Theodore Sturgeon was one of America’s finest writers. Kurt Vonnegut called him “a master storyteller.”
A born gymnast, Sturgeon wrote with authenticity about circus performers in The Dreaming Jewels
(later re-released under the title The Synthetic Man). Sturgeon held numerous ‘day jobs’ (merchant seaman, bulldozer operator, door-to-door salesman) which he used in his work.
He won the International Fantasy Award for his groundbreaking novel More Than Human.
From the Theodore Sturgeon tribute page, www.iliadbooks.com
Sturgeon is excellent at conveying the emotions of children – a talent on ample display in this 1950 novel. Crystalline, jewel-like aliens, intelligent but utterly incomprehensible, exist on Earth; as part of their life-processes, they sometimes produce flawed copies of objects, animals, or people. But the rare paired jewels produce perfect copies – like young Horty, an apparently human lad who runs away from home and joins a carnival, where he’s befriended by midget Zena and the other carnies.
Kirkus review, 1984
“Zena, thoughts are formless, coded… Impulses without shape or substance or direction – until you convey them to someone else. Then they precipitate, and become ideas that you can put on the table and examine. You don’t know what you think until you tell someone else about it”.
“It was a place of flickering impressions and sensations; of pleasure in the integration of abstract thought, of excitement at the approach of one complexity to another, of engrossing concentration in distant and exoteric constructions”.
“Once in his room, Horty sank down on the edge of the bed with his arms still full of books. He did not close the door because there was none, due to Armand’s conviction that privacy was harmful for youngsters. He did not turn on the light because he knew everything in the room, knew it with his eyes closed. There was little enough”.
“There were the beginnings of a wonderful warm glow inside him, a feeling he had had only once or twice before in his whole life – the time he had won the sack-race and they gave him a khaki handkerchief, and the time four kids had whistled to a mongrel dog, and the dog had come straight to him, ignoring the others”.
“All good and all evil, all morals, all progress, depend on this order of basic commands. To survive for the self at the price of the group is to jeopardize species. For a group to survive at the price of the species is manifest suicide. Here is the essence of good and of greed, and the wellspring of justice for all mankind”.