More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon
More Than Human
Theodore Sturgeon(1918 – 1975) is one of the giants of the science fiction golden age. He wrote several novels, hundreds of short stories as well as scripts for television and film (including a couple of episodes of the original series of Star Trek). He also won the Hugo and Nebula awards. As fans of Kurt Vonnegut will probably already know, Vonnegut’s most famous character, Kilgore Trout, is based on Theodore Sturgeon, who was a good friend of Vonnegut’s.
More Than Human is Theodore Sturgeon’s most famous novel and has the rare distinction of being one of a very few science fiction novels published in the 1950s to gain serious academic recognition as literature. More Than Human was originally published in 1953. The book is frequently included in lists of the 100 best Science Fiction Novels of all time. The copy that we have in the Library at Dulwich International High School Suzhou is part of the SF Masterworks series pictured above. Our school library has a wide collection of SF Masterworks books, made up of select science-fiction books from as far back as H.G. Wells.
More Than Human is about how six extraordinary people with strange powers come together and “blesh” (a portmanteau of “blend” and “mesh”) their abilities to act as a single, gestalt organism. Throughout the book, they progress towards a mature consciousness, called homo gestalt, which is presented as the next stage in human evolution. I found this an enjoyable, if somewhat difficult book to get through. There are parts of it that are frustrating. This is because Sturgeon evocatively reproduces in writing an entirely plausible and empathic recreation of what characters with repressed memories and amnesia would feel like and behave. This doesn’t make for easy reading, but it is certainly very good writing. Sturgeon has a real knack for getting you into the heads of his characters with such realistic psychological depth, that you can’t help but care for them, flawed as they are.
In common with many books that I really want to get absorbed in, I listened to the Audible version of this book while I read it. This process of bimodal reading provides a much more immersive reading experience and for me at least, helps me focus much more on the text. The Audible version of this book is remarkable, as it has two different and equally excellent narrators. Veteran audible narrator Stefan Rudnicki reads the first and last parts of this three-part book, while Harlan Ellison reads the middle section.
At the time of writing, the Audible edition of More Than Human is part of the Audible Plus Program, which means, that if you are an Audible subscriber, you can download it to your Audible Library free of charge, without spending any credits.
This choice of narrators makes perfect sense, as the book is more like three separate but interrelated novellas, that are all different in tone and content but work together to create a cohesive whole. It’s a richly psychological book that for the most part, is concerned with the human mind, rather than science fiction themes. More than Human is certainly a unique book, quite unlike anything I have read before. It’s a book you need to read more than once to fully appreciate the story it’s telling. Sturgeon was fascinated with socio-psychological models drawn from Darwin, Freud, and other grand theorists of the human condition. He develops these psychoanalytical themes in More than Human with subtlety and poetry.
