More Than Human

More Than Human

Author: Theodore Sturgeon

Publisher: Ballantine Books (1953)

ISBN: 0345243897

pages: 188

genre: science fiction

2.5 (out of 5) STARS

Annotation: A company of unusual, nearly monstrous people, each of whom possesses a particular extraordinary talent or faculty, acts in concert as a single superhuman, realizing a power that cannot corrupt.

Summary: There's Lone, the simpletion who can hear other people's thoughts and make a man blow his brains out just by looking at him. There's Janie, who moves things without touching them, and there are the teleporting twins, who can travel ten feet or ten miles. There's Baby, who invented an antigravity engine while still in the cradle, and Gerry, who has everything it takes to run the world except for a conscience. Seperately, they are talented freaks.Together, they compose a single organism that may represent the next step in evolution, and the final chapter in the history of the human race.

In this genre-bending novel- among the first to have launched sci fi into the arena of literature -one of the great imaginers of the twentieth century tells a story as mind-blowing as any controlled substance and as affecting as a glimpse into a stranger's soul. For as the protagonists of More Than Human struggle to find who they are and whether they are meant to help humanity or destroy it. Theodore Sturgeon explores questions of power and morality, individuality and belonging, with suspense, pathos, and a lyricism rarely seen in science fiction. (www.goodreads.com)

Evaluation: I thought this book was rather odd and disturbing. I wish a different selection had been picked for science fiction. I have not read very much science fiction but am still interested in exploring this genre a bit more.

Read-a-likes:

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein

Foundation by Isaac Asimov

Dune by Frank Herbert

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur Clarke