Oh, the Humanity!

Sometimes, you come across a book that is so good, you stop and wonder why you hadn’t read it before. When it comes to Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human, the simple answer is that I had never heard of the book before. I’m not very knowledgeable about science fiction, and the only reason I picked this book up was on the strength of a recommendation from someone whose opinions I trust. Happily, the book was every bit as good as I expected.

More Than Human tells the story of a group of extraordinary people who come to find each other. They all have strange powers of one sort or another, and they come to “blesh” together, each person becoming one part of a new type of organism. In effect, they become the next stage of human evolution, homo gestalt. That’s all you’re getting from me about the plot, which is really tricky to describe without spoilers. But as with the neatest detective stories, all the plot threads you follow throughout the book end up woven into a tapestry of incredibly beauty.