Gurlick. The illiterate stumble bum. The drunken louse. The destroyer of humanity. The eater of the soggy, discarded, horse-meat hamburger. The receptacle for the alien's spawn.
The Medusa. An alien hive-mind. The consumer of two galaxies. Next target: the Earth.
Guido. The hater of melody. The murderous prankster. Hell-bent on the total annihilation of all music, and those who would make it.
Henry. The boy too-tall for his age, with a face like an adult's. Abused by his father. “You're a sissy, a coward,” he says. So scared and frightened, all he can do is cry.
Dimity Carmichael. An ugly and lonely woman. Haggard. She lives vicariously through the sexual escapades of a young woman addicted to the act.
Sharon Brevix. The four year old. Inadvertently left on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere by her mother and father. Left all alone, except for a doll, to wander the country side.
So far as I can tell, Theodore Sturgeon did not populate his books with typical heroes. His books are not full of dashing men and gorgeous woman performing feats of daring-do, saving the world, and having a grand time doing it. Sturgeon liked to introduce his readers to the less desirable, the dregs of humanity, the discarded, the forgotten, the downtrodden. The kind of people, good or bad, that other people consciously try to avoid coming in contact with. You know the kind. You're walking down the street. Ahead of you, you see a man. He looks dirty, unkempt, in your mind you can already smell him. Is that piss, or blood streaming down his leg? Does he only have one shoe on? You don't know him. He could be a good man on the inside, a man in need of compassion, or help, or a dollar, or a smoke. All you know is that at the next light, you're crossing, even though you don't need to. And then, perhaps later, you start to question why you did what you did. As human beings, shouldn't we want to help one another? Sturgeon writes about these kinds men and woman, and he does so with passion, with sincerity, and with an uncanny understanding of humanity.
Like The Dreaming Jewels and More Than Human, To Marry Medusa is not a book to be taken lightly, to flippantly read through to pass the time. Even though Sturgeon was toying with genre conventions, and working within the realm of science fiction, this is heavy duty stuff. Essentially, you could boil down the book's plot to a simple alien invasion story. This is the skinny wireframe, the postulation: what if an alien hive mind came to consume the Earth, and what if this being's first contact with humanity was in the shape of a total loser, a man who hated humanity? In order to bring the minds of the people back into formation, to reform the gestalt of the one mind, The Medusa must first learn how to work through a fractured and troubled psyche.
So, while the basic idea itself is nothing new, the way Sturgeon handles it casts forth a brilliant light and strips away any feelings of tiredness, cliche and banality. The structure alternates between the Gurlick/Medusa arc, and a series of anecdotes detailing the actions of different characters throughout the world. What do these seemingly random events have to do with The Medusa's plan? At first, things feel disjointed, chaotic, and strange. Sturgeon switches POV, one of the narratives is told through first person, while the others are told through third person, and it isn't clear what any of these people have to do with anyone else. However, rest assured, Sturgeon brings everything together in a masterful way. It is clear that I was in the hands of an author who truly understood the power of fiction, and knew how to craft his prose to deliver the maximum impact. Sturgeon's writing is exemplary, but it is not often easy to read. He has a unique voice, with his own rhythm and cadence. He's a literary King Crimson, but once you tap into his gig, it totally delivers in amazing ways.
I - and “I,” now, think as I work of what is happening - a different kind of thinking than any I have ever known...if thinking was seeing, then all my life I have thought in a hole in the ground, and now I think on a mountaintop. To think of any question is to think of the answer, if the answer exists in the experience of any other part of “I.” If I wonder why I was chosen to make that leap from the car, using all my strength and all its speed to carry me exactly to that point in space where the descending machines would be, then the wonder doesn't last long enough to be called that: I know why I was chosen, on the instant of wondering.
To Marry Medusa takes the concepts of an alien invasion, and wraps around this simple convention a vibrant exploration of humanity. At it's core are the themes important to Sturgeon: loss, loneliness, love, abuse, and passion. More so than any other genre author I have read, I get the sense that Sturgeon truly loved mankind, like it was his dream to see us evolve into something more. Even while he was writing about despicable characters doing nasty things to one another and themselves, he never comes across as being misanthropic. He was not pointing out these biological and social blemishes to show how us faulty we are, but, rather, he was showing us the directions in which we should aim our compassion, love, patience, and understanding. Sometimes it is hard for us to see the humanity under the grotesque surface, but Sturgeon could, and I believe that he wanted to help lift this veil so that we might experience something good and awesome.
