Lovemaking, even the suppressed and silent kind, is a demanding thing, a thirsty and yearning thing. “Everybody’s alone.” “But some people learn how to live with it.” It was so he could look down at it and you wouldn’t be able to see his eyes. I looked at him and suddenly realized why he fooled with the pipe all the time. “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.” “Ask Baby what is a friend.” “He says it’s somebody who goes on loving you whether he likes you or not.” Sometimes the world’s too much to live with and a body sort of has to turn away from it to rest. If I was underlining in this book (I can’t, it’s Lauren’s), I would have underlined… 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. It’s “what-if”, yes, but it’s a morality play (or an ethos play, Sturgeon would probably quibble over this). In the end, it’s not just an exploration of human psychic evolution. 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. The third is about love, or something deeper than love, and terror (but I think all love is melded with terror). 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 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. As all the best books are.ĭue 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. 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. The idiot lived in a black and grey world, punctuated by the white lightning of hunger and the flickering of fear. And perfectly edited prose is exactly what I love. The writing transcends the simplistic language. More Than Human seems much further polished. 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. Is so much better than the Kindle edition that looks like ten minutes of Photoshop work:

More than human by theodore sturgeon