I’d never heard of this book, though the title itself seemed familiar (probably from the similar phrase from Blade Runner). I’d also heard of Theodore Sturgeon as one of the big names of the Silver Age, but knew nothing of his writing, and nothing of him beyond Heinlein famously helping him out of a spell of writer’s block. When I saw this book, I took the opportunity to expand my classic SF reading.
Well. It was weird. I’ll give him that.
The story concerns a group of children with seemingly random psychic gifts: a young man with telepathy, a young girl with telekinesis, young twin girls with teleportation, and a…baby…thing…with partial telepathy and “superintellect” (not sure what an appropriate psychic term for this gift would be).
It’s a short book that covers a lot of ground. The first section concerns how they are drawn together to form a cooperative psychic ‘entity’ they call the “gestalt” – they remain distinct individuals, but their abilities link them into a greater, integrated whole. The second section addresses what happens when one part of the gestalt is lost and must be replaced – by the non-ideal replacement available at the time – and how it changes as a result. The third section concerns a normal person affected by crossing paths with the gestalt, and how what happens to him threatens to pull the entity apart.
As I said, it was weird. Not good-weird, like a Twilight Zone episode or a Lovecraft story, nor bad-weird, as in consciously trying to be outré or cutting edge or ‘experimental’. It was weird in a very similar way to Bester’s The Stars My Destination, from around the same time (1953 vs. 1946) – an unusual subject handled in an unusual way.
Sturgeon’s use of language is actually quite good, and he manages to successfully wrangle a number of details of the action, the nature of the various gifts, and in-story history, while showing believable character changes over time – all in, again, what is a fairly short novel.
Besides the resemblance to Bester, one thing that stuck out to me was the occasional pandering on racial issues. Like Heinlein, Sturgeon created non-white characters at a time (circa 1950) when that was not commonly done. But unlike Heinlein, Sturgeon wasn’t always as adept at smoothly weaving this ahead-of-the-times element into the story. There are moments when he presents the reader with a clumsy “racism bad, m’kay?” message of the type common to broadcast television of the Seventies, in what felt like the same manner: We interrupt the dramatic flow of this program to shoehorn in a Very Special Moral Lecture against __-ism.
Overall, I can’t say that there was a much in it that stuck with me in terms of ideas. After reading it, it was like I’d…read it. That’s it. Entertaining in the moment but lean on lasting impressions, especially compared to Earth Abides, which I purchased at the same time and with which I read it back-to-back.