The Perfect Host : Volume V

By Theodore Sturgeon

A collection of stories, mostly science fiction, some fantasy and one cowboy story.

• Quietly A girl is raised by her anarchist father and abandoned by him when she turns 18.
• The Music Lunatic in a hospital eats a nurse.
• Unite and Conquer Scientist fakes an alien invasion to unite mankind.
• The Love of Heaven An evolved human race wants to return to the home world but discover they are poison to all life on Earth.
• Till Death Do Us Join A man who thinks he has an evil twin comes up with a plan to kill the twin.
• The Perfect Host  A string of mysterious deaths are caused by a "thing" that attaches itself to people it finds interesting and sympathetic. 
• The Martian and the Moron An empty-headed girl makes contact with Mars. Humorous story.
• Die, Maestro, Die!  Band announcer is deadly jealous of the band leader.
• The Dark Goddess  Woman wants her brother's common-law wife to make the marriage legal. Story has a good, brief description of life in the 1920s.
• Scars Cowboy rescues a woman.
• Messenger A rich inventor is planning to give all his wealth away. But his daughter's fiance tries to kill the rich man before he can do that.
• Minority Report A spaceship goes on on a mission and never returns. So another ship goes after it to figure out what happened.
• Prodigy After multiple wars and pollution, humans have developed many mutations. In order to stop these mutations from being passed on, children are put to death if they don't fit the standard norm.
• Farewell to Eden Two people escape Earth for a new world but it doesn't end well.
• One Foot and the Grave A man and a woman both have one of their feet change into a hoof. They are told it was caused by magic emanating from an ancient being chained in the nearby hills.
• What Dead Men Tell A guy stumbles upon a secret society of immortals and has to pass a deadly test to become one of them.
• The Hurkle Is a Happy Beast Story of an invasive species, only this species is an extraterrestrial. Humorous story.

This is a pretty good collection of stories. The author is very fond of the twist ending. For example, in Scars, the main character claims to be a gentleman because he rescued a woman and declined to take advantage of her, even though she indicated she was interested. [Spoiler]Turns out he is impotent.

Venus Plus X

By Theodore Sturgeon

Charlie Johns woke up to find himself among people who looked human but preferred to think of themselves as the next step beyond homo sapiens. They call themselves the Ledom. They appear to be neither male nor female. But as Charlie Johns finds out, the key word is appear.
They live in peace and harmony and close to nature in an enclave hidden from the rest of the world. They are not aliens, they are fully human, but they live a lifestyle alien to accepted norms. They have set themselves aside in an attempt to create a society free of war and division and hate. Any their ultimate goal is to renew humanity when the rest of us manage to destroy ourselves.
But what are the Ledom, really? Charlie is charmed by them and agrees to help with their little project. They claim to have brought him there to weigh them in the balance and give them his true impressions of what they have created and of their genderless society. But Charlie senses he is not getting the full truth of the matter. And then he happens upon a little hidden family of Ledom: two fathers and their grown daughter. And the lie is exposed. The Ledom are not natural hermaphrodites. They are surgically altered to become so:

—of man with grafted uterus coupling with man with grafted uterus.

—of the knives and needles stitching a manmade and inhuman newness into the bodies of babes.

The story is interspersed with flashbacks to a group of regular Americans living their everyday lives with their kids, their jobs and their friends, a sort of contrast to the everyday lives of the Ledom.

What a boring story. The Ledom are boring. The regular folks back home were boring and their story was pointless, came across as filler to make the book longer. The big surprise at the end, that the Ledom were not a natural mutation but were the result of surgical intervention wasn't surprising or shocking.
What the author totally fails to address is where do they get all those grafted uteruses? One assumes from female babies. So what happens to those baby girls after their uteruses have been removed? The Charlie character is more outraged at boys with grafted uteruses than he is at the probable murder of every female baby born to the Ledom males. Oh, and he is also upset about men loving men.

 

 

The Synthetic Man aka The Dreaming Jewels

By Theodore Sturgeon

Horty is just a grade school kid when he gets in trouble for eating ants at school. When his adoptive father finds out, he punishes Horty by shoving him into a closet but accidentally catches the boy's hand in the hinge, severing three of the Horty's fingers. After the man leaves the room, Horty grabs his favorite toy, a jack-in-the-box called Junky and runs away.
Junky is just a toy but the toy has two eyes made of crystal. The crystals look like ordinary glass but are something else entirely. And Horty is bonded to the crystals, as becomes apparent when a thief unknowingly damages the toy and Horty cries out in pain.
Fortunately for Horty, he has fallen in with a small group of carnival people, one of whom recognizes Horty for what he really is, something that Horty himself does not know. And she makes it her duty to protect and educate Horty and hopefully turn him into the human being that he truly is not.

This is such a gratifying story. Horty starts out a weak and defenseless child but he takes satisfying revenge on those who harmed him and those he cares about. It's always nice to see justice rain down on those who deserve it.

Review from Kirkus Reviews.

The Cosmic Rape

By Theodore Sturgeon

The hive mind. Draws its power from enormous numbers of members within the hive. But what happens when the hive mind meets up with what it has never encountered before in all its existence: the solitary intelligent minds of the human race?

Told in a series of vignettes of the lives of ordinary people, just going about their normal activities. Then in an instant, it all changes as people find themselves thinking, not as individuals, but as one united organism. Guess what, hive mind: a new sheriff is in town. And its name is Humanity.

This is just a weird story. The united humans attack and destroy the invading machines of the hive mind. Then they join the hive mind willingly, which apparently gives humanity ascendancy over the hive.
The first human taken over by the hive mind, a drunken bum, never gets to enjoy the rewards of the hive and spends the rest of his life in solitary misery and loneliness, supposedly because that is what he truly desires. Weird.

Godbody

By Theodore Sturgeon

A naked man who calls himself Godbody appears on the rural outskirts of a small town. He comes into contact with a small number of people, offering them his unconditional love and healing their wounds, both mental and physical, winning their love and devotion. But it all ends tragically when the little group runs afoul of a straight-laced, angry spinster who sees it as her mission to keep the little town on the straight and narrow.

Sturgeon's version of a hippiefied, modern Jesus Christ. A sweet and captivating story, even with its sad ending. I was disappointed but only because I was expecting a science fiction story, which this really wasn't. It is a story about God's love.

More Than Human

By Theodore Sturgeon

Lone was a wild man, living in the woods, unable to speak, unable to think very clearly. He was rescued by a farmer who saw possibilities in Lone and took him in. Under the farmer's care, Lone learned to speak a few words, to do chores, to be more human. All was good until the farmer's wife got pregnant. She didn't want Lone to be around the baby. So he went back to the woods and built himself a snug home in a cave. And gradually he acquired a family of sorts of little children on the run who needed a place to grow up, a place safe from the rest of us. Because they weren't ordinary kids, they were kids with powers. There is Baby, who never grows up; the twins Bonnie and Beanie, Janie and, later on, Gerry. Baby is an organic computer, unable to speak or walk, a seeming idiot. Bonnie and Beanie also never speak, but are able to transport themselves instantly anywhere. Janie also transports, but not herself, only things. Janie can hear Baby's thoughts and he keeps them informed and he guides them. Gerry is a powerful telepath, but he can't hear Baby. Lone serves as the front man, the one who goes out and buys food and clothes. He takes care of them until he is killed by a falling tree. At which point they move in with a woman from Lone's past. With Lone gone, the new front man becomes Gerry. Which is a real problem, because Gerry, an abused street kid, is lacking in morality and compassion. This band of misfits may be a new kind of person, homo gestalt, but until it learns some humanity, the rest of us could be in serious trouble.

This was a pretty good book. The story kind of jumps, which is not surprising since it was apparently put together from three short stories. I read this book a long time ago and even knowing how it came out, I still enjoyed rereading it.