Title: To Marry Medusa
Author: Theodore Sturgeon
Rating Out of 5: 4.5 (Amazing, but not quite perfect)
My Bookshelves: Aliens, Science fiction, Speculative fiction
Dates read: 23rd September – 3rd October 2019
Pace: Medium
Format: Novel
Publisher: Vintage Books
Year: 1958
5th sentence, 74th page: Like its predecessor, it began, on the instant of its completion, to build another, more advanced version of itself.
Up until one minute ago, Gurlick was merely a specimen of homo sapiens, and a substandard specimen at that. But now this craven, seething, barely literate drunk has ingested a spore that travelled light years before touching down on our planet. A spore that has in turn ingested Gurlick – turned him into a host for the Medusa, a hive mind so vast that it encompasses the life forms of a billion planets. A hive mind that is determined to ingest Earth as well.
In this mind-wrenching classic of science fiction, the visionary novelist Theodore Sturgeon places humanity on a collision course with an organism of unimaginable power and malevolence and reminds us how much we depend on each other, or even on a wretch like Gurlick. Crackling with suspense, overflowing with invention, and startling in its compassion: To Marry Medusa is a tour de force from one of the great imaginers of the golden age of speculative fiction.
This is my first ever hive mind story. And one of the most intense and kind of insane stories I’ve read in a long time. Thoroughly enjoyable. Impossible to forget. And a great introduction to the genre of speculative fiction. I can’t wait to sink my teeth into more!!!
To Marry Medusa jumps around a lot. There are multiple storylines. Multiple tales, and a wide array of characters which dance across the pages. At first I found that overwhelmingly confusing – I thought that it was a story following Gurlick. And then random others would show up, and not appear again… yet, about halfway through, this tactic is explained. And suddenly it makes total sense. To the point that you wonder why you ever questioned the multiple storylines in the first place…
At the beginning of this tale, humanity wasn’t really highlighted in a nice light. It kind of shone a bit of a spotlight on the depravities of humans, rather than the shining glories. Yet, when all is said and done. When the final battles have been fought, there is this glimmer of hope. There is a sense that the world isn’t as screwed as I was beginning to think, and that maybe… just maybe, we actually have a chance to redeem and save ourselves.
This novel will take you on an amazing journey. It makes you question the trajectory that we’ve all found ourselves on… even after all these years. There is something disturbing and haunting about the reality which Sturgeon presents us with. One that is also not completely hopeless, and just makes you think that maybe we have a potential future after all…
Earth and Skye 