Sturgeon was a singular writer; there was nothing like his work during his time and I'm not sure there ever was.  Although shelved as science fiction, his work is better, in my opinion, categorized as speculative fiction.  Sturgeon does not employ technological advances, nor do his characters magically transport to the moon or Mars.  He likes to explore what it means to be human right here on Earth. He was also interested in the possibilities of a group mind or hive mind. He explored that in a couple stories; one of which is this one.

A creature termed Medusa by the author is a spacefaring hive mind looking for a new planet to absorb.  In its long existence, it had never encountered a sentient species that was not a hive mind.  The earthlings are quite confusing; intelligent, tool-using, yet not a collective.  Medusa makes some extrapolations and decides that what happened was that something severed humanity's collective mind.  Medusa's methods require a hive mind to exist so that it can subsume it.  It has no way to reach the humans' minds without it; so it decides it has to fix humans.  It selects one male human for its project.  The human chosen, Gurlick, just happens to be about the poorest specimen of mankind imaginable.  His life is made up of hate for everything and a single happy fantasy dream of a perfect woman.

Medusa uses Gurlick to build machines that build more complex machines that build ever more complex machines and so on; until it has the technology it needs to send a sort of sonic pulse that will bring every single human mind together.  Once that is done, all Medusa needs is a willing female of the species that will engage in coitus with Gurlick who has, within his genome, a time bomb that will enable Medusa to subsume the human hive mind.  However…Medusa could not have understood that mankind's advances were a result of individual accomplishments; it thought it was restoring the status quo.  So, it had no idea of what would occur when all these individuals were brought together into a gestalt.  It never had a chance…

The author selects some particular individuals for the reader to follow:  an abused young boy who was frightened of everything, a young woman with peculiar sexual appetites, a lost four-year-old girl, two related men in Africa squabbling over a theft, and a musical genius whose talents had been deliberately stifled.  Through them we see the results of the sonic pulse.  This is where Sturgeon was headed; an examination of the possibilities of a gestalt of all humans.  And it is a very pretty dream.

Sturgeon does not engage in world-building nor does he spend much time delving into each character.  Plot is all.  I have wondered if he'd have enjoyed writing more treatises or essays as Asimov did; rather than dressing it up as a story.  But I have always really enjoyed his ideas and explorations of what it means to be human.  This was a fast and fun story.  ~~ Catherine Book

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