Name: More Than Human
Rating: 4.205882352941177 (17 reviews)
ISBN: 9780375703713

Theodore Sturgeon

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. Winner of the International Fantasy Award. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

More Than Human

It was aight, Hip should have slimed tf out of Gerry but oh well. 

Seriously tho the story being told through different view points was pretty cool and the whole thing with Hip needing to slowly remember how Gerry fucked him over and then eventually tryna get his get back was really tuffffff.

Drew

It was aight, Hip should have slimed tf out of Gerry but oh well. 

Seriously tho the story being told through different view points was pretty cool and the whole thing with Hip needing to slowly remember how Gerry fucked him over and then eventually tryna get his get back was really tuffffff.

Homo Saps >>>> Homo Gestalt

Tim Pendry

As regular readers of my reviews know, I tend to approach literature as form and as content. How does a text work as narrative and what did it mean then and what may it mean now? Quality can thus not be a simple matter since a well written work can be trivial and the serious may be bad art. Theodore Sturgeon's 'More than Human' fits into an odd category of works that are both significant and flawed, absurd and meaningful and where it is hard not to feel sorry that where it works is on the edge of genius but where it does not is in danger of being risible or irrelevant to us today. 'More Than Human' is very much part of an American science fiction tradition using the genre to investigate contemporary issues. This always makes such works 'of their time' and less interesting to ours although there is often something that can speak to us nearly three quarters of a century later. In this case, Sturgeon was exploring an area that is usually associated with the British science fiction of New Worlds a decade later, exploring the 'science' of mind and inner space rather than rockets and outer space. The science looks just as dodgy in both cases today but that is never the point. Sturgeon, caught in a world of Freudian couches and behaviourism, postulates something totally absurd - that the next phase of evolution might be a 'gestalt' creature made up of co-operating human components representing different human functions and creating something greater. The absurdity, of course, is that such a gestalt could not survive easily (except through conquest) or reproduce since each 'part' would have to be created out of chance and necessity. However, the absurdity is mitigated by some serious thinking about alternative being that is relevant to AI now. The narrative approach is also flawed and yet there is some exceptionally fine, even experimental, writing that, in the first two thirds, demonstrates something close to genius. The plotting and characterisation mostly work, linking elements to create a whole. He is a fine writer when he allows himself or is allowed to be. Only a fine writer could make one believe in the absurd as he does. The session between a narcissistic sixth gestalt member and a psychotherapist is superb cat-and-mouse theatre as just one example. The flaw possibly lies in a bug bear of 1950s American science fiction which is most usually presented as short stories about single ideas. What Sturgeon seems to have done is construct his novel as a chain of such enclosed story lines that lose consistency of approach by the end. And, yes, it turns out that the book was constructed (in a process like so many others of the era) as an expansion of a novella onto which two other stories were grafted ... and it shows. This is a period in the genre where the market (centred on magazine publication) did not encourage total coherence. Perhaps Sturgeon found difficulty in maintaining his experimental vision. Perhaps publishers required the book to offer readers a more conventional approach. Whatever the cause, the 'conventionality' of the final third and its strange 'conspiracy plot' sits ill with the genius of the first two thirds. In that first two thirds (before the love story and the paranoia around a destruction of memory forced on an innocent soldier victim) Sturgeon really does think out of the box in structuring his gestalt creature out of a calculating baby, an idiot, an interpretative girl and two black twins. These and their relationship are truly creative interventions which make the absurd seem humanly (or more than humanly) plausible. But, as so often, the dynamic, the potentiality of the tale collapses into yet another bout of American liberal moralism. Oh, what it could have explored! The more science fiction I read of the period, the more I realise how American science fiction would become trapped between its desire to think the unthinkable and yet meet the needs of a market of expectations and conformity and so never quite achieve true greatness. Nevertheless, this is a book that can trigger thoughts about consciousness and its components but also one about the origins of morality and its relationship to new forms of consciousness. This is where it becomes relevant to our contemporary thinking about artificial intelligence. The fear of a new evolved form of human moving away from and out of conventional ethical constraints (almost certainly an anxiety ultimately derived from Nietzsche's 'death of God') is already being transferred to our anxieties about AI. There is nothing new perhaps under the sun. The text has also been praised for its 'poetry'. I think this is fair praise. There are many points in the early story where the use of language, sometime allusive in the extreme, really does reach levels of greatness. This aspect of the case justifies it as 'minor canon'. Does it flip over the line into 'mainstream literature'? No, it is close, it dances on the border but it does not quite make the grade. What it does feel like is a more personal statement than you generally get in genre writing. Perhaps only Philip K. Dick can get so close. What we seem to be seeing is a writer simultaneously fascinated with how the mind might work and looking for an answer to an existential question about our loneliness. The 'gestalt' is a response to being alone even if unaloneness eventually comes down to 'love' in the conventional part of the tale. And yet the ending then transcends this to suggest something else entirely - a form of collective total being beyond even the 'gestalt', one that contains a final state that makes one understand why it became a loved book amongst the subsequent generation of Californian hippies. Personally I was not convinced but then I am not convinced by pantheism and guiding hands in any case. Others will be. The solution to being alone and God being dead is apparently getting ethics and immersing yourself in the collective. Er, well, if that rocks your boat, why not?

Matthew Royal

Coincidentally picked up this book about an emerging gestalt lifeform while watching Sens8 on Netflix. The author, Theodore Sturgeon, is the creator of Sturgeon's Law -- "90 percent of everything is crap." The narrative voice jumps around a bit, as does the actual line of the narrative. Perspective shifts occur 3 or 4 times during the story, but they're done with skill, representing progressive stages of awareness or awakening. 

The conclusion -- building on the characters comprising the gestalt being's discovery of a new ethos for themselves -- is inspiring, spiritual, humanistic, satisfying, and ultimately inevitable, and a powerfully optimistic insight into what our relationship could be with the super-intelligent AI's humanity will someday build.

Cindy Lieberman

Interesting (and slightly weird) though experiment about a gestalt-consciousness composed of a handful of societal misfits in the 1950s who find each other and “blesh” (blend+mesh) their complimentary skills. Narrated in three distinct parts, the book covers themes of loneliness, family, memory, and belonging.

More Than Human

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