Product Description

All alone: an idiot boy, a runaway girl, a severely retarded baby, and twin girls with a vocabulary of two words between them. Yet once they are mysteriously drawn together this collection of misfits becomes something very, very different from the rest of humanity. This intensely written and moving novel is an extraordinary vision of humanity's next step.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #171004 in Books
• Published on: 2000-04-13
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Theodore Sturgeon created very human characters with real, intensely observed emotions. More Than Human (1953) is his story of a Gestalt or group mind, not a chilly super-intellect but a painfully assembled band of talented misfits. Lone is telepathic but a literal idiot; Janie, an abused runaway girl, moves things with her mind; Bonnie and Beanie, very young black twins, can teleport; Baby has a computer-like brain and also Downs syndrome.

In part one, this crippled Gestalt is movingly brought together from the wreckage of members' past lives. Part two sees Lone replaced by the psychologically damaged Gerry, a murderer at age eight: he must, agonisingly, confront his reasons for killing the benefactor who cherished them as individuals but menaced the all-important group. (The twins can't eat with the white folks; Baby should go to a home...) Part three artfully echoes the previous sections' long healing of Lone's body and Gerry's mind, with the now-grown Janie defiantly rehabilitating an unfortunate victim of Gerry's misused talents. Although the Gestalt is now tremendously powerful, there's still one important factor missing.

"Does a superman have super-hunger, Gerry? Super-loneliness?"

Sturgeon wrote beautifully, from the famous opening--"The idiot lived in a black and grey world, punctuated by the white lightning of hunger and the flickering of fear."--through moments of great poignancy, and unexpected images, like a starved man seeing marmalade as stained glass. More Than Human won the International Fantasy Award and holds up well today. This is recommended. --David Langford

Synopsis
All alone: an idiot boy, a runaway girl, a severely retarded baby, and twin girls with a vocabulary of two words between them. Yet once they are mysteriously drawn together this collection of misfits becomes something very, very different from the rest of humanity. This intensely written and moving novel is an extraordinary vision of humanity's next step.

About the Author
SALES POINTS * #28 in in the Millennium SF Masterworks series, a library of the finest science fiction ever written * 'The corpus of science fiction written by Theodore Sturgeon is the single most important body of science fiction written by an American to date' Samuel R. Delany * 'He brought things to science fiction that had never been there before: eloquence, passion, a love of life, and a fiery poetry that found its natural expression in prose' Robert Silverberg * Winner of the International Fantasy Award

Customer Reviews

More than sci-fi
I've only just come across Sturgeon and 'More than Human' is a real eye-opener. At times it reads like X-Men rewritten by Mark Twain and Rilke, but all such equations are inadequate. Sturgeon's style is poetic in the best sense of the word — not flowery or overwrought, but fresh and always connected to real sensory experience of the world rather than literary cliché.

This is science fiction without robots, computers or space travel, that could be set any time since the early 20th century. But as an imagining of humanity's future it is superior to most 'futuristic' SF.

It's a speculation on human evolution that manages to be philosophically intriguing on a number of levels — on one hand an inquiry into the function and origins of morality, on the other a plea for liberty and 'experiments in living' that John Stuart Mill would have been proud of. The conflicting human urges towards both independence and society are sensitively portrayed, and there are startling moments of both horror and compassion. Between the lines there is also the sad recognition that we often hamper our own development, on whatever level, because of fear and ignorance.

'More than Human' is a brief but dense read. I imagine it will well repay repeated visits and should outlast most genre fiction.

When equality goes as does limitation
I really enjoyed this book, and whilst the story is nothing spectacular, what it points towards is of far more interest and this is clearly a story that has paved the way for many science-fiction novels to follow. The story is laid around young misfits, each of them is warped or abnormal in some way, unaware of their place in the world, that is until they encounter each other. A mentally disabled man who is able to control peoples' minds, a telepathic girl who can move things with her mind, two twins who can teleport, yet have a vocabulary of only two words, and finally a severely retarded baby with a mind like a computer. Separately they are flawed and uncertain, as a group they become a single entity with almost limitless capabilities.

While I found the story to be fairly typical, the novel aims to look at how morality and ethics are affected when people are no longer born equal. Each of the characters have come from backgrounds that have been unsupportive, both towards them as people but also towards their unique gifts. As such it lends itself towards notions of what would happen if a yob culture were given the faculties to do as they please without the usual limitations?

This is a wonderfully thoughtful story. There are many stories around that detail the existence of people with extraordinary powers, this is probably the greatest as it looks so closely and thoughtfully about the risks of such power. Brilliant stuff, science fiction at its best.

One of SF's most challenging, thought-provoking novels
Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human is, quite simply, one of the best and most original science fiction novels of all time; it is also one of the more neglected classics in the field. This magnificent example of literary science fiction belongs on the same shelf as Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and Alfred Bester's first two novels. I was already a Sturgeon fan before reading More Than Human, but even I almost scoffed at comparisons of this novel with the work of William Faulkner (my literary hero). Much to my surprise, though, there is indeed a Faulknerian aspect to this novel. The narrative radiates traces of stream of consciousness and moves quietly back and forth in time from place to place as it approaches the essence of a philosophical revelation from multiple levels. For this reason, you will most likely either love or hate the book, for its greatest strength is very likely, to some readers, its greatest weakness.

More Than Human is such a unique novel that some individuals may not consider it science fiction at all; the science wrapped into these pages is of the most abstract and philosophical sort, centering on the question of the future evolution of the human race. The novel is broken up into three very distinct sections, each division marked by a shift in both emphasis and viewpoint. Initially, it can be a little difficult to get your bearings after one of these jumps, but all of the pieces of this giant puzzle come together in the end; I would qualify this by saying that the ultimate resolution happens in the reader's mind and is not necessarily spelled out by the author on the final page. The novel features some rather surprising plot twists along the way, and sometimes the reader may think Sturgeon has wandered far off the beaten track. In a sense he has because More Than Human marks the birth of a new kind of science fiction; rest assured that Sturgeon knows exactly where he is going from page one.

The novel opens with a self-described and self-acknowledged idiot living the only life he has ever known, one of utter loneliness and nothingness. His one gift is an ability to make people do things for him by looking at them in a certain way. His encounter with a unique, incredibly over sheltered little girl in the woods leads to an early scene of great tragedy and a turning point in the young man's life. Lone, as he manages to name himself, is taken in by a farming couple and introduced to the life he had never known. Elsewhere, a young girl named Janie lives a life of unhappiness under the roof of her unfit mother. She has her own special gift, the ability to move things with her mind, and one day she comes to know a pair of black children who can disappear and reappear at will. All of these characters somehow find each other and begin to see themselves as something more than human after a mongoloid baby is added to the strange little family. Taken together, they are one person: Lone is the head, Janie and the twins are the legs and arms, and Baby is the brilliant thinker that only Janie can communicate with telepathically. What forms out of these interconnected lives is a new type of human being: Human Gestalt. Individual weakness is subsumed by group superhuman strength, but this new type of human is lonely and prone to make mistakes as it struggles to understand itself.

The three sections are all remarkably different, yet they work together in much the same fashion as the children to become something incredibly powerful. In broad terms, the first section describes the birth of Human Gestalt, the second section describes its search for a purpose in life and a reason for being, and the third and most important section addresses the ethical and moral ramifications of such a new type of superhuman. The novel is told with such subtle power and mind-numbing beauty that any description I attempt to make will not do it justice. This is thought-provoking science fiction at its best.