Throwback Thursday: Theodore Sturgeon’s More than Human Points a Way for Us to “Live Long and Prosper”

Sturgeon (born Edward Hamilton Waldo) is one of the giants of science fiction. He was a prolific short story writer (The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon series encompasses 13 volumes), and he wrote a number of novels as well. He won the Nebula and Hugo awards for the novelette Slow Sculpture and received a number of other nominations for both those awards. His friend Kurt Vonnegut used him as the model for Kilgore Trout, the fictional SF writer who appears in a number of Vonnegut’s works. (Vonnegut was amused by the idea of someone with a fishy last name.) Sturgeon also coined my favorite of the “laws” of the science fiction genre. Sturgeon’s Law states: “Ninety percent of [science fiction] is crud, but then, ninety percent of everything is crud.”
More than Human is definitely part of the good 10 percent, or even the best one percent; deservedly, it is probably Sturgeon’s best-known work. It is an expansion of an early novelette titled Baby is Three, published in 1952 (a work the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America placed into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, honoring SFF works published prior to the establishment of the Nebula Award). It concerns a group of six extraordinary humans who discover they have the power to “blesh” their talents together, turning them into a sort of unified meta-organism.

The first third of the novel, “The Fabulous Idiot,” gives the backstories of the original tale’s characters, revealing how they discovered their talents (shades of Marvel’s X-Men) and first found each other. (This section reminded me of the Netflix series Sense8). It ends with a group of disparate individuals realizing they have united as a new type of being.
The middle section of the novel recreates the original novelette almost word-for-word, and is still titled “Baby is Three.” Just a few words at the end are changed in order to allow a different, deeper climax at the end. If the first section shows a new entity being born; this section is about its growing pains. The first-person narrator tells his story through an extended psychotherapy session. As a clinical psychologist, I often have an issue with how authors try to use psychotherapy as a narrative shortcut, but Sturgeon keeps it, if not quite realistic, at least within the bounds of artistic license. And the narrator’s telepathic powers would let him convince the therapist to cancel the rest of the day’s appointments to let the whole story be told. This character has joined the gestalt organism born in the first section. In fact, he has become its “head.” But this new being, which the narrator calls Homo gestalt, is still immature and dangerous, which shows in the his final statement in the middle section: “What the hell is morality, anyway?”

That question is answered in the final section, appropriately titled “Morality.” Here, Homo gestalt finally grows up and finds its place in the world. This is a book about what it means to be alone and what it means to belong; it is the next step for humanity that shows us what it really means to be human.
Sturgeon wrote two episodes of the original Star Trek. One, “Amok Time,” was among the five TOS episodes nominated for the 1968 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation. It lost to the legendary “The City of the Edge of Forever,” written by Harlan Ellison. But Sturgeon’s script featured the first appearance of the iconic Vulcan benediction, “Live long and prosper.” It is an appropriate salutation for Homo gestalt as it exists at the end of More than Human. Hopefully we’ll get there, someday.