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thesis that, with intelligent sentient beings, the sum of one and one is (both richly and disturbingly) a great deal more than two.
His finest expression of this theme to date was in last year's long Galaxy novelette, "Baby Is Three"an extraordinary study of a group of children,ranging from a Mongolian idiot savant to a clever girl with para-psychological skills, who together constituted one unified beingpossibly the precursor of a new symbiotic race, Homo Gestalt. In More Than Human we have the full novel of which that story is the mid-section; there are equally long portions before and after describing how the children came together, and how later they learned to fulfill their highest potential. These sections are on the same high level of writing and thinkingand, as is fitting to the theme, the novel as a whole adds up to much more than the sum of its three parts.
This issurprisingly for so generally prolific a writeronly Sturgeon's second novel. One fears to toss about words like "profundity" and "greatness" in connection with the literature of entertainment; but it's hard to avoid them here. And one hastens to add that purely as entertainment, the book is a masterpiece of provocative storytelling.
Anthony Boucher (as "H. H. Holmes"), [Review of More Than Human and E Pluribus Unicorn], New York Herald Tribune Book Review, 22 November 1953, p. 19
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James Blish
All of Sturgeon's major work is about love, sexual love emphatically included. He has so testified, but had he kept mum about the matter it would have been discovered anyhow; it is right there on the page. This, for Sturgeon, is far from a limited subject, for he has stretched the word to include nearly every imaginable form of human relationship. Here again I think he is probably always in danger of embarrassing a large partthe juvenilesof his audience; the rest of us are fortunate that, if he is aware of this danger, he evidently doesn't give a damn. (. . .)
Directly under this heading belongs Sturgeon's love affair with the English language, which has been as complicated, stormy and rewarding as any affair he has ever written about. He is a born experimenter, capable of the most outrageous excesses in search of precision and poetry; people who do not like puns, for example, are likely to find much Sturgeon text almost as offensive as late Joyce (and I am sorry for them). Nobody else in our microcosm could possibly have produced such a stylistic explosion as "To

 
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