A few months ago, I said that I’m planning to reread some of the science fiction novels that had most impressed me during my formative years in the field, back in the 1950s, by way of seeing how they stand up to my more critical eye half a century later. The first one I chose, Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth, stood up to the scrutiny remarkably well. This time around I’ve picked Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human, which has been regarded as a classic science fiction novel since its publication in 1953.

 

More Than Human isn’t exactly a novel. It consists of three novellas, the middle one of which, “Baby Is Three,” appeared first in the October 1952 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, the most important SF magazine of its day. I was a Columbia freshman in October 1952, staggering under the unanticipated reading load that an Ivy League college imposed on its students, but still trying to keep up with my science fiction reading, too. (Not just for fun, either. I was already hoping to write science fiction professionally, and reading an innovative magazine like Galaxy was a form of vocational training for me.) I still was living at home that year, with an hour-long subway ride each way to Columbia and back, and SF was my subway reading. So I first encountered “Baby Is Three” aboard the Seventh Avenue Express, and it had a stunning impact on me. It was a first-person story, narrated by a tough, angry teenager, in which the narrator reports on his sessions with a remarkably skillful psychotherapist who gets him to talk about his experiences living among an odd group of people with paranormal powers. The tone of the story was utterly unlike anything that any SF writers of the day, even Isaac Asimov, even Robert A. Heinlein, even Ray Bradbury, had attempted: street-talk, mostly, vivid, brisk, rough. (The therapy being practiced was L. Ron Hubbard’s dianetics, the ancestor of Scientology, which Sturgeon had been dabbling with, though he didn’t explicitly say so in the story.)

I wasn’t the only one who was stunned by “Baby Is Three.” Within the general SF community it was probably the second most widely discussed story of the year, after Philip José Farmer’s “The Lovers.” For the thirty-four-year-old Sturgeon, who had established his reputation in the 1940s with such stories as “Microcosmic God” and “Killdozer,” and more recently had been startling us all with works like The Dreaming Jewels, “The Stars are the Styx,” and “Rule of Three,” it was an announcement that he was ready to take his place in the top rank of the field. (As he would show in 1953-55 with a swarm of a dozen or more awesome novelettes and novellas.)

Major book publishers were just becoming interested in science fiction then. “Baby is Three” brought Sturgeon an offer from the new house of Ballantine Books, which had launched an ambitious SF program with such books as Arthur Clarke’s Childhood’s End and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, to expand the story to book length by adding two more novellas to the existing one. He wrote them both in about three weeks and called the book More Than Human.

 

Though I hadn’t read the book in more than fifty years, I remembered it fairly well, which will tell you something of the effect it had on me (and many others) in 1953. It belongs to the subgenre of superman stories, along with such works as Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John and H.G. Wells’ Starbegotten—novels that depict the evolution of man-kind beyond the Homo sapiens level. The story deals with the forging of a group of freakish misfits of the peculiarly raffish kind that we came to know as Sturgeonesque people (an idiot, two speech-impaired black girls, a mongoloid baby, etc.) into a being of superior powers to which Sturgeon gives the linguistically infelicitous name of Homo Gestalt.

When I began my rereading, I felt myself from the very first paragraph in the hands of a master. This is how it opens:

“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 shinbone, sharp as a cold chisel, and there in the torn coat were ribs like the fingers of a fist. He was tall and flat. His eyes were calm and his face was dead.”

No one, not even the eloquent Ray Bradbury, had managed prose like that in the science fiction of that era. “The white lightning of hunger”—how extraordinary! “Ribs like the fingers of a fist”—who but Sturgeon could have written that, then? A generation later, William Gibson would begin his own classic novel Neuromancer with the startling line, “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” But Gibson had had the advantage of knowing Sturgeon’s work of thirty years earlier. Sturgeon was on his own when he wrote More Than Human.

And as I read on through Sturgeon’s portrayal of the life of the retarded man who would be one of the components of his gestalt superbeing, I was struck again and again by the dazzling imagery. “The idiot’s eyes whose irises seemed on the trembling point of spinning like wheels.” . . . “It was air with a puzzle to it, for it was still and full of the colors of dreams, all motionless, yet it had a hurry to it.” . . . “His mouth opened and a scratching sound emerged. He had never tried to speak before and could not now; the gesture was an end, not a means, like the starting of tears at a crescendo of music.” Some of Sturgeon’s similes and metaphors go too far over the top, as when he compares the color of marmalade to stained glass. But even when he plunges off into wild verbal excess, the only crime he commits is the one of excessive ambition: even Sturgeon’s reach sometimes goes beyond his grasp, but at least he is reaching, when that sort of thing was almost never attempted by science fiction writers and, usually, actively discouraged by SF editors. The prose here is remarkable stuff, of a level that Sturgeon himself rarely approached again, as his highly individual manner turned into formula and engulfed him in his own mannerisms. Here, though, everything works wonderfully well.

 

But I found little things going wrong with the book as I moved on through it, and I began to remember that its author was a young man with a family of small children, who had spent his entire career writing under great pressure for poorly paying pulp magazines. Troublesome signs of pulpy overexplicitness begin turning up. Right on the first page we are told that the idiot is a creature “lacking in empathy,” a textbooky sort of thing to say that could well have been left for us to conclude from the character’s own actions. In the pages that follow we get similarly needless auctorial prods. They are relatively rare, amidst pages of remarkable nuance and grace; but that they are there at all is a sign that Sturgeon could not entirely edit away the vestiges of his pulp-magazine background.

Each of the three novellas making up the book has a different narrative structure. The first, “The Fabulous Idiot,” is third-person omniscient, introducing us not only to Lone, the idiot, but to Janie, Beanie, Bonnie, and the unnamed mongoloid child, four of the other components of the ultimate superbeing. Sturgeon glides from one viewpoint to another with breathtaking skill. The second section, “Baby Is Three” is, as said, the first-person narrative of Gerry, the unpleasant but hypergifted teenager. The final part, “Morality,” reverts to third-person narrative, but this time keeps entirely to the viewpoint of a new character, Hip Barrows, who will be essential to the resolution of the plot.

This time around I was surprised to find two major characters killed off between scenes, an odd and awkward narrative strategy; and I found each of the three sections marred at its climax by the unhappy surfacing of pulp-magazine storytelling. In Part One, the idiot, who can barely speak, let alone think, unexpectedly and offhandedly flanges together an antigravity device under the telepathic guidance of the other mutants, using materials Sturgeon doesn’t bother to describe. “Powered inexhaustibly by the slow release of atomic binding energy, the device was the practical solution of flight without wings, the simple key to a new era in transportation, in materials handling, and in interplanetary travel.” I found that an implausible gimmick and the lines about “a new era in transportation” an intrusive editorial comment, light-years distant from the sort of prose shown in that amazing opening paragraph.

Then, at the climax of the famous central “Baby Is Three” section, comes a bulky slab of sci-fi jargon when Gerry tells the psychiatrist what he really is: “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.” All that is true; but nobody outside the pages of a science fiction magazine would have talked that way in 1953, and nobody but a science fiction reader would have any idea what “teleports” and “telekineticists” were. It is a disturbing reminder that Sturgeon, for all his stylistic skill, had developed those skills in magazines with names like Astounding Science Fiction and Startling Stories.

In the final section, twenty troublesome pages are devoted to the vast, heavy-handed expository conversation in which Janie, the telekinetic, explains to Hip Barrows, its mystified protagonist, what his life and Sturgeon’s book are all about. Hip digests this stuff—which a less hurried writer might have told in a less schematic way—and then launches into an interior monologue about the difference between ethics and morality (“There must be a name for the code, the set of rules, by which an individual lives in such a way to help his species—something over and above morals”) that does not have the sound of fiction at all but the tone of the ponderous and often fatuous editorials with which John W. Campbell, Jr., regaled the readers of his magazine Astounding Science Fiction between 1937 and 1971. Which leads, finally, to the discursive and expository pages in which Hip neutralizes the villainous Gerry and completes the forging of the new superbeing.

 

A classic science fiction novel? Yes, certainly, for all its flaws: a trailblazer, a pathfinder, and for the most part a rich and moving book besides. A literary masterpiece that one can set on the same shelf with the books of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Updike, Bellow, Roth? Alas, no. I had hoped, reading it now, that More Than Human wholly transcended the clichés of science fiction’s pulp era. It doesn’t. For all his enormous prose skill and soaring insight into the human soul, Sturgeon couldn’t fully shake off the set of traits that those pulp magazines had engrained in him. It hurts, when he lapses suddenly into the bad old ways of the pulps, the jargon and the hasty tricks, because the rest of the book is so good and the pulp stuff knocks us out of the painful reality of his strange characters and back into a more primitive era of storytelling. But still, it represents a mighty step forward from the magazine era. It deserves to be cherished for that reason alone; but we can and should go to it today not just as a landmark in the emancipation of science fiction but as a worthy novel in its own right.