Sturgeon had had plenty of experience in his short fiction at drawing vivid personalities, and it shows in this novel. And, by way of further contrast, he succeeds in making his characters both more detestable and admirable than any Lovecraftian people. Without even engaging any extraterrestrial scenario, Sturgeon manages to evoke a cosmic indifference more effectively than H.P. The comparisons I found myself making for this story were not to other pieces of science fiction, but rather to the horror genre. "Yet-how many men walked the earth who were not men at all how many trees, how many rabbits, flowers, amoebae, sea-worms, red-woods, eels and eagles grew and flowered, swam and hunted and stood among their prototypes with none knowing that they were an alien dream, having, apart from the dream, no history?" (181) Written circa 1950, it is also set in mid-20th-century America, with an emerging substratum of non-human strangeness. The Dreaming Jewels (also published elswhere as The Synthetic Man) was Sturgeon's first novel. The third of them, Venus Plus X, I originally read in a battered used paperback, and I've already reviewed it separately. This Book of the Month Club edition contains three unrelated novels by Theodore Sturgeon.
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