filthy, derelict, embittered alcoholic named Gurlick, who cadges drinks and rails at length
about "bastits"—an all-encompassing word that includes the entire rest of humanity, whom he holds
responsible for his debased condition—steals a discarded hamburger from a stray dog, stomps the dog for emphasis and swallows down his scavenged meal.
This would be just another normal day for Gurlick, were it not for one thing: that hamburger
bears one of the spores of the Medusa, an inhuman interstellar hive-mind that has already assimilated uncounted civilizations across the universe, and has been awaiting a suitable host to begin its conquest of mankind.
Gurlick, who maintains his whining, churlish personality even as he staggers forth to do his alien overlord's bidding, sees the assimilation to come as a chance to stomp the bastits for a change. Complaining every step of the way, he starts constructing the advanced device that will bring all of humanity under the Medusa's heel.
Meanwhile, in a series of alternating chapters, we follow vignettes from the lives of various other human beings whose lives are about to be impacted by the Medusa's invasion. Among them are Paul Sanders, a cad who doses a grieving young widow with a date-rape drug and gleefully prepares to ravish her; Mbala, an African villager intent on catching (and killing) the thief who has been raiding his garden; Henry, a 5-year-old boy whose upbringing seems designed to instill a bottomless, pathetic sense of self-loathing; and Sharon Brevix, a 4-year-old girl whose accidental roadside separation from her family goes dangerously unnoticed when her harried parents
drive away in separate vehicles, each believing that she's riding with the other. All are people whose lives have been brought to this point by humanity's inability to see through the eyes of others. All are symbols of our shared fallibility, and seeming reasons why we should be defenseless in the face of a threat as overwhelming as the Medusa.
Gurlick activates the machine. What follows is a woefully one-sided battle, over just about two hours after the onset of hostilities.
Because humanity is not defenseless after all.
The Medusa never even has a chance. ...
An unexpectedly united humanity
Grand Master Theodore Sturgeon, a pivotal creator of science fiction, fantasy, horror and (in works he ghost-wrote for others) mystery, was one of the greatest wordsmiths speculative fiction has ever produced; his work is, it follows, largely out of print, hard to find outside of occasional retrospective collections and larger used-book stores. (A tragedy of which we should all be duly ashamed.) This novel, an expansion of his 1957 novella, "To Marry Medusa," may seem padded despite its extreme brevity by today's standards, but it also captures many of the attributes that made his work so special.
Sturgeon's prose is dense, elliptical and, though driven by deep empathy for his troubled, imperfect creations—very much including the despicable Gurlick—just as often distancing; it can be hard to feel for the people involved when almost everything Sturgeon says about them is said in an archly clever manner. There's so much of it, often put to the service of minor points, that it's sometimes easy to wish he'd just quit showing how glib he is and get on with the story, already. That said, he just as frequently dazzles with sentences and paragraphs brilliant enough to elicit double-takes.
Here's a brief excerpt from the chapter about the Brevix family, two parents and four kids moving cross-country in a car and moving van. The hilariously awful trip, detailed in a chapter that captures the stress of traveling with small children about as well as anything ever has, pauses when the harried wife hands the harried husband a carton containing the box lunch she'd picked up for him many miles before. Alas, the box has been stored on end, unsettling its
contents and justifying the following description: "... he found himself looking down on what looked like the relief map of some justifiably forgotten, unwanted archipelago. In a sea of cold curdled milk and tomato juice was a string of hamburger islands on whose sodden beaches could be seen the occasional upthrust prow of a wrecked and sunken dill pickle. Just under the surface blueberries bobbed, staring up at him like tiny cataracted eyeballs. Over to the northeast, a
blunt island of rice pudding gave up its losing battle and, before his eyes, disappeared under the waves."
It's a throwaway paragraph about a minor story point, but really: Has anybody else ever described bad food that heroically?
As for the closing chapters, which detail humanity's dizzyingly effective defense against the
Medusa, they're to die for. They're thrilling, surprising, horrific and triumphant. They turn this
novel into more than a study of how we defeat the alien menace, but also, in a way, why despite
everything we deserve to. That is, as long as we don't permit figures like Sturgeon to recede into the dim and forgotten past.
