Book #2 for 2023, continuing with the LOA 1950s SF collection. This was an expansion of a novella called “Baby is Three” which was published in 1952 (the novel following in ’53), with that original story being the middle part of the novel and two other new sections surrounding it, the first part being backstory and the third part being what happened next. I’ve not read the original (nor indeed anything else by Sturgeon except “Microcosmic God”), so I’m left wondering what if anything he did to fit it in with the two new parts… cos, taken by itself, I’m not sure it makes an awful lot of sense, at least not as it stands in the book. Then again, other critics have noticed the multi-part structure mirrors the “gestalt” theme of the plot, where each part depends on the others to add up to the whole and isn’t enough by itself… maybe so, I’m just not sure that it actually does that, I don’t know if it does cohere fully. On the plus side, it does achieve a reasonable feat by making its superhuman entity interesting and indeed kind of sympathetic, unlike, for example, Stanley Weinbaum in The New Adam…
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