More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon (1953)
(Not long ago—okay, it’s going on two years now, but whatever—A.V. Club editor Keith Phipps purchased a large box containing more than 75 vintage science-fiction, crime, and adventure paperbacks. He is reading all of them. This is book number 61.)
What’s next? That’s the question at the core of a lot (though not all) of science fiction. And though there’s no talking about the future without really talking about the here and now, a genuine interest in and concern for the future of humanity pervades the genre. Why did this forward projection develop when it did, after centuries of literature set firmly in the past and present? No doubt the huge advances in science at the end of the 19th and 20th century played a part. So did genre momentum. Elvis, Carl Perkins, and Chuck Berry (and others, of course) started making rock ’n’ roll, and suddenly everyone had a guitar, some blues riffs, a pounding rhythm, and a song to sing. Why should it be any different with Jules Verne and H.G. Wells?
But I’d put a lot of the credit squarely on Charles Darwin’s shoulders. It’s hard to overstate the cultural impact of Darwin’s theories. It isn’t that everyone before Darwin believed that Earth had only been around for a few millennia, but few people provided compelling evidence that we should believe otherwise, either. But with evolution, humanity had to confront the idea of history stretching back further than the mind could easily contemplate, and a universe that stretched further still. It dovetailed with a growing, and widely evident, religious skepticism. Post-Darwin, creation unfolds at an immeasurably slow pace, always subject to the brute laws of nature. Even the clockmaker Creator of the 18th century Deists looks hands-on by comparison. Maybe there’s room for God in this new order, but it gets harder and harder to see where that room is situated.
Is there a better combination for a cultural crisis? How about compounding it by letting science give humanity the ability to destroy itself? That’s what Theodore Sturgeon was looking at when he wrote More Than Human, in which evolution and the end of humanity figure prominently. Remarkably, he uses both to point toward a better tomorrow, although he doesn’t get there the easy way. In Sturgeon’s world, evolution is a messy process, a trial-and-error affair whose errors leave confusion, and sometimes bodies, in their wake.
Divided into three sections that build on each other—the book is itself something of an evolutionary process—More Than Human opens with “The Fabulous Idiot,” wherein we meet most the book’s key players, young people with extraordinary gifts that set them apart from the rest of humanity. (You can bet that Stan Lee and Chris Claremont had this on their nightstands at some point.) These include the idiot of the title: Lone begins the book as a barely verbal wild man whose life is changed first by the care of a friendly farm couple, and then later, and more profoundly, by some kids. Among them: Janie, a telekinetic girl; a pair of teleporting twins named Bonne and Beanie; and a baby whose physical deformity hides the mental powers of a supercomputer.
Apart, they’re freaks. Working together, they form an organism spread across multiple bodies, essentially a new species called homo gestalt. And though they may be the next stage in evolution, with advantages mere humans can’t imagine, that doesn’t mean they have it easy. In the first part, Sturgeon brings his characters together and guides them toward the difficult realization that they belong together more than they belong among humanity. Figuring out what to do next isn’t easy, particularly when it becomes apparent that all the parts don’t work together that well. Lone is bolstered by the others, but his inadequacies place limitations on the new organisms. “We can do practically anything,” Baby says, speaking through Janie, “but we most likely won’t. He says we’re a thing all right, but the thing is an idiot.”
Sturgeon continues:
So it was that Lone came to know himself; and like the handful of people who have done so before him he found, at this pinnacle, the rugged foot of a mountain.
Put another way: With great power comes great disappointment.