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| Del Rey/Ballantine 1981, Paul Giovanopoulos |
In 1952, Theodore Sturgeon's novella "Baby Is Three" appeared in the October issue of Galaxy magazine to great acclaim. It's critical success prompted Sturgeon to expand on its premise with a prequel and a sequel (the novellas "The Fabulous Idiot", "Morality"). Although this second cycle of stories did not see print in magazines, all three parts were eventually published as the novel More Than Human (1953). Initially unsuccessful as a hardcover, it was later translated into more than a dozen languages, appeared in graphic novel form, was released as an LP (featuring the author reading its first section), and has been frequently optioned for film.
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| Ballantine Books 1953, Richard Powers |
Structure
The first section, titled "The Fabulous Idiot", opens with several seemingly-unrelated vignettes describing the unfulfilled lives of several damaged/discarded members of society. Eventually, after their mental sensitivities draw them together, these "lost souls" begin to realize that together they make up the head, body, arms and brain of a single entity (Homo gestalt). However, since the individual representing the head (responsible for leadership and direction) is a mentally-stunted "idiot", the group realize that they are still far from reaching their full potential.
The second section, "Baby Is Three", begins as a disturbed teenager named Gerry visits a psychotherapist, during which Gerry recalls how he had come to meet the members of the gestalt family described in "The Fabulous Idiot". As the session progresses, Gerry is able to overcome buried mental blocks in order to recognize himself as a member of the gestalt unit. With Gerry's help, the gestalt seemingly reaches a certain level of "adult" potential, although its maturation may put the rest of humanity at risk.
The final section, "Morality", jumps ahead several years and introduces an amnesiac man named Hip, who is rescued from prison by Janie, a member of the gestalt family (now led by Gerry). Through Janie's help, Hip gradually recalls his lost memories, and realizes that he is a victim of the gestalt humans' amoral application of their super-powers. In a daring confrontation, Hip helps Gerry realize that their gestalt is still missing a vital component, and plays a key role in helping the group reach their full potential.
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| Ballantine Books 1975, Lee Rosenblatt |
The Fabulous Idiot
- A homeless 25-year-old "idiot" survives on the streets by scavenging for food and shelter. At times he is able to somehow "influence" the minds of people he encounters into giving him things.
- A disturbed widower named Kew raises his two daughters in a highly-repressed religious environment. One day, his daughter Evelyn is drawn to the bank of a nearby brook where she begins to express some "forbidden yearnings".
- The idiot is drawn to the brook near Evelyn's home and manages to break through a metal fence to reach the Kew property. When Evelyn and the idiot meet at the brook, they establish some kind of deep connection when they make physical contact. However, Evelyn's father soon arrives and attacks the idiot with his whip, driving him away. Evelyn then attacks her father in a frenzy, but Kew bashes in her head. Later back at the house, Kew loads a shotgun in a daze and blows his brains out (apparently prompted by the idiot's mental powers of suggestion). Dying from wounds inflicted by her father, Evelyn tells her older sister Alicia to seek freedom in the real world. Meanwhile, the injured idiot is eventually found by a farmer named Prodd and nursed back to health back at his farm. Having no children of their own, he and his wife raise the man (eventually called "Lone") as a substitute son.
- While her husband is off at war overseas, a woman named Wima entertains many male guests. Her 4-year-old daughter Janie frequently disrupts these "parties", especially when she begins showing signs of telepathy and telekinesis (which her mother tries to ignore). At age 5, Janie begins using her powers to tease two 3-year-old, inarticulate toddlers who also reside in her apartment building. She is surprised to learn that they have the ability to teleport themselves. Janie brings the twins back to her mother's unit in order to entertain them, but Wima turns them out because the twins are black. Janie runs away with the twins and the three of them eventually find an abandoned house to live in. For a time, they find a way to use their powers to survive on their own while stealing supplies from local stores.
- Back at the Prodd farm, Mrs. Prodd becomes pregnant. At this point, her husband intimates to Lone that he should look for another place to live, as it will soon be too crowded. Although he has now been with the Prodds for 8 years, he returns to the forest without hesitation. Some time later, Lone returns for a brief visit in order to borrow an axe, but senses that the Prodds are uneasy when he is around.
- After creating a stable shelter for himself in the woods (hollowed out of a hill), Lone is mentally drawn to the house where Janie and the twins have been residing. Janie spots him peering at her, but Lone's remembrance of his bad experience at the Kew house prompts him to quickly retreat. Janie and the twins soon follow Lone back to his own hill-side abode and tease him with their strange powers. Eventually, Lone agrees to share his food with them and they establish themselves as a quartet.
- When Lone returns to the Prodd farm to return the borrowed axe, he learns that Prodd is delusional, Mrs. Prodd is dead and their child is a "mongoloid". Unopposed by Prodd, Lone takes the baby with him back to his forest home. Janie tells Lone that the twins can communicate with "Baby" and that the infant is some kind of "adding machine" (computer). By asking Baby questions (through Janie and the twins' telepathic connection to the infant), Lone learns how to build a device which will help Prodd with his farm work: an anti-gravity generator.
- When Lone returns to the farm with the device, he finds that Prodd has abandoned it. Lone leaves behind the anti-gravity device and returns to his forest home. There, Baby explains that the five of them make up a whole being: Janie the body, the twins the limbs, Baby the brain, and Lone the head. However, as Lone is an idiot, the being will unfortunately never progress beyond its current state.
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| Editrice Nord 1974, Karel Thole |
- Gerry, a callous 15-year old teen, visits a therapist named Stern
and asks him to help him find some answers as to why he has just killed
someone. Stern puts Gerry under hypnosis and has him relive his past.
- Seven
years in the past (at age 8), Gerry flees an orphanage, after which he
survives by sleeping in the wild. One day, Lone discovers him and brings
him back to his forest abode. There, Janie feels that Gerry somehow belongs with their "gestalt" group. Gerry is puzzled by the
strange super-powers these people seem to have.
- About three years after being adopted into Lone's group, Gerry visits Alicia Kew, now a 33-year old recluse, and tells her that Lone has been killed by a falling tree. Mysteriously triggered by mention of Lone's name, Alicia agrees to take in Gerry and the other three children. Although shocked at their wilderness-hardened state, she cares for them for the next three years and tries to rehabilitate them. At one point, the children become alarmed when Gerry, Baby and Janie are kept separate from the twins (due to their race). Eventually Alicia gives in and they have a desegregated lifestyle. In an earlier incident, Alicia tries to send Baby away to a care center which handles mongoloid infants, but when Janie uses her telekinetic powers on her, she relents.
- During his session, Gerry soon reveals to Stern that he had been prompted to kill Alicia because adapting to her more civilized lifestyle (and discarding the use of their powers) had been causing them to lose their former "gestalt existence". However he does not know why killing her was necessary, as their new life had actually been more comfortable than their life in the forest.
- Further hypnosis reveals that when Gerry had first approached Alicia for help three years ago, Alicia's repressed memory of an encounter with Lone had suddenly been restored when she had heard Gerry utter the phrase "Baby is three". The phrase had caused Alicia to recall a time several years in the past when Lone had visited her and used her as a tool find research about "gestalt life-forms" (organisms which are a part of a whole, but separated), which he believes he and his three friends to be. Lone eventually realizes that his four-member gestalt is incomplete, and that it is still missing a "brain" (whom he would soon find in the form of Baby). Afterwards, he erases her memory of their encounter, but tells her that he may one day need her help once again, at which point she will remember their encounter.
- Gerry realizes that Alicia's sudden recollection of her time with Lone had been so strong that it had buried his own remembrance of once probing Alicia's mind with his under-developed telepathic powers. But with the past now uncovered, Gerry uses his newly-reawakened telepathic power to burrow into Stern's mind in order to learn what he really is: a more advanced (i.e. - not "idiot") version of Lone as the gestalt's head. Afterwards, he realizes that Alicia had had to be killed because her continued care of the gestalt was killing its chances for survival. Now believing himself to be a member of a new, evolved super-being, he recalls his lifetime of mistreatment, and vows to now "have fun" himself. When Stern questions Gerry's apparently missing sense of morality, Gerry erases the therapist's memory of the session.
- (In the original magazine version of "Baby Is Three", it is also revealed that Gerry had not actually killed Alicia, but had only been contemplating it. Now armed with the realization of his role as a 3-year-old "head" of a gestalt being, he plans to "grow up", although Alicia will be treated with kindness.)
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| Ballantine Books 1968 |
- An amnesiac named Hip Barrows is freed from jail by a woman named "Janie Gerard". Over a period of days, a now grown-up Janie tries to help Hip regain his memory. He soon recalls attacking a man named Thompson, followed by his being thrown in jail.
- Hip impatiently tries to regain the rest of his memory and vaguely recalls searching for someone named "Alicia Kews" as well as "some children". One night, Hip spots a naked black woman in Janie's room while she is out. When Janie returns and finds out about Hip's sighting, she has the two of them flee the house in a panic. In a new hideout, Janie waits while Hip begins to slowly recollect his missing 7 years.
- Seven years ago while serving military duty at an artillery testing range, Lieutenant Hip Barrows discovers a strange magnetic field near an old abandoned farm. With the help of an off-duty Private, he discovers the anti-gravity device left behind by Lone on the Prodd farm. However, the Private then knocks him unconscious and sends the anti-gravity device into outer space. Later, Hip is interrogated by a "Major Thompson" who has the same face as the Private who had attacked him. All evidence of the strange magnetic field also mysteriously disappears. After being relieved of duty (for trying to attack Thompson), Hip spends the following years trying to find out more about the farm (which no longer contains any trace of the strange technology). He eventually tracks down Prodd, who tells him about his time caring for Lone. After that, he finds Lone's old hideout, as well as some parts of the anti-gravity device.
- With Hip now having overcome his involuntary mental block, Janie tells Hip that after Gerry's "awakening" with Stern, Gerry had continued to advance his education until one day he had become bored and then gone into a state of seclusion. In order to "rouse" Gerry, Janie had given Hip the idea of looking for Lone's anti-gravity device. Fearful of the effect of unleashing such technology on the world and of being hounded in connection with the device, Gerry had then infiltrated the military base in order to discredit Hip. Seven years later, when Hip had gotten close to finding him again, Gerry had then erased his memory, ending up with Hip in jail.
- Janie brings Hip back to the gestalt family's old forest hideout to confront Gerry for his crimes. At first, Gerry tries to mesmerize Hip once again, but the twins intervene and Gerry is bound. Hip is then able to instill a sense of "ethos" in Gerry by telling him that, as a new life-form, he must respect his past in order to usher in a future with more of his kind. This would also therefore end his lonely isolation. After Gerry realizes the wisdom of Hip's words, Janie then recognizes Hip to be yet another member of their gestalt: their sense of morality (conscience). Once Hip joins the "gestalt family", Gerry suddenly becomes aware of many other gestalt beings existing throughout human history, helping it along in its technological progress. Without a sense of morality, Gerry's gestalt had thus far been "quarantined", but now that it has become whole it is welcomed into the existing community of Homo gestalt.
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