What do you think?
Rate this book
188 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published October 1, 1953
The idiot heard the sounds but they had no meaning for him. He lived inside somewhere, apart, and the little link between word and significance hung broken. His eyes were excellent, and could readily distinguish between a smile and a snarl; but neither could have any impact on a creature so lacking in sympathy, who himself had never laughed and never snarled and so could not comprehend the feelings of his gay or angry fellows.
She had not been taught to read, but only to listen and obey. She had never learned to seek, but only to accept. Knowledge was given to her when she was ready for it and only her father and sister knew just when that might be.
There was a little girl on the bank, dressed in a torn plaid dress. She was about six. Her sharp-planed, unchildlike face was down-drawn and worried. And if he thought his caution was effective, he was quite wrong. She was looking directly at him.
In the half-cave, half-cabin, with the fire smoking in the center of the room and the meat turning slowly in the updraft, with the help of two tongue-tied infants, a mongoloid baby and a sharp-tongued child who seemed to despise him but never failed him, Lone built the device.
Homo Gestalt, the next step upward. Well, sure, why not a psychic evolution instead of the physical?
The idiot lived in a black and gray world, punctuated by the white lightning of hunger and the flickering of fear. His clothes were old and many-windowed. Here peeped a shin-bone, sharp as a cold chisel, and there in the torn coat were ribs like the fingers of fist. He was tall and flat. His eyes were calm and his face was dead.That first paragraph drew me in. The images (lightning, chisel, fist) were strong and compelling. We feel the harshness and violence of his world before we are even told about it. The long, flowing, imagistic sentences at the beginning end in the flat and mimetic “His eyes were calm and his face was dead.” That’s good stuff.
He says he is a figure-outer brain and I am a body and the twins are arms and legs and you are the head. He says the ‘I’ is all of us.Or explained in another way:
I’m the central ganglion of a complex organism which is composed of Baby, a computer; Bonnie and Beanie, teleports; Janie, telekineticist; and myself, telepath and central control.The novel itself is made up of three parts. Parts two and three essentially involve a recounting of past events: the conflict is supplied by a character struggling to understand himself through an uncovering and recounting of the past. It’s a relatively brisk and efficient technique that allows a great deal of exposition to be covered in a short amount of space, while still keeping a certain amount of forward dramatic tension going. I’m not sure the story could have withstood a more detailed labouring over the details of the formation of the gestalt, so that was good too.