More Than Human

There was a period when science fiction tended to refer to the next stage in human evolution as homo superior, and one of the ways of achieving this state was through a gestalt, a number of individuals working as one. The idea is there, for instance, in The Inner Wheel by Keith Roberts, but it’s most successful expression was probably in this novel by Theodore Sturgeon. Through three linked stories, we follow the development of a gestalt, starting with a loner with telepathic abilities who begins to gather odd children around him. When he dies, a sociopath takes over the group, but in the last story an air force engineer who has been locked in an insane asylum becomes the group’s conscience, and so completes the homo gestalt. Why it’s on the list: The novel, which won the International Fantasy Award, is perhaps Sturgeon’s masterpiece, a brilliant account of how the collective outweighs the individual, and opens up new ways for human development.