This is a book in three distinct parts. The first two parts are powerful, impressive, and rather shocking; at least by the standards of the early 1950s. It's shaping up to be a great classic.

The third part is still good in its way, it's not a failure, but I find it less convincing; it seems rather eerily to anticipate the mindset of the 1960s.

The story dramatizes the evolution of a new form of humanity: homo gestalt. We see it coming together uncertainly in its early stages and fumbling towards viability. The three parts of the book show successive stages of the process, all richly imagined with many details and individual personalities.

The third part is broadly correct in its theme, but there were many possible ways of handling it, and I don't think Sturgeon picked one of the better ways. So I give the book as a whole four stars rather than the five it might have had.

The gestalt described in the story is not at all plausible, but that's not the point. I don't think Sturgeon was saying, "This is going to happen!"; he was saying, "Wouldn't it be amazing if this happened!". The book is more fantasy than science fiction, but it's written like science fiction and so the reader tends to assume that's what it is.

Sturgeon also seems to be trying to suggest that some people who become useless failures in our society may have hidden talents that they're unaware of or don't know how to use (though probably not the talents described in this book!).

More generally, I suppose that most people fail to live up to their potential, because it's hard to find out what their potential is, where their true talents lie, what would be the ideal jobs for them. ( )

Understandably dated given its publication date; but still a good read. Feels like it transcends the genre. Would not necessarily recommend it to anyone not a die hard sci-fi / fantasy fan but glad I "stumbled" on it. ( )

Sturgeon is an odd SF author. Much of what he wrote is not even SF, it's fantasy. This is an interesting book and very much Sturgeon. Not really my cup of tea. ( )

Story: 3 / 10
Characters: 9
Setting: 5
Prose: 7

I've decided to start breaking down my ratings better. Generally, story is the only element that matters, since literature is a storytelling medium. Thus, my regular rating focuses only on that. You can easily see from the rating breakdown that besides the story, this book was generally quite strong. A similar idea to the wolves in Vinge's Zones of Thought trilogy. Nevertheless, not recommended. ( )

A new species comes into existence, Homo Gestalt.

This struck enough chords for me to recognise that I probably read it about 40 - 50 years ago at a time when I was reading a lot of SF with similar themes. This time round though, my head being in a different place, I struggled with it and just found it baffling for much of it. It wasn't bad, but I had no particular impulse to pick it up again after doing other things and was forcing myself to finish it just to get it out of the way. ( )

First Reading:
Well done sci-fi.

Second Reading:
I can't recall having read this book, but see that I first listed it nine years ago. On this reading I found it difficult to stay interested until I found, from Wikipedia, that it was based more or less on three novellas, and structured in three sections with time gaps in the storylines between them. It tells of a Gestalt, a group of people with different psychic sorts of skills, which may together become the first of a new type of human, more powerful than any single human person so far. It was a groundbreaking novel, and at the time, science fiction and fantasy were often closely linked.

Section one "The Fabulous Idiot" left me wondering where the story was going and when would things become clear. So I left section one, skimmed through "Baby Is Three" and began to read the final section "Morality". All three fit together.

So sections one and two were worth skimming, with enough bad scenes to make me avoid learning all the details. I won't try to discuss the characters or plot, since many reviews cover those things.

And the final section, though sort of preachy and full of details and written in the more wordy style of the time, was psychologically interesting. ( )

A jewel of a book, I found it by chance in an attic and it was one of the finest, most beautiful books I've ever read.
Delicious. ( )

I love old scifi book covers so much. Again the original:

is so much better than the Kindle edition that looks like ten minutes of Photoshop work:

More Than Human has the sparseness of prose like the other Theodore Sturgeon book I’ve read, The Dreaming Jewels, but only in words used, not in the sentence style and structure. More Than Human seems much further polished. The writing transcends the simplistic language. And perfectly edited prose is exactly what I love.

The idiot lived in a black and grey world, punctuated by the white lightning of hunger and the flickering of fear.

This is the first line, short and fairly simple words, but similar in sharpness and all uncomfortable (punctuated, lightning, flickering) as the idiot is; all working together—as a gestalt—greater than the sum of their parts. As all the best books are.

Due in part to this, Sturgeon has a knack for writing characters that probably couldn’t exist within the real world, but he instills them with just enough humanity so they’re never not unbelievable. The first section is third-person narratives to introduce the unique characters: Lone, the idiot (the idiot brain, that is); Alicia Kew, the girl without sin; Bonnie and Beanie, the teleporting twins; Gerry Thompson, the adult 6 year old; Hip Barrows, who loves radios; Janie, the telepath; and Baby, who is three. The second section is first-person narrative (the coming of the second, immoral brain) happening years later with flashbacks to fill in the missing years. The third is about love, or something deeper than love, and terror (but I think all love is melded with terror). And when a character’s personality changes significantly between parts two and three, you believe it, because Sturgeon has created a real person and real people change.

In the end, it’s not just an exploration of human psychic evolution. It’s “what-if”, yes, but it’s a morality play (or an ethos play, Sturgeon would probably quibble over this). It’s probably closest stylistically to Phillip K Dick: inhuman circumstances, with extremely human thoughts and feelings in an effort to communicate a thought just on the edge of humanity.

If I was underlining in this book (I can’t, it’s Lauren’s), I would have underlined…

- Sometimes the world’s too much to live with and a body sort of has to turn away from it to rest.
- “Ask Baby what is a friend.” “He says it’s somebody who goes on loving you whether he likes you or not.”
- “Ask Baby what kind of people are all the time trying to find out what they are are what they belong to?” “He says, every kind.”
- I started to cry. Fifteen years old and crying like that!
- I looked at him and suddenly realized why he fooled with the pipe all the time. It was so he could look down at it and you wouldn’t be able to see his eyes.
- “Everybody’s alone.” “But some people learn how to live with it.”
- Lovemaking, even the suppressed and silent kind, is a demanding thing, a thirsty and yearning thing.
- The most human thing about anyone is a thing he learns… and earns. It’s a thing he can’t have when he’s very young; if he gets it at all, he gets it after a long search and a deep conviction. After that it’s truly part of him as long as he lives. ( )

Gibberish - much ado about nothing imo.....

This novel was first published four years before I was born. I own the Easton Press edition of it, bound in leather with gold page edges and a ribbon bookmark. I never got around to reading that fancy edition before my eyesight and arthritis made ebooks much easier. I discovered in October that I'd bought the kindle edition in 2017. Now, I have read this classic tale of humans with powers. It wasn't the easiest novel to read, and the end is a little 2001-space odyssey-ish. But it was interesting, and unique. As with many a fantasy novel, there are many point of view characters, but at least Sturgeon never 'head-hops' during any single scene.

I can tell you that a few reviewers obviously didn't understand it very well. This type of story wasn't uncommon back then, the idea of humanity evolving into a different kind of entity, and Sturgeon's is full of growing pains. It ends on an upbeat, full of potential. ( )

This was an interesting read but not as good as I hoped. The concept is interesting - creating a kind of mind Voltron with 6 people who have extraordinary powers becoming one hive mind which he believes is the next evolutionary step for humans. I always enjoy books about "people with powers" and I'm sure it inspired a lot of sci-fi we have today but like a lot of older novels, it did not age well in certain respects. I'm sure it was quite ahead of its time for the 50's for even having 2 important characters be black females but to make them mute and naked? It would be nice to think that he was making a statement on the importance of black women's impact on our society despite being overlooked and ignored but he wasn't. lol! The fact that he made the "brain" a white male who controlled the "other parts" bothered me as well, not to mention his depiction of a person with an intellectual disability. So, while I liked the idea of the book, there were definitely some cringy parts that time and science, but also social consciousness, has moved beyond and I feel this could make a better story written now. ( )

Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human was a thought provoking book, but what blew me away was that the book was originally published in 1953. I don't know how the author managed to not date himself. He was brilliant. Was the message of the book the continuation of the species? Was the message timelessness? Read the book. ( )

Next Step in Human Evolution

Humanity could have obliterated itself many times over throughout the ages; yet here we are. What, you may wonder, has saved us from ourselves? The answer is ourselves, we have saved ourselves because of certain traits we possess. We are social creatures, which means we need each other; that existing without others would be impossible. We are creatures of conscious, possessing, at least the vast majority of us, an innate and also learned morality. While we have many other traits and attribute as a species, these couple keep us from destroying ourselves. And, as Theodore Sturgeon dramatizes in More Than Human, even as we advance and evolve into more powerful creations, without these, well, kaput. In fact, these two traits form the essential parts of the next step, Homo Gestalt, and Homo Gestalt isn’t complete until that last one, morality and its concomitant conscious become part of the whole.

The full novel More Than Human grew out of a novella Sturgeon published in Galaxy in 1952, what became the middle of the novel, “Baby Is Three,” preceded in the novel by “The Fabulous Idiot,” and followed by “Morality.” The novel follows the merging of different individuals who each possess a special trait, telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation, advanced intellect, and finally (though not meshed into the group until the end) a conscious. Apart, each is vulnerable. Together they form a new step in human evolution, a species with abilities far beyond those of humans but grounded in humanity. To really use their abilities to move humanity forward, they need each other, and they need the one thing that will prevent them from destroying humankind and themselves: morality brought to the group by the last individual.

Part 1, “The Fabulous Idiot” follows Lone, a man who possesses telepathic powers, but no real connection to humanity until he finds Evelyn Kew. This ends in the tragedy of lost love. Lone then finds the poor farm family, the Prodds, who bring him in as the child they never could have. But when Mrs. Prodd becomes pregnant, Lone leaves to live in the woods. There he attracts three children, Janie with telekinetic powers, and the twins Bonnie and Beanie, who can’t talk but can teleport. Later, he learns Mrs. Prodd has died and left a mongoloid baby. Lone adopts the baby, who turns our to possess super intelligence. These then form the new Homo Gestalt.

Part 2, “Baby Is Three” occurs years later after the death of Lone. Gerry Thompson, an orphan and criminal, can’t remember his life and seeks the aid of a psychiatrist. With his aid, Gerry pieces together his life, realizing that he is the telepathic member of a family, the gestalt started by Lone. He has an uncontrolled ruthlessness about him that makes him dangerous.

Part 3, “Morality” begins years later with the desolate former Air Force Lt. Hip (Hippocrates) Barrows being found by a grown up Janie. Once a gifted engineer, he fell on hard times, being booted from the military and incarcerated in an asylum. Janie helps him discover his past life, the cause of his current condition, and his real purpose in life, which is to join the gestalt and provide them, particularly Gerry, the a governor of morality.

Winner of the 1954 International Fantasy Award (no longer awarded), Sturgeon offers insights the nature of human and humanity, and a unique imagining of how humankind might evolve in the future.
( )

Next Step in Human Evolution

Humanity could have obliterated itself many times over throughout the ages; yet here we are. What, you may wonder, has saved us from ourselves? The answer is ourselves, we have saved ourselves because of certain traits we possess. We are social creatures, which means we need each other; that existing without others would be impossible. We are creatures of conscious, possessing, at least the vast majority of us, an innate and also learned morality. While we have many other traits and attribute as a species, these couple keep us from destroying ourselves. And, as Theodore Sturgeon dramatizes in More Than Human, even as we advance and evolve into more powerful creations, without these, well, kaput. In fact, these two traits form the essential parts of the next step, Homo Gestalt, and Homo Gestalt isn’t complete until that last one, morality and its concomitant conscious become part of the whole.

The full novel More Than Human grew out of a novella Sturgeon published in Galaxy in 1952, what became the middle of the novel, “Baby Is Three,” preceded in the novel by “The Fabulous Idiot,” and followed by “Morality.” The novel follows the merging of different individuals who each possess a special trait, telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation, advanced intellect, and finally (though not meshed into the group until the end) a conscious. Apart, each is vulnerable. Together they form a new step in human evolution, a species with abilities far beyond those of humans but grounded in humanity. To really use their abilities to move humanity forward, they need each other, and they need the one thing that will prevent them from destroying humankind and themselves: morality brought to the group by the last individual.

Part 1, “The Fabulous Idiot” follows Lone, a man who possesses telepathic powers, but no real connection to humanity until he finds Evelyn Kew. This ends in the tragedy of lost love. Lone then finds the poor farm family, the Prodds, who bring him in as the child they never could have. But when Mrs. Prodd becomes pregnant, Lone leaves to live in the woods. There he attracts three children, Janie with telekinetic powers, and the twins Bonnie and Beanie, who can’t talk but can teleport. Later, he learns Mrs. Prodd has died and left a mongoloid baby. Lone adopts the baby, who turns our to possess super intelligence. These then form the new Homo Gestalt.

Part 2, “Baby Is Three” occurs years later after the death of Lone. Gerry Thompson, an orphan and criminal, can’t remember his life and seeks the aid of a psychiatrist. With his aid, Gerry pieces together his life, realizing that he is the telepathic member of a family, the gestalt started by Lone. He has an uncontrolled ruthlessness about him that makes him dangerous.

Part 3, “Morality” begins years later with the desolate former Air Force Lt. Hip (Hippocrates) Barrows being found by a grown up Janie. Once a gifted engineer, he fell on hard times, being booted from the military and incarcerated in an asylum. Janie helps him discover his past life, the cause of his current condition, and his real purpose in life, which is to join the gestalt and provide them, particularly Gerry, the a governor of morality.

Winner of the 1954 International Fantasy Award (no longer awarded), Sturgeon offers insights the nature of human and humanity, and a unique imagining of how humankind might evolve in the future.
( )

One of the worst science fiction works I've read. I recently purchased it through 'Better World Books' for $3.98 and I'll be selling it to 'Half Price Books,' for maybe $.25. Perhaps it's the fact 'More Than Human' was written in 1953 and I read it 64 years later. The book was penned when those on the political left were certain, any day now, Man would blow the planet Earth up. These were also the days when telekinesis and telepathy and hypnosis were the going thing. Reading the book, you cannot tell who is speaking, after character after character is added. ** S P O I L E R A L E R T ** And, after flogging myself to keep reading, I finally discover that, basically the book has very little science fiction in it, but a lot about morality and mores and ethos. Ends up the 'Gestalt Five' characters in the book are a new, advanced, evolved, Man. (BTW: I know this review is written sloppy, but, since I'm not getting paid, live with it.) ( )

A book that makes you imagine, in the tradition of the best works of science fiction. It tackles the question of how humans will evolve next, and answers it in a plausible, if unexpected, way. Well worth the read. And a good story to boot! ( )

More Than Human
by Theodore Sturgeon

I read this when I was a teen, some 40+ years ago. I can't say I remember anything about it from then but I read almost all his books out at the time. This was nice to revisit to see if it jogged any memories but it didn't. I have too many past books stored up there! Lol! Many must have been reshelved.
The story is about a variety of children who have odd gifts and sometimes physical quirks that make them freaks to most.
I enjoyed how the author followed each character and the reader got to learn about each one and their gift. Then showed how they meshed together. This was very character driven! Janie was my favorite although the twins were pretty amazing!
Some of the first parts were a bit slow but it picked up. ( )

It’s difficult to provide a teaser for this story without spoiling anything. I went into it blind and was pretty confused about what I was reading at the beginning, but it soon starts to make sense, and seeing the bigger picture form was part of the fun. I’ll just talk about the very beginning. In the beginning, we’re introduced to an “idiot”. He doesn’t speak, he doesn’t seem to have any intelligent thoughts, he doesn’t have a family or a home. He wanders around, with no reliable source of food or shelter. Sometimes people mistreat him, sometimes people help him. Sometimes, if he gets really desperate, people do exactly what he needs them to do, even if they didn’t want to.

This book was published in 1953. For the most part, it aged well and it’s very readable. It appears to be set around the time when it was published, and there aren't many references to technology anyway, so there aren’t as many jarring moments compared to books from the same time period that focus more heavily on technology. I didn't notice much sexism. There were a couple of racist characters, but they weren't intended to be likeable and we didn’t spend much time with them. The main thing that startled me and frequently reminded me I was reading an older book was the use of the term mongoloid.

Most of the fun for me was in learning what exactly the point of this weird story was, as well as guessing and learning about what happened in the parts of the story that weren’t told in a linear manner. I thought the journey was better than the destination, though -- the ending fell flat for me. I have more comments on that behind the spoiler tags below. I’m rating this 3.5 stars, because I enjoyed it while I read it, but rounding down to 3 on Goodreads because I wasn’t very satisfied with it by the end.

In the last few pages, Gerry gets a mental lecture on ethics from Hip and then suddenly Gerry grasps this concept (a concept that he’s been exposed to before), he feels ashamed of himself, the gestalt adds Hip to their group to be the “prissy” part, and now the gestalt has suddenly become an ethical creature that will do great things for the world and is promptly inducted into the great secret society of gestalts. It was too pat.

I also had some issues with the other gestalts immediately welcoming the new one into the fold. How often do we see people in real life say they’ve come to some great understanding or decision, something that will improve their attitudes or their behavior? How often do we then see their good intentions go by the wayside as soon as they meet a significant challenged? Maybe they keep trying and do better after the second or third or fourth challenge, maybe they don’t. Maybe they get even worse than before. This new gestalt hasn’t done anything to prove itself yet. If they weren’t ready 5 or 10 minutes ago, how are they suddenly ready now just because one of their parts has accepted a new idea but not yet put it into practice? ( )

A thought provoking work on humanity

Theodore Sturgeon at his best. What is humanity and how will it evolve? Written in the early 50s, this story is much less race and gender biased than many others written at this time. While the author projects his moral and ethical values, he shows a thoughtful and considered view of what might be and manages to spin a remarkably entertaining tale at the same time. ( )

More three connected stories than a novel, but still a classic. The first story is the strongest and holds up amazingly well. It navigates the interweaved lives of Lone, the idiot, Alice and Evelyn, the sisters imprisoned by a sadistic father, Jane the telekinetic, and, to a lesser extent, Beanie and Bonnie the African American teleporting toddlers, the Prodds, a farming couple, and... Baby, though Baby becomes more relevant later. This first story lets the reader be as lost as its protagonists, who are growing up either abused or ignored. Their secret is revealed very gradually and organically. The second story, "Baby is Three", is more of its time -- a classic 1950's narrative trope of some revealing a backstory in a psychotherapist's office. The tone will remind many of Heinlein. It's a very good Heinlein story, but not as groundbreaking as the first story. The final story is the weakest. It focuses on a character introduced in the first story but dropped after one page. This is one of those "amnesiac gradually remembers" stories. It begins well but devolves into way too much talking and exposition, some of it to try and defend and bolster a creaky plot. To make it more frustrating, the closing lines of the second story and the title of the third story already clearly established where things were going.

This was one of my favorite books half a century ago. Still recommended. ( )

I have no explanation for my deep love of this novel. It's hokey and ridiculous and overwrought and leaves bushels of interesting themes all over the place, unassembled. It's hopelessly dated. I love it. I connect with these very implausible characters. I revere this author for writing with such careless abandon of form or plot and who still keeps me riveted. This may have been my fourth or fifth reading of this particular novel. It's one of my security-blanket books. ( )

Evidently Sturgeon's novel is prototypical New Wave SF: characters emphasised over science, competing ideas and ideals foregrounded while chases and battles sidelined. The storytelling is well done, from prose to structure and plotting.

Sturgeon uses a distinctive narrative voice: stylised, meant to represent a non-neurotypical intelligence, and achieves that memorably. He does this three times, actually: the first and third parts are in third-person omniscient; the 2nd in first person, each time following a different character. He pairs these voices with an exceedingly economical prose style: this is a short novel, reads fast, but contains a lot of content in that short narrative. Some of that is the prose: poetic but clear, unadorned, it's the combination of simple words not a selection of fancy or unusual words. But just as crucial to the style is the novel's structure and plotting. Three intertwined novellettes or novellas, a focus on short scenes which show rather than tell, with much action relayed retrospectively (either reviewing memories, or relaying history in brief episodes). There are overlapping characters but from different time periods.

Against all this, Sturgeon stays alert both to the implications of his ideas, and also their potential. His plots and premises often flow because they start not "at the beginning", but in medias res. Such choices grab the reader's attention, and Sturgeon lets the full picture resolve naturally, unspooling details and background until the story's uncertain images come into focus. The denouement dilates from his central idea, reflecting on how human evolution, as he conceives it, raises distinct ethical questions for his characters. Sturgeon's finale accommodates both the preceding conflict and thematic ambition, a mix of plot climax and conceptual revelation.

I really enjoyed the concept and how Sturgeon realised it, overall a welcome counterweight to the prevailing Marvel / DC approach to superheroes. While Sturgeon never uses the term "superhero" (referring instead to Homo gestalt), arguably a new kind of superhero is precisely what he describes. ( )

A novel about friendship, and synergy, as a new form of entity attempts to live in the community of 1950's America. ( )

So this is one of those classic Science Fiction books that make it to the best of lists. It was originally written in 1953, and for being that old, it feels modern in its setting. However, it feels incredibly dated in the story. Telepathy has run its course in science fiction, and many of the ideas are old and could be considered laughable.

The biggest problem is the idea of the "gestalt". Where multiple people form something that is bigger than them. Unfortunately, it doesn't work, because it feels like the person with the "brain" of this gestalt decides everything, and the rest of the group gets no say. This concept would have worked if there is a true blending, but theres not. The telekinesis part of this gestalt goes off on her own to teach the "brain" humility. Also, the "brain" can't talk to the calculator portion of the gestalt. So there are serious problems to this book.

The second problem is how the author deals with racism and disabity. For 1953, I suspect the author was fairly forward thinking about race. But, with the black twins, Beanie and Bonnie, don't even talk and are the "feet" of the gestalt, used mostly for fetching things far away. And baby isn't really a character. He is a "Mongloid" - which I'm assuming is Down Syndrome, but the author never describe him beyond the label. All he is a computer, able to answer questions when given enough input, but never moves past being an infant.

So, its a book that has many problems, and it is full of ideas, even if not properly implemented. ( )

Love love love it ( )