Sealed Baby is outlet Three From More Than Human Read by The Author Theodore Sturgeon Vinyl Record Album LP Caedmon TC 1492 Abridged

Baby Is Three is a short story and part of a larger novel titled More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon. First published in the October 1952 issue of Galaxy magazine, it was later crafted into a full novel, More Than Human. From the back cover: Where do you get your ideas?” I suppose every writer is asked that twelve or twenty times a week-especially fantasy and science fiction writers and other such weird and far-out types. Nobody seems to believe the straight answers (“From people like you," or "I don't know") even when they're true. In my case, both are usually so. I know that "you" -people I meet, people I remember, sometimes people I have never met but wish I could-wind up in print, but I don't always know just how they get there, nor how, sometimes, one combination of notions evolves into a story and another-perhaps a much more likely-looking one, does not.

In the matter of “Baby,” however, I do remember how it began. I was reading a novel called Pavilion of Women by that superlady Pearl S. Buck (may she live forever, and she will) and ran into a sequence in which an old monk lived in a sort of cave, taking care of a passel of orphaned and abandoned kids. He and his raggedy charges had nothing else at all in common with the idiot Lone and his crazy moppets; it's just that the situation stuck to my head and wouldn't be scraped off. That was the springboard; there is no accounting for the myriad variables which went into the rest of it; why, for example, I structured it from the appearance of young Gerry in a psychiatrist's office instead of any of the many other ways in which it might have been done. It went very quickly-two weeks or so, if I remember correctly, and all first draft.

Continued below
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Baby is Three From More Than Human Read by The Author Theodore Sturgeon

Vinyl: Factory Sealed
Cover: Factory Sealed VG+. Splitting on top, some soiling.

Album tracks:
Beginning 34:45
Conclusion 33:48
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A year later a publisher asked me for a novel, and the only thing I cared to write about was where the people in “Baby” came from, and where they went to. There was some discussion with the publisher about writing two additional novelettes for these purposes, to be marketed separately in magazines before book publication, so I wrote them that way. By the time they were done there had been the usual shuffle of personnel at the publisher, and the new crew knew nothing of this arrangement, and the two new novelettes became parts 1 and 3 of More Than Human. (Parenthetically, Thole's fine cover painting was done for the Italian edition of More Than Human; that wonderful levitating truck occurs in parts 1 and 3, but not in “Baby.”) Why, as a novel, it isn't scored across like a Hershey bar and just as frangible, is a mystery to me. I had no idea when I was writing it that I would see it trophied and reprinted, translated and reprinted again, until at the current count it exists in 17 languages (if you count American English and English English as two separate languages, and some people do). Apparently the book has something substantive, something to say, which transcends any tricks of glossy and facile language, and I am naturally very pleased about that.

The heart and soul of More Than Human is, clearly, the second part, “Baby is Three.” It appeared in Galaxy, a science fiction magazine under the editorial guidance of Horace L. Gold. Its explosive acceptance astonished and puzzled me almost as much as did the later reception of the book, and its inclusion in the Hall of Fame, the contents of which were chosen by successive ballots by my peers in the Science Fiction Writers of America, is a matter of great gratification to me.

I wish to express my appreciation to Horace Gold and to the many editors and publishers who have seen fit to promulgate this novelette and the novel which sprang from it, but most of all to the readers all over the world who, by their response, have so encouraged me. -Theodore Sturgeon
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Having put pen to paper, I find it is difficult to write about Ted Sturgeon. Ted has no doctorate, such as Isaac Asimov, nor is he a space-scientist, such as Arthur C. Clarke, nor yet a systematic weaver of his own future such as Robert A. Heinlein. Indeed, Ted is no scientist at all-simply a wonderful writer. He is one of the very few science fiction writers to put the emphasis on the man rather than on the machine. “Baby is Three”-actually, the whole of More Than Human-is innocent of new inventions in the shape of SpaceWarps, Zeta-Blasters and the like. Instead, its invention is infinitely more profound than that. One might say that Ted has created The Ultimate Invention: Homo Gestalt. Of course, Superman had been a cry heard long before Nietzsche created Zarathustra. Science fiction has its own Odd John and Slan, but all of these are wondrously beautiful personages on a plane far above our own, as befits a Superman. Ted's Homo Gestalt, however, is a most unlovely amalgamation of defective protoplasmic beings. It is a remarkable conceit and, in Ted's hands, it works logically, and more important, emotionally, for Ted is an emotional man.

Name any profession: he's had a hand in it somehow. He drove a bulldozer once and wrote quite a horrifying little piece about the experience called Killdozer; before that he had run away to sea in the accepted tradition; he also slung hash and actually can still cook very well indeed; he has been involved with Madison Avenue on occasion and probably dozens of other things that not outlet only I, but he, has forgotten.

As for writing, besides More Than Human, he has several collections to his credit including Caviar, The Way Home, A Touch of Sorcery and more. In addition, he has written another novel called The Dreaming Jewels in which a little boy is found eating ants. The reason is that his diet requires formic acid. No one but Theodore Hamilton Sturgeon could have thought of that one.

Ray Bradbury once wrote of Sturgeon's writing as having "... the attributes of a magnificent fire-cracker string, ending in a loud twelve-incher.” -Ward Botsford

"Baby Is Three" from More Than Human, published by Copyright 1972 by Theodore Sturgeon.

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