Lyn's Reviews > More Than Human

You pick up the book, turn to the back cover and are confronted with the man. So this was Kurt Vonnegut’s model for Kilgore Trout. Staring back at you is a gaunt image: a scraggly, bearded man who but for the pipe and the contented look might offer the same aspect from a homeless person or from a Jethro Tull album jacket.

Turn to the first page and read - “The idiot lived in a black and grey world, punctuated by the white lightning of hunger and the flickering of fear. His clothes were old and many windowed. Here peeped a shinbone, sharp as a cold chisel, and there in the torn coat were ribs like the fingers of a fist. He was tall and flat. His eyes were calm and his face was dead.”

Damn.

And you’re hooked. Sturgeon has lured you into his most renowned work and you are held by this quiet, out of the way brilliance that compelled you siren-like from the bottom shelf of the used bookstore.

Bradburyian in its poetic beauty, akin to Philip K. Dick in its unabashed inimitability, More Than Human evokes a standard whereby science fiction ceases to be a genre, defies label and containment, and becomes simply a very good story. Lacking the epic quality of Arthur C. Clarke or the brash, but approachable engineering sensibility of Robert A. Heinlein, Sturgeon has crafted a story unique in its time and place and yet one that heralds a greater creation. Sturgeon quietly, but confidently ushers in a new age of speculative fiction.

This is not altogether “hard science fiction” but more well rounded, introspective and psychologically challenging, the kind that Philip K. Dick or Ursula K. LeGuin would write (this reminded me very much of Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney) and there are also elements of horror that would have made proud King, Matheson, or even Lovecraft.

First published in 1953 and winner of the International Fantasy Award and nominated for the 1954 Hugo, a nominee along with Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood's End (of which More Than Human bears a thematic resemblance), missing the mark only to Ray Bradbury’s epochal Fahrenheit 451.

More Than Human is just a very well written book and defies an easy categorization.