To Marry Medusa

(the original title of this book is The Cosmic Rape)

The base of the story has to do with cooperation – not unlike More Than Human, by the way. The alien that threatens Earth is some kind of hive mind entity, and it tries to incorporate humanity in its telepathic union willy-nilly.

Sturgeon is right that lots of our current social and interpersonal problems stem from information gaps: uncertainty, mistrust and miscommunication would disappear to a large extent if we instantly knew each other’s thoughts fully. Disdain and hate would be replaced by understanding and forgiveness.

But on a more basic conceptual level, I think Sturgeon misses a few beats, resulting in both a misconception of what cooperation is, and a classic case of human exceptionalism.

Let’s start with the latter: according to Medusa – the hive mind alien that spans galaxies and countless species – they haven’t encountered an individualistic species with such high level of technology in the entire universe. Given the book’s premise of densely populated outer space, that seems improbable, but I’ll grant Sturgeon his point: humans from the 1950ies could have be exceptional, even in a universe where the Fermi paradox is without subject – like the universe in The Cosmic Rape.

The former is more crucial. What exactly is cooperation? Sturgeon’s narrator states this: “that a single entity of any species was capable of so much as lucid thought without the operation of group mechanism, was outside [Medusa’s] experience and beyond its otherwise near-omniscience”. With “group mechanism” Medusa means instant and full telepathy between each of the individuals in the hive mind.

To me, all that seems to ignore that we, as a species, actually do operate as a group. We are a prosocial species. Humans couldn’t really exist as individuals. Because we cooperate, we could kill mammoths, and develop lucid thought like the theory of relativity. Without cooperation, we couldn’t have learned to live in Greenland nor the dessert, nor designed slings and arrows, nor launched Apollo 11, nor operate Starlink in a war zone.

Medusa compares itself to a hive of bees, but that seems wrong too. Bees actually aren’t a hive mind at all. They do not possess telepathy. What they do have is instinctive cooperation via communication, not unlike what humans do. 

As such, the central conflict of the novel, between an alien that symbolizes group cooperation and humans that symbolize individualism, doesn’t hold. I get it that Sturgeon tries to advocate for more cooperation, that’s noble for sure, but his central metaphor is a bit silly when you realize humans are basically the most successful cooperating species on the planet, with the best track record of colonizing all kinds of ecological niches and having the most complex, abstract thoughts and technical practices.

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Full review on Weighing A Pig