“It would lead to the addition of one more item to the Unified Field – what we now call psychic energy, or ‘psionics.'” “Matter, energy, space, time and psyche,” he breathed, awed. Sturgeon even gives a kind of hard SF explanation for his premisses, should his reader have trouble with suspension of disbelief. So yes, this is science fiction, even though it might read as psychic fantasy at times. I started my reviews of Childhood’s End and The Demolished Man in the same fashion. Obviously, the fifties were a different time, and parapsychology and the likes still held great promise. I’ll make a few general remarks on content and writing first, and elaborate a bit about the philosophical foundations of this book in the second part of my review – Friedrich Nietzsche, oh yes! Readers familiar with this book’s content will not find that surprising: More Than Human is roughly speaking about a mind-reading idiot, teleporting twin girls, a retarded baby with a supermind and a telekinetic girl, together forming something new: the “Homo Gestalt” – something more than human indeed. Each part is quite distinct, 3 novellas if you will, but taken as a whole, they are yet another, different thing. Sturgeon added a part before and a part after. Theodore Sturgeon is one of SF’s greatest short fiction writers, and so it is apt that More Than Human stems from a novella, Baby Is Three.
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