More Than Human, a book that James Blish once called 'one of the very few authentic masterpieces science fiction can boast', takes an array of ideas about psychology and the potential abilities of the mind that were current at the time it was written and uses them to suggest what the next stage of human evolution might be. In a three-part narrative, Sturgeon traces the progress of a group of outcasts and misfits - including an idiot boy with telepathic powers called Lone, black twins with telekinetic abilities and a severely retarded child who possesses hidden mental gifts - as they gradually unite to form a gestalt being which transcends ordinary humanity. Lone's death and his replacement by the orphan Gerry, prepared to kill to maintain the group's integrity, is followed by the arrival of Hip Barrows, whose coming makes the gestalt complete and leads it to the discovery that it is not entirely alone.

Like so many of the best SF novels of the 1950s, More Than Human began as a series of short stories (first published in Galaxy magazine) and its origins do show. Ironically, for a work which shows how a group of individuals become greater than the sum of their parts when brought together, the stories do not always meld as smoothly as they could but the reader is carried through the patchwork narrative by the power of Sturgeon's imagination and the subtlety of his prose. The slow emergence of Lone from his almost vegetable state to an awareness of the world around him and his own responses to the people in it is a particularly vivid and intensely imagined piece of writing. Always prepared to tackle ideas and themes that less adventurous genre writers of the period ignored, Sturgeon's fiction shows just how American SF grew in sophistication and ambitiousness in the early years of the 1950s.

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