More Than Human (1953)

Theodore Sturgeon’s much celebrated novel is a kind of fix-up of three novellas. The first and third—“The Fabulous Idiot” and “Morality,” respectively—were written expressly for the novel. The centerpiece second part, “Baby Is Three,” was previously published and won awards of its own. The novel has followed a crooked path to its present status as one of the 100 best sci-fis. I didn’t know any of this when I went to read it, but I did notice that “Baby Is Three” was notably the best part. The other two were way too unnecessarily coy about letting us in on what’s going on. It’s a fantastic idea, this Homo Gestalt, the next evolutionary step from H. Sapiens. As readers, we need all the help we can get without some peekaboo routine of the determinedly slow reveal. But it’s a big and intriguing idea, this vision of human mutants. I got such a hit of X-Men at points that I wonder how well Stan Lee or whoever worked on the comic might have known this novel. The big ideas are there to be discovered (not without labor, alas, at least in my experience). Sturgeon is a name I knew way back when I was reading science fiction stories as a kid, along with Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein. I don’t remember much about the Sturgeon stories, whereas stuff by Bradbury and Heinlein has stuck with me. I think most of Sturgeon’s greatest achievements are wrapped up in this novel. I wouldn’t know where to go next with him. The first part, “The Fabulous Idiot,” has some affinities structurally with William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and its baffling first part, which is also explicitly about “an idiot” (term of art in more benighted times). They are very different works, but I do wonder if Sturgeon was prone to literary pretension. Two-thirds of this book anyway suggest he might be, but I don’t know. He wrote a lot of stories that might be worth a look for a next stop. Kudos to the Library of America anthology, American Science Fiction, 1953-1956, for reminding me science fiction doesn’t have to be just space opera, which we see a lot of, of course. More Than Human is decidedly not space opera and has lots of interesting ideas about psychology and evolution, though it may not be necessarily done well overall—ambition, reach, grasp, all that. Read the first part to get to the second part. Third part optional. Another reminder of the problems with fix-ups.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

"If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?" (1967)

Theodore Sturgeon is probably the best-known old school science fiction writer in the Dangerous Visions collection. Lester del Rey, Frederik Pohl, and Poul Anderson count too, but they come up short of Sturgeon's stature. I've been talking lately about the "Is God Dead?" cover of Time magazine as a likely source of some of these stories, but Sturgeon's story looks to a very different one: Robert A. Heinlein's 1961 novel, Stranger in a Strange Land. Heinlein, of course, is on the short list of revered science fiction writers of his generation, in the '40s and '50s, with Isaac Asimov and maybe Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury. With Stranger, in the '60s, Heinlein seemed to shift gears away from "hard" science fiction and conservative politics into radical proto-hippie ideas of free love. (I say "seemed" because the whole thing stinks to high heaven when you get into the details of the novel.) Sturgeon is taking those ideas another step further and into incestDanger, Will Robinson! The story is set so far in the future that the sun going nova is a plot point, leading to a human diaspora that is at least galactic, if not universal, thanks to technology. I must say, humans do not appear to have changed much in the 7.6 billion years between now and then. At any rate, as planetary civilizations have slowly reached out and connected for purposes of trade, the hero of this long story (or novella, whatever) discovers a planet with fabulous resources but one with which no one wants to trade. He is Charli Bux, a sort of roustabout traveling man living on planetary trade work. The planet is Vexvelt. The reason it is shunned it because its culture practices incest. It's not just that the natives of Vexvelt don't recognize it as a taboo, but there it is even considered a desirable norm. In a way, the story is good at forcing you to look at taboo itself, because honestly I never got far past feeling like it was icky. They are a lusty bunch, these Veltvexians—it's not just incest, but more broadly free love is how they roll. There might be a reasonable case against the concerns of inbreeding and congenital birth defects. Maybe it doesn't apply to Veltvexians? If so, that's important to mention. Otherwise the Veltvexian arguments often have the stink of someone working on a reluctant partner to put out, as if they're made with raging hard-ons. I know my response to the story is probably more like my response to the taboo. It's actually a perfectly engaging story, told with skill, about a subject that makes me squirm to think about for long. So sure, OK, let's call it dangerous. Just get it away from me.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison