This is one of my ancient paperbacks that I found on the shelves. No note on the flyleaf when I got it or if I read it. The book was published in 1958.
An interesting premise and there are many compelling passages and sections, but overall it lacks depth.
PREMISE:
A spore, 'THE MEDUSA' is traveling through space searching for sentient beings so that they can absorb it into 'the hive'. The spore is dropped to Earth and travels through the food chain until it reaches an alcoholic homeless person, Dan Gurlick. He is asked by this higher entity to 'find out how humans can reconnect' like they were before. In other words, humanity was intended to be live a hive of bees or a colony of ants and Dan Gurlick will become 'the host'.
As this process begins, the humans learn to 'grok' together and repel the alien plan. Nothing in the novel sheds light on how this defense happened.
Numerous characters are introduced that are not really connected to the overall story.
Interesting Points:
(After human consciousness is re-united)
"Now children would never again wonder if anyone cared, or grow up thinking that to be loved is a privilege. It's a privilege only to adults. To any child it's a basic right, which if denied dooms the child to a lifetime of seeking it and an inability to accept anything but child-style love. The way things were now, never again would a child be afraid of growing up, or hover anxiously near half-empty coffers so very easy to fill."
Chapter 26 is a short chapter that very effectively describes how a human 'united mind' would be. It makes it sound pretty fantastic.
The ideas of the novel are interesting and compelling, yet as a novel, it doesn't quite gel.
The novel's page at Wikipedia:
A reader's observations about the book at Amazon:
"Theodore Sturgeon's The Cosmic Rape (1958) is an unusual and refreshing take on the alien invasion trope -- especially for a 1950s novel. Unlike many other reviewers, I found that the mechanics of the work (innumerable characters, short length, and ramshackle structure) do not detract from the overall result. Sturgeon's prose is, as always, admirable. Although the novel can feel like an outline rather than a fully fleshed out novel like his earlier masterpiece of the genre, More than Human (1953), the end result is a poignant exploration of collective conscious/individuality.
Brief Plot Summary (limited spoilers)
Gurlick, an alcoholic homeless man, accidentally ingests a seed of the Medusa (in a half-eaten hamburger found in a trashcan). However, the Medusa does not immediately transform him. Instead, the Medusa's ability to convey/carry it's ultimate goal (to create a hive-mind) is restrained by the paltry abilities of Gurlick's intellect. Most importantly, the Medusa is baffled by humanity which has achieved so much individually without a hive-mind. The individuality of humanity (despite wars, struggle, isolation) is its most notable and positive quality. The alien believes that humanity once had a hive-mind that fractured overtime.
Thus the unusual galaxy spanning entity has Gurlick discover how to "put people's brains back together again." The alien's reward plays into Gurlick's base desires -- he can break whatever he wants. The chapters containing Gurlick's story are the most numerous.
Other secondary characters include Dimity Carmichael who is aroused by the sexual sufferings of others (in this case an abused co-worker). A perpetually frightened boy name Henry who is unable to differentiate between happiness and punishment because his abusive father begins all his punishments with smiles. And Mbala (clearly Sturgeon had just read Achebe's Things Fall Apart) whose manhood is challenged by a yam thief. Although there are numerous other side jaunts/characters everything wraps up in a relatively cohesive whole at the end.
Final Thoughts
The structure of Sturgeon's work can be quite frustrating. Sturgeon's preference for the short story form means that each character hardly receives more than one or two short chapters. Each story is linked thematically by a scene of guilt, fear, anger... The event causing the emotion-often characterized by miscommunication between individuals-serves to isolates the character from others. This isolation/miscommunication is paired with the arrival of the Medusa which seeks to create a human hivemind which it will be able to control.
For a novel barely clocking in at 160 pages and comprised of numerous small chunks, Sturgeon manages to ask and ruminate on some very pertinent themes. The Cosmic Rape is in no way a masterpiece of the caliber of More than Human but deserves to be read by all fans of Theodore Sturgeon and the genre. This is a fascinating re-invention of the alien invasion trope."
My observation- "Nice try, but no cigar. "
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