Who needs a hug? In More Than Human, both exercising and receiving compassion and forgiveness are means by which characters evolve. It's nice of Sturgeon to specify a method of evolution since this is a novel about the advancement of the species through a joint, gestalt life form with mental superpowers, after all. Due to the book's emphasis on compassion and forgiveness, the telepathy of the gestalt has sometimes been called tele-empathy by critics. We think that makes the book tele-tenderhearted.
Questions About Compassion and Forgiveness
- This book makes us hungry. Throughout the novel, characters bond when some provide others meals. What can you say, using passages from the text (as opposed to passages from the opera version, which doesn't exist as far as we know), about the role of food in More Than Human?
- Group hug time! Stern and Hip treat Gerry with compassion. Who treats Hip with compassion, and how would you describe that character's techniques for doing so?
- Lonely Alicia Kew, amirite? Describe her downfall from dancing Alicia to Miss Kew in terms of compassion and forgiveness, or lack thereof.
- How do the Prodds' compassion for Lone and the gestalt members' compassion for one another differ?
Chew on This
Hip calls Gerry a monster but is correct to treat him with compassion and forgiveness because the only way for society to progress is through such empathy, even empathy delivered to dangerous people who have killed others.
Hip calls Gerry a monster and is incorrect to treat him with so much compassion and forgiveness because it's only in fiction that such empathy so frequently causes truly bad people to convert to goodness—in real life, it doesn't work like that.