Theodore Sturgeon (1918–1985)

A taut magical realism story with solid SF under-pinnings. Horty is a young orphan who, abused by his step-father, runs away and gets picked up by a strange group of carnies. Impersonating a girl midget, he lives for several years on the road with the carnival. But there is something different about Horty - and about the Maneater, the sinister figure who runs the carnival...

Sturgeon weaves a wonderfully realized tale of humans who are enthralled and endowed with super-human talents by the show more hidden powers of an ancient species - The Dreaming Jewels.

First published in 1950, this is one of the better stories I have read from that era. For character development alone, it stands head & shoulders above much of the 'Golden Age' material of the time. If you happen upon a copy of this out of print gem - grab it before the next person does! show less

Wow, yes, I can see why this is considered one of Sturgeon's best and listed on the all-time greats of science fiction. His writing is strange and beautiful; his favorite themes are all present (loneliness/belonging; love; sex; morality; ethics; outsider/insider; integrity); and the Sturgeon brand of humanism is on full display:
And here, too, was the guide...not an exterior force, nor an awesome Watcher in the sky, but a laughing thing with a human heart and a reverence for its human show more origins, smelling of sweat and new-turned earth rather than suffused with the pale odor of sanctity.
Sturgeon deserves his unique place in science fiction and in American literature. show less

More three connected stories than a novel, but still a classic. The first story is the strongest and holds up amazingly well. It navigates the interweaved lives of Lone, the idiot, Alice and Evelyn, the sisters imprisoned by a sadistic father, Jane the telekinetic, and, to a lesser extent, Beanie and Bonnie the African American teleporting toddlers, the Prodds, a farming couple, and... Baby, though Baby becomes more relevant later. This first story lets the reader be as lost as its show more protagonists, who are growing up either abused or ignored. Their secret is revealed very gradually and organically. The second story, "Baby is Three", is more of its time -- a classic 1950's narrative trope of some revealing a backstory in a psychotherapist's office. The tone will remind many of Heinlein. It's a very good Heinlein story, but not as groundbreaking as the first story. The final story is the weakest. It focuses on a character introduced in the first story but dropped after one page. This is one of those "amnesiac gradually remembers" stories. It begins well but devolves into way too much talking and exposition, some of it to try and defend and bolster a creaky plot. To make it more frustrating, the closing lines of the second story and the title of the third story already clearly established where things were going.

This was one of my favorite books half a century ago. Still recommended. show less

This was a reread, although I couldn’t tell you when I last read the book. The late seventies or early eighties, at a guess. I’d remembered the novel’s basic set-up, but nothing else. Venus Plus X is set in the distant future, in a utopian community of hermaphroditic humans (not really an acceptable term these days, but these have the organs of both sexes and can procreate).

A man from the mid-twentieth-century is pulled forward in time to the community of Ledom. Yes, it’s show more “model” backwards, but Sturgeon admits in a postscript he reversed the name of a can of his favourite tobacco. The time-traveller, Charlie Johns, is asked to give his opinion on Ledom and its society. Various guides show him around and explain things. Everything in Ledom is a consequence of the “A-field”, a sort of force-field, and the “cerebrostyle”, which can write knowledge directly onto people’s brains. There is also a chapter on biology - the Ledoms have both sex organs, and two uteruses, and always give birth to twins.

Alternating with this guidebook-style narrative is some sort of sitcom featuring two families who live next door to each other. These sections are almost entirely dialogue.

There are long sections on gender, which I suspect only gammons and terfs will disagree with, and religion, which manages to erase almost all of them except Christianity and misrepresents those it does mention. Sturgeon’s thesis is that both of these - the elimination of gender through the creation of hermaphroditic humans, and a charitic religion - were necessary to create the utopian Ledom. Except, while Sturgeon rightly points out gender roles are social constructs, he still defines them using biological sex; and, as others have pointed out, the gender politics Sturgeon presents were not universal even back in 1960 - and his model society only exists more because of its two magical inventions than anything else.

Charlie learns Ledom exists inside an A-field bubble on an Earth devastated by nuclear war. He also discovers - against the wishes of the Ledom senior members - that the Ledoms give birth to normal humans, which are then (surgically?) altered to be Ledoms. For some reason, this sends Charlie completely off the rails and he tells them he, and all humans, would kill them if they could. When Charlie tries to escape to the past, he discovers the truth about the time-travel machine. Meanwhile, nuclear bombs explode outside Ledom’s A-field - is this implying humans still live? Or that Ledom is actually in the present? It’s unclear.

Sturgeon writes that he wanted to write a novel about sex. The novel credited with introducing the topic of sex into science fiction is Philip José Farmer’s The Lovers (or rather, the novella from which it was expanded) in 1952. The earliest sf novel I can find centred around a hermaphroditic character is Katherine Burdekin’s Proud Man, published in 1934, but in that novel the hermaphrodite travels back in time from the future to 1930. Burdekin’s novel, according to Wikipedia, criticises gender roles. Venus Plus X doesn’t do that - it posits a near-utopia, which despite its arguments only survives because it hides a horrible secret, which, to be fair, is a common science fiction trope, sort of like soylent green. I wasn’t convinced.

The title, incidentally, comes from the phrase “men are from Mars, women are from Venus”, and Charlie speculates that the hermaphroditic Ledoms are women with a bit extra, “x”. Ugh. show less