More Than Human Harvesters

I've been thinking again about Monego's essay, which I mentioned a few days ago, and it occurred to me that one probable source for the Harvesters in Fourth Mansions is Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human (1953), a landmark work of mid-century science fiction. This must have occurred to others, though I haven't seen it discussed.

Sturgeon’s novum reimagines evolution acting on the communal mind through Homo Gestalt, a multi-person organism formed by marginalized individuals who learn to blesh into a single superior being. Lafferty said he read several hundred science fiction novels when he committed to the genre. It is hard to imagine that Sturgeon's novel was not among them, given how celebrated it was. At the same time, Fourth Mansions introduces elements Sturgeon lacks, and it reads as a monitory response to Sturgeon’s humanism. It was, of course, Sturgeon who gave us the term lafferties.

A few other connections. Both writers have primary characters who are blessed simpletons, and both use the simpleton as a catalyst. Sturgeon has Lone, “the Fabulous Idiot,” and Lafferty has Freddy Foley. In Sturgeon, the simpleton leads humanity forward to a benevolent collective mind; in Lafferty, Freddy becomes the center of contending cosmic forces. Where Sturgeon treats collective consciousness as natural and secularly redemptive, Lafferty presents brain-weaving as predatory elitism. If Sturgeon imagines a hidden society of supermen guiding history, Lafferty does something similar with his factions, but his view of history is, as it always is, multiplex and conspiratorial. We get the four factions outside the castle. Everything is set within a Catholic horizon shaped by Teresa of Ávila rather than relative to secular evolution or humanistic progressivism. The ascending spiral of the Interior Castle becomes a normed environment by which one can verify whether the leap is a true one, whereas in Sturgeon, the verdict is one grounded in self-sufficient human judgment.

A resource for reading the Harvesters alongside Jung's Aion: