“What is it called when a person needs a… person… and the two are like one thing and there isn’t anything else at all anywhere?”
”I Is All of Us”
Alfred Bester, as we've seen, tended to not just set his stories in the future but one stuffed with SF paraphernalia. But, see buddy, he’d write in regular Americanese, to keep things, y’know, rooted for the reader. Theodore Sturgeon does something like the opposite. He less frequently uses future or interplanetary settings. But what’s nominally this world always feels less Science Fiction than Fantasy. Everything - language, characterisation, events - is heightened to the degree that they feel set somewhere else. Which is never the other side of the board to us, more a chess move away.
His style is rich without being florid. He places regular words in unusual contexts, so they catch your attention. ’More Than Human’ (1953), often rated as his best work, has this as its opening paragraph:
“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 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.”
Sturgeon’s also adept at the slow-burn reveal. Rather than than provide a series of flourishy, out-the-hat ‘revelations’ he expects the reader to pick up on his hints and nods. The classic example here would be the ‘special’ nature of his cast. (Though admittedly the title helps more than a little.) Ten years after ’Slan’, it’s written on the assumption the reader will know these tropes, and doesn’t need them to be reiterated.
However, in ’Slan’, in in ‘The X-Men’, in ‘Tomorrow People’, the fact that we readers don’t have the heroes’ powers is treated as something of a triviality, best overlooked. Because really those powers just symbolise our ‘specialness’, psi abilities standing for smarts and so on. Besides, who’s to say we won’t evolve into them one day?
Whereas here, in perhaps the book’s most unique feature, there’s little attempt to make the ‘special’ characters sympathetic. They’re not necessarily audience identification figures, just who we happen to find ourselves with.
The idiot who starts off the book in the quote above (later named Lone) is telegraphed as being the very opposite of the standard super-smart slan. We’re told he’s composed of “many lacks… lacks, rather than inadequacies, things he could not do and would never be able to do.” His attitude to human society is one of uncomprehending indifference. Meeting him on the page isn’t so far from what meeting him in real life would be. Too remote for any real attachment, you end up just watching what he does. ‘Idiot’ is used in the original sense, of idiosyncratic, being beyond communication. (“A creature so lacking in empathy, who himself had never laughed and never snarled and so could not comprehend the feelings of his gay or angry followers.”)
While Janie is the epitome of the witchy child, whose strange behaviour so spooks adults. She uses her special powers to play tricks on two toddlers, and when that leads to their getting a parental whipping shows no remorse. When they mount a revenge attack she realises they have powers of their own, and straight away decides to ally with them.
As we’ll (hopefully) get on to, John Wyndham took two books to play this trope both ways up, with the para-humans as persecuted minority and as hostile invasion force. Sturgeon shows little interest in either. His para-humans are more alien, yes, but less other-worldly and more… well, alien. Human concerns are not theirs, and so humans are of little interest to them.
With this trope powers are usually plus, as in the term extra-sensory. Telepaths can either speak or think to others, just as they choose. Here despite the title they’re less “more than” and much nearer to other, as if making a different choice. They have senses we don’t have, but lack the ones we do. In ‘The Stars My Destination’, Foyle’s feral nature was seem as an irony given his abilities. Here it seems contingent.
Further, and unlike everything else we’ve seen so far save the X-Men (who won’t appear for another decade after this), each ‘special’ has their own unique power. And that’s then taken a step further. For this is the way “more than” does come into the narrative, and it’s numerical…
These para-humans blesh, which is defined as “group… the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” And it’s this, not those individual powers, which is the crucial distinction. We’re not dealing with Homo Superior but Homo Gestalt. Described by Baby to Janie: “He says he is a figure-outer brain and I am a body and the twins are arms and legs and you [Lone] are the head. He says the ‘I’ is all of us.” (‘Head’ seems to mean something like ‘central node’.)
As the ‘brain’, Baby is less a character than a plot device. In ’Tomorrow People’, Tim is ostensibly a computer, but actually one of the characters. Baby is the reverse, essentially a human super-computer who can only be contacted via intermediaries. The reader never hears from him directly.
Bleshing is later elaborated on. “That was Janie’s word. She said Baby told it to her. She said it meant everybody all together being something, even if they all did different things. Two arms, two legs, one body, one head, all working together, although a head can’t walk and arms can’t think. Lone said maybe it was a mixture of ‘blending’ and ‘meshing,’ but I don’t think he believed that himself. It was a lot more than that.”
And this was quite an audacious thing to write at the height of the Cold War, where the good guys were defined by their commitment to individualism and the bad guys the dehumanising evils of collectivism. It’s notable how many of the covers to this book portray the more-thans as something alien and menacing, contrary to the way they’re actually described.
Or, to look at it more closely… Fans, naturally enough, prized finding other fans and hanging out with them. Slang terms such as ‘slan shack’ (for a group house of fans) evolved for this purpose. And this was more true in pre-internet days, when such things required more effort. But they also very much prize individualism. They’re more like innately solitary creatures which are drawn to one another, while actual encounters are fraught with danger, with rival Bradbury and Asimov fans likely to fall into a blazing row at any moment.
However, it doesn’t read as though Sturgeon’s intent is to pillory the ‘fans are Slans’ trope, even if he wouldn’t have written this book without all that. It’s more that he takes it as his impetus. He asks “what if this thing happened, what if some really were more than human?”, and follows the thought where it takes him.
He said later: “The Gestalt relationship has preoccupied me for so long - the concept of a whole entity made up of very discrete individuals who don't lose their individuality. Gestalt between people is not like an army or a fascist dictatorship where everybody does what he's told. It's not an idea or particular creed that people have or share. It's what they are.”
So, rather than flatter us fans for our superiority the novel’s purposely written on the basis that we are the unbleshed, and when we read of bleshing we essentially bump against a conceptual glass wall. In fact, even among the para-humans there’s a lot more space space devoted to them not bleshing than bleshing.
The book’s compiled from three novellas, linked but not sequenced together, making it a kind of montage. Many is the review which sourly notes that the book’s about a unity between characters, but is so fractured in the way it’s written. The same people probably complain that in ’Turn of the Screw’ the narrator is unreliable…
In ’Demolished Man’, Bester gave us dual (not to mention duelling) protagonists, an audacious step for genre fiction which tends to spotlight the hero. Whereas Sturgeon gives us what’s essentially three protagonists, one for each novella, and no sense which we’re supposed to take as the main one.
There are plenty of plot lines which do come together, and with a satisfying click. But overall its a series of parts which don’t make up a complete picture, which only alludes to a greater whole. Sturgeon often showed an interest in music and these work like musical motifs, sometimes working in isolation, sometimes combining.
Furthermore, each of the three sections does bring the story forward. But, as we start them, we’re thrown back into a state of uncertainty, dropped off somewhere new and left to get our own bearings. The text switches between first and third person narration without explanation, at one point switches between different first person narrators. It’s elliptical, if not fragmentary. The failing of memory is made a major theme. And this is our seeing what it is to blesh, but only from the outside.
Children, They Grow
One key way in which the trope is assumed is that the powers’ basis are never explained, but assumed to be associated with youth. It’s only Lone whose parents we don’t see, and in all cases they’re ‘normal’. There’s a strong element of another trope which often coincides, of free-range children, where you get to live in a den in the woods with all your mates, away from those uptight order-issuing adults.
With few crowd scenes or background characters, the cast list is relatively light. And adults are commonly shown as confining, restrictive and - ultimately - limiting. The first we encounter, Mr. Kew, is a fulminating puritan who keeps his daughters locked up against the evils of the world. But his eldest, Evelyn, gets something of a psychic homing signal to meet Lone, and vice versa. (It’s unspecified, but presumably she’s more-than too.) The quote up top is from her.
Though this is a boy-meets-girl moment, instead of bonking they bond. (“The currents of their inner selves surged between them.”) But the laid-on Spring setting associates this with new birth. And in a more symbolic sense this is where the hybrid is begat. The other characters are introduced from that point on, and in age order.
Though one of those ‘children’ is Lone himself, who’s taken in by the Prodds. A kindly old couple, the most likeable ‘parents’ we come across, they feel more like indulgent grandparents. (“We’ll raise him up just like a child” confirms Mrs Prodd.) Farmers, they take on a role somewhere between Ma and Pa Kent and the blind old man in ’Frankenstein’. It’s they who teach Lone to speak, and more generally to consider others. (When he first takes the other more-thans in, it’s the image of Mrs Prodd which compels him.) Lone spends eight years with them, which might seem an un-necessarily long period until we realise the children are growing up in real time.
And when they do gather together, as often with the feral children trope, they take on a form of the family they’re ostensibly escaping. Lone’s the father, Janie the Mother, the Twins the kids and the knowledge-dispensing but immobile Baby an age-inverted Grandfather.
This is disrupted in the second novella with the (off-stage) death of Lone. New character Gerry, realising he can’t replace him as head, takes them to Evelyn’s sister to be looked after. But in the meantime Alicia (as was) has become Miss Kew, who “looked a lot older than she was, because she held her mouth so tight”. She constantly corrects their grammar, tells them to “stand up straight” and enforces regimented mealtimes. Her name may well be a subliminal antonym for ‘askew’, representing all that’s correct yet wrong.
Against which Gerry brings sullen adolescence into the equation, describing himself as “ninety per cent short-circuited potentials and ten per cent juvenile delinquent.” (Not at all like those well-behaved Tomorrow People.) Realising their lives in this new situation are comfortable but unbleshable, he kills her.
All this is told in, as you might guess, a fragmentary fashion as Gerry visits a psychiatrist in order to recall it all. And framing it this way bounces us into seeing it psychologically, characters in terms of symbols rather than human life. The rather reasonable question “why kill her, why not just leave?” goes unasked. The details of the murder are not just glossed over, their glossing over is itself spelt out.
Miss Kew had to die because of what she represented. If ’Demolished Man’ was a psychological thriller, this is a psychological story. Events might occur, but just as incidences of mental states.
”Powers of Recovery”
The third novella shifts to a character who has up to that point only been mentioned once. Hip, like Lone, is incomplete, asocial and uncommunicative. And like Lone, he’s raised up just like a baby, this time by Janie. So this takes the form of a coming-of-age tale, out of child-like immediacy…
“His afternoons began to possess a morning and his days a yesterday. He tried to remember a bench they had used, a theatre they had attended, and he would lead the way back. She relinquished her guidance as fast as he would take it up until it was he who planned their days.”
But we discover he’s had his memories wiped by Gerry, out of a combination of preserving the gestalt’s secrecy and pure malice. So this follows a similar structure to Gerry’s novella, with Janie as the psychiatrist and he the recovering patient. (“Janie demanded nothing. She only… she only waited.”) Hip is not growing, so much as rediscovering.
We also find out that, even if he can use some of its powers, Gerry has led the hybrid away from bleshing - supposedly the thing he killed Miss Kew over. His “unsullied ego” prevents him getting the thing that ego desires. So they’re not back in the woodland den, but in the abandoned house of Miss Kew’s father, grandiose and monstrous, described as “a great sick mouth” with furniture “so heavy it has never been moved.” Without Janie, Baby is silent to him.
It’s also significant that in the very first novella, Gerry and Hip are introduced adjacently, which sets us up to compare and contrast them from the start. Pre-life-hiatus, Hip was self-confessedly “arrogant, self-assured, shallow”. Losing what he had and getting it back doesn’t just restore him to where he was, it changes him.
It’s sort of strangely impressive that the finale hinges so closely on the distinction between morality and ethics. Not exactly the sort of thing which is focus group tested. While ethics are worked out from first principles, we’re told, morality is when these become codified into binding rules. It’s true that this breaks a rule very commonly associated with morality, that there must be ‘the guilty’ and they must be punished.
But, solving everything by staging a philosophical argument seems reminiscent of the ending to the original ‘Quatermass’, where the solution is to ask the monster if its ever considered being nice. Something which seems to stem from the pre-internet-message-board era.
Plus, me being a materialist type, I’m not keen on the notion that morality is some abstract code which we are taught, rather than something which exists in real-world instances. And if that is the distinction between it and ethics, then quite frankly we only need one of these.
(As we’re rather abruptly told of Lone’s demise, which we never witness but are only told about by the other guy, I had been wondering if he wouldn’t make a surprise reappearance, demanding to know “who’s been bossing in my head?” And I’m not sure I don’t prefer that as an ending.)
But there may be a better way to see it. It could be seen a a story of two adolescents, one of which is able to reach emotional maturity. Lone was lacking, his concerns only immediate. Replace him as the head and wider questions come into frame. Gerry responds to these like an adolescent with powers, who can no longer be told what to do by Miss Kew but has no meaningful notions of his own. While Hip hits upon maturity. And we discover that, before then, the gestalt never truly bleshed.
I See No “I See No Colour”
Bester mentions in passing a black Esper recruit, able to enter a door which whites can’t, bucking the prejudices of his day. Sturgeon makes more of this. He puts reference to the colour of the twins only in the mouths of white racists, it being a matter of indifference to the other more-thans. But first he uses another reader tip-off, not just making their father a janitor (a typically black job to have) but giving him the exaggerated ‘black’ voice of his time. He never quite says “yessuh Mistah Bossman”, but it comes close.
Further, what commonly passed for anti-racism in this era was putting black characters in peripheral roles, thereby granting the nice white characters the chance to demonstrate their enlightened attitudes. And this is somewhat cemented here. The twins say no more that “oop”, “eee” and “hey-ho”, even though they have aged like everyone else. It’s trying to be better, true. But the trying shows up the failing.
Overall… as said in earlier instalments you could recommend van Vogt only to SF fans, but Bester to a the general reader. Sturgeon, in a sense, works only for a similarly narrow group, but quite a different one. It’s the reader willing to actually read, who’ll pay close attention, ask questions, fill in gaps, sometimes skip back over earlier passages. And for some of us it’s refreshing to be trusted to do this, to be treated as adults. It feels kind of special…
Coming soon! More of this Pariah Elites business...
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