More Than Human

If you have ever been lonely and longed for completion, you will be drawn to this book. But if you are one of those rare souls who sense that completion demands more than a wife or a husband, who yearn to find a small group of friends like yourself who can believe and will the same thing--and yet still manage to preserve their distinctive humanity--then this book is just the thing for you.

More Than Human is about six people--each with a distinct and extraordinary power--who wander lost and damaged until they discover one another. When they do, they begin to realize that together they constitute a new form of life--homo gestalt, they call themselves--which might just be the next step in human evolution.

This is an extraordinary, resonant book. Stylistically and structurally, it's The Sound and the Fury of science fiction novels: the tale of an idiot not an quite idiot, whose tale--not as simple as it seems--is bound up with the narratives and lives of others which give his story its meaning. It has passages of loneliness as fierce as anything you will find in Job, Robinson Crusoe, Hunger, or Native Son, and yet everything in it points toward love, despite the bleakest of conditions. Best of all, it ends with a surprising revelation that leaves the reader with the conviction that there is indeed hope for the future without in any way diminishing the challenges and the loneliness of the individual human life.

Sturgeon was always an accomplished writer, but in this book he outdid himself. This is one of the science fiction books that--even now, more than fifty years later--needs to be read.