Book Review

Book Review

More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon

     What is the next step in human evolution? The science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon had some ideas. In his novel More Than Human he introduces homo gestalt, the species that will eventually replace homo sapiens. This time around, the environmental adaptation will not be physical but instead will be psychical or psychological.

     More Than Human is actually three separate short stories that were published in pulp sci-fi magazines during the Silver Age. They were strung together to create his novel and this was done effectively enough to make it organically sound, something that writers of lesser talent can not do even when writing a straight linear narrative. The first section of the novel introduces the initial main characters. The idiot-savant Lone is temporarily adopted by the Prodd family, some farmers whose first child was miscarried whereas their second child, Baby, is born mentally disabled. Baby has powerful mental computing abilities so Lone kidnaps him. The backwoods Kew family also gets introduced. Lone, the Prodds, and the Kews could easily have been taken from the pages of a a William Faulkner novel and that is one of the unique aspects of this book; it starts off like a Southern Gothic story with fully developed characters instead of the usual cartoon-type people in run-of-the-mill science fiction writing. We also learn about Janie and her African-American friends Beannie and Bonnie who can teleport themselves wherever they want. Lone, Baby. Beannie, Bonnie, and Janie are not separate people though. Actually they are different parts of one person and as one person they represent the next stage of human evolution, the homo gestalt.

     The second section is framed as a psychotherapy session with a character named Gerry. This is not just a framing device though as it also functions as a theoretical basis for the story. The concept of gestalt is examined further and the therapist’s office is a suitable setting for doing so. Gestalt actually originated as a school of psychoanalysis. It involved an inquiry into the separate elements of a person’s character as well as the past events of their lives. By putting the pieces of a patient’s mind back together a breakthrough would occur that led to an awakening of self-actualization. The individual was then able to live to their fullest potential by maximizing the insights gained during the course of their therapy. So Gerry’s psychotherapy session follows this routine as a narrative framework to advance the plot of the novel. He does not tell his story in a linear sequence of events. Instead he starts in the middle, explains the most important factors first, then fills in the details later so that all the pieces of the story’s puzzle fall into place at the end of his session. His story is about how Lone found him in the woods and took him in, how Lone met Mrs. Kew whose backstory is included in the first section of the book, and how Gerry takes homo gestalt to live with Mrs. Kew after Lone dies. At the end of Gerry’s therapy, we learn who he really is and how he lacks only one aspect of life, the one thing that makes a human complete. That missing piece of his personality gets taken up at the end of the book.

     The third and final section tells the story of Hip Barrows, a genius engineer who gets rescued by Janie, the homo gestalt member who can move objects by thinking. He is in jail with amnesia and does not know how he got there so Janie helps him get back on his feet and able to realize his place in relation to homo gestalt. Hip’s engineering experiments take him to the Prodd farm where he locates a device that was created by homo gestalt in the first section of More Than Human. Eventually Hip confronts Gerry who lives in a hidden location deep in the woods. The ending will not be given away here but an interesting observation might be that the final encounter bears a strong resemblance to a ceremonial initiation rite.

     Overall, More Than Human is effectively written. The characters are three-dimensional and the non-linear narrative has depth and complexity. The novel explores issues of morality, the human condition, and what it means to be an outsider in a world full of insiders. The language is clear and flows without getting sidetracked or bogged down in muddled thinking; there are no confusing plot holes. If you wanted to make the case that science fiction is, in the true sense, not genre literature but a branch of ordinary fiction, More Than Human could be one of the first books to use in support of that argument. 

Sturgeon, Theodore. More Than Human. Farrar Strauss and Young with Ballantine Books, New York: 1953.