at times. I do not want to mention anything more about the plot as I went into the book knowing nothing, not even about the gestalt topic, so the less you know about the book, I think the more you will enjoy it. I guess this is nothing new. Many reviews give away too much. The reason for the 4 stars, as I mentioned, is due to my problems with the ending. First off, reading a book about children who rarely spoke like children but did on occasion act like children worked for me. It was all very believable. But in the final section, I thought the dialogue took a turn downward. When Sturgeon began to write about adults acting like adults and speaking like adults, he lost me. I no longer felt connected through the dialogue at all and consequently, this kicked my head out of the story and the ending fell a little flat. I liked the ending and thought it was perfect otherwise. Sturgeon's prose was beautiful throughout the rest of the book. In the end, if you are a fan of classic science fiction then this is a required read.
—Kathryn
I love old scifi book covers so much. Again the original: is so much better than the Kindle edition that looks like ten minutes of Photoshop work: More Than Human has the sparseness of prose like the other Theodore Sturgeon book I’ve read, The Dreaming Jewels, but only in words used, not in the sentence style and structure. More Than Human seems much further polished. The writing transcends the simplistic language. And perfectly edited prose is exactly what I love.The idiot lived in a black and grey world, punctuated by the white lightning of hunger and the flickering of fear.This is the first line, short and fairly simple words, but similar in sharpness and all uncomfortable (punctuated, lightning, flickering) as the idiot is; all working together—as a gestalt—greater than the sum of their parts. As all the best books are.Due in part to this, Sturgeon has a knack for writing characters that probably couldn’t exist within the real world, but he instills them with just enough humanity so they’re never not unbelievable. The first section is third-person narratives to introduce the unique characters: Lone, the idiot (the idiot brain, that is); Alicia Kew, the girl without sin; Bonnie and Beanie, the teleporting twins; Gerry Thompson, the adult 6 year old; Hip Barrows, who loves radios; Janie, the telepath; and Baby, who is three. The second section is first-person narrative (the coming of the second, immoral brain) happening years later with flashbacks to fill in the missing years. The third is about love, or something deeper than love, and terror (but I think all love is melded with terror). And when a character’s personality changes significantly between parts two and three, you believe it, because Sturgeon has created a real person and real people change.In the end, it’s not just an exploration of human psychic evolution. It’s “what-if”, yes, but it’s a morality play (or an ethos play, Sturgeon would probably quibble over this). It’s probably closest stylistically to Phillip K Dick: inhuman circumstances, with extremely human thoughts and feelings in an effort to communicate a thought just on the edge of humanity.If I was underlining in this book (I can’t, it’s Lauren’s), I would have underlined…- Sometimes the world’s too much to live with and a body sort of has to turn away from it to rest.- “Ask Baby what is a friend.” “He says it’s somebody who goes on loving you whether he likes you or not.”- “Ask Baby what kind of people are all the time trying to find out what they are are what they belong to?” “He says, every kind.”- I started to cry. Fifteen years old and crying like that!- I looked at him and suddenly realized why he fooled with the pipe all the time. It was so he could look down at it and you wouldn’t be able to see his eyes.- “Everybody’s alone.” “But some people learn how to live with it.”- Lovemaking, even the suppressed and silent kind, is a demanding thing, a thirsty and yearning thing.- The most human thing about anyone is a thing he learns… and earns. It’s a thing he can’t have when he’s very young; if he gets it at all, he gets it after a long search and a deep conviction. After that it’s truly part of him as long as he lives.
—Gideon
Not an easy read for me. Extremely well-written with incredibly brilliant concepts, but difficult to wrap my brain around completely. There were many passages that I had to reread three or four times. A fair bit of the narrative seemed to go over my head, and I have to admit that there were a few times that I thought maybe I was not smart enough to fully appreciate this book. But then, inevitably, everything would come to light and I came out of my confusion right alongside the characters.Original and intriguing, I will be thinking about this book for some time. I would like to own a copy of this book so that I may study it in-depth in the future. More Than Human has all the right pieces to become a favorite book of mine, but I think it may take a while for me to understand the awesome concepts put forth by Sturgeon.
—Addie
