Customer Reviews

The Dreaming Jewels

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4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
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I think that his first novel, although he had written plenty of short stories (and would only add to that number . . . the ten volume series reprinting all his short stories is a godsend, check it out!). The plot isn't so much science fiction as borderline fantasy, Horty is a young man caught doing something disgusting behind the bleachers (you'll probably laugh when you find out what it is, either Sturgeon was making some sort of a joke or people were really different back in the fifties) and his mean stepfather "accidentally" severs three of his fingers (though not the most disgusting finger severing sequence, the second one is far more disturbing), so he runs off and joins the circus. The plot starts to twist and turn at that point and jump ahead, sometimes not to its complete benefit, a lot of things either don't get explained or aren't explained well (the origins of the jewels and what they do does seem to change as the story progresses) but the thing that hooks you in and keeps you reading is Sturgeon's overriding compassion and love for everything and everyone. He can find something sympathetic is just about everyone (the only character that I couldn't like even some small part was Horty's stepfather, I found him mostly pathetic but that was the point), even the dreaded Maneater has some redeeming values. There's a lot of touching scenes, especially as Horty comes to grips with what he might be and the consequences of that. Really it's just a heartwarming novel written by a guy who had a great store of humanity and showed it in his stories. Never dripping with sentiment to the point where you feel like you're overwhelmed with emotion, the book remains compulsive reading and just as essential reading as his other two novels (More Than Human and Venus Plus X), he keeps things brisk and moving. Simply put, he showed right from the start that even in the beginning he was as good as the best. And he only got better from here.

Sturgeon has a remarkable imaginative gift, and a style equal to the task of expressing it - not as lyrical as Bradbury's, more in a sardonic vein. He has a sharp eye for the incipient paranoia and multiple repressions of early 1950's America, in which sex, relative social status, and (brand new) nuclear weapons posed threats of roughly equal weight; this background is taken as a given, and is skewered with a reasonably light touch. The real theme is the need for spiritual development, in a world dominated by the drives toward wealth and (more essentially) power. But this is handled very indirectly, as a fantasy based on a simple science fiction premise, which is revealed gradually in the early part of the story. This premise, by the way, is wholly improbable in any literal sense; it is roughly on a par with the mystical assumptions of any of the currently popular religions. One is not expected to spend a lot of time worrying about the science of it. It fits in the world of the book a good deal more neatly than the more strenuously worked out hypotheses of other writers.

The book begins, "They caught the kid doing something disgusting out under the bleachers at the high-school stadium ..." and one is left quite deliberately to one's presumably lurid imagination until page 4, where the nature of the offense is revealed ... though the point of the episode is saved for much later, when it fits in naturally with the basic premise. The inane vulgarity of that opening line represents one of the two poles of Sturgeon's Manichaean world.

The book is a real pleasure to read, on several levels. There is a quiet humor and intelligence behind the story (and perhaps an air of desperation as well). These themes were tackled in more direct ways by Kerouac and Salinger, among others in the U.S. Sturgeon's approach is more reminiscent of Hesse or Kafka; he's not in their league, by any means, but he's good in his own way. His characterization is generally weak and one-dimensional, perhaps to the point of self-parody. This is often the case in satire (Swift, Vonnegut). Sturgeon is less interested in his characters than in their various epic struggles, internal and external, but endows the key ones with enough life to keep them interesting. His greatest weakness is his adherence to the rule that the bad shall be punished and the good rewarded, before the final curtain. This is really not consistent with his world view.

I've been a bit heavy-handed in my description - Sturgeon doesn't beat you over the head with his big themes, but he doesn't bury them either. He just tells a simple story of a badly mistreated orphan with a curious jack-in-the-box with glowing eyes, and lets you make of it what you will.

I should add that Sturgeon's "More than Human" is a distinctly stronger book with related themes and a more interesting premise, and one should read that novel before this one; if that doesn't give you considerable pleasure, then you may as well leave this one alone.

"The Dreaming Jewels," a novel by Theodore Sturgeon, is a well-written and moving blend of science fiction, horror, mystery, love story, and coming-of-age tale. It tells the story of Horton "Horty" Bluett, a young boy who lives unhappily with his abusive adoptive father. The boy's only "friend" is a jack-in-the-box with glittering, jeweled eyes. To escape the abuse, Horty runs away and joins a traveling freak show, where he is befriended by an extraordinary trio of midgets. Ultimately, Horty's odyssey leads him to seek the mystery behind a strange and marvelous life form that is unlike any other species on earth.

"Jewels" is a fascinating story. A key theme is the notion of being a "freak," an outcast. Sturgeon effectively explores the emotional ramifications of this theme, and vividly depicts his outcasts' search for love and community. He makes good use of the carnival setting in his narrative. Although the story's villainous characters are a bit shallow, the other characters are complex and well-developed.

Other important themes in "Jewels" include education, masquerade (including gender-switching), transformation, and communication in its many forms. Sturgeon explores both individuals' desire to dominate and abuse others, as well as the capacity for love and tenderness. Sturgeon's prose style is well suited for the complex task of this book. Overall clear and economical, his prose is at times richly descriptive, at times quite poetic.

At one point Charles Fort, the tireless documenter of strange phenomena, is mentioned in the book, and that reference is quite resonant. In "The Dreaming Jewels," Sturgeon embraces and celebrates those who are seen as weird or deviant, and discovers the humanity behind the freak show exteriors.

Here is the one novel that wholeheartedly belongs in the children's section. "The Dreaming Jewels" is so soft, gentle, easy-going, and clear-cut that it hardly leaves any impression on the mind. It coddles the reader, croons reassuringly into his ear. Sturgeon has taken risks and written daring novels ("Venus Plus X", etc.), but this, his debut effort, is as old-fashioned as they come. This is the sort of novel in which the young hero saves the beautiful heroine from the clutches of the nefarious villain and inherits a fortune.

The first mental adjustment the reader must make is to realize that this is a story being told, not narrated. The impression of the author speaking through the book isn't as strong as in some of Heinlein's juveniles, but constant and unremitting. Sometimes Sturgeon injects bits of ad lib humor into the text("Here she generated, on the spot, the most diffuse and colorful statement of her entire life"); unfortunately, at other times he manipulates and obscures certain story elements to create artificial suspense (a young child is passed for a midget; ten years pass with no one noticing; only much later do we learn that the child can change shape). Sturgeon also bleeps his own profanity, which is fairly amusing.

The characters are the greatest disappointment. Introduced as strong, memorable individuals, they gradually become cardboard scenery in the great cosmic conflict between Horty and the Maneater. The Maneater, the manic, scheming master of the freaks created with alien crystals, is perhaps the novel's only interesting character, though even at best a caricature. Horty Bluett, on the other hand, is just the sort of hero you want to stop reading about: a Superman clone who can change shape and size at will, has a perfect memory, and always acts a gentleman.

Despite moments of extreme Dickensian cheesyness and a string of unbelievable last-moment revelations, this two-hundred-page novel is a quick, pleasant read. "The Dreaming Jewels" is far and away one of the author's least successful novels, but its cohesive qualities show just why Sturgeon is a Grandmaster of the genre.

This is, for me, better than More Than Human. The plot moves, the characters are alive, deep, the story is so intense. Reading Sturgeon, one can see exactly who Stephen King is trying to emulate!

A real mix this book. Some bits dated, other ones timeless. Some characters profound, others stereotype. Some plot elements original and striking, others almost TV episode predictable. I'm glad I read it though, and I'll keep an eye out for others by this guy.

I didn't really rate the motiveless villains in the book, much as Sturgeon made them quite ugly rather than just telling us they were nasty (particularly the odious judge). However Horty, especially as a child, is a powerful and touching character. This is particularly where he leaves, say, an Asimov behind.

Asimov's great strength, however, was his inspired ideas, and for much of the book the secret of the crystals is an intriguing background, a classically clever SF `What if'. However when the secret is finally revealed we get too many pages of straight exposition rather than having the idea integrated into the story. And much as where Sturgeon went with it showed the same sort of brave imagination Bear surprised me with in Blood Music, it still felt far too much like those nasty epic fantasy climaxes where the hero stumbles across his cataclysmic era saving powers with some random mumbo-jumbo that is supposed to make sense but could have gone any direction at all without reference to anything earlier in the book. This is lazy, and it further undermined the standard melodramatic action climax.

So in summary I really loved the first half of this book, but felt a bit let down as it forced itself into a less interesting conclusion. His child's view was a triumph, and the way the clever SF idea initially informed rather than overwhelmed the story really impressive. However the subtleties were eventually overrun by the idea and the Batman/Robert Jordan-Terry Goodkind conclusion.

It is hard to believe this book was written 50 years ago. Everything about it is still modern. The symbolism and characterization make this book worthwhile even if you don't like sci-fi. It is short, but it will stick with you for a long time.

This was my second Sturgeon novel, my first was More Than Human. I read my dads copy, which was under the 1975 name The Synthetic Man. This book, although it doesn't have the same meaning to it as More Than Human, is just as well written. Sturgeons only problem with it was that he was probably under a fairly harsh deadline, judging from how he jumped fairly far into the future, and also didn't give a lot of back story to some of the more interesting characters, such as where the Maneater found some of the freaks in the show. I think if Sturgeon had written this later on in his career, when he had more flexibility, and a bit more experience, this book would have been one of the greatest science fiction novels ever. This is a good opener to his writing, but not at all the best example of his best. His best writing came from his short stories. If you've never read Sturgeon before, starting here is a good spot, if you have and haven't read this book, I'd say read it because it is a good example of what an author can do when they're starting out on the novel trail.

I've only read one book by Sturgeon before and it was his collection of short stories in the book Starshine. I thought the 6 stories were "partly juvenile stories with no depth." My expectations of Dreaming Jewels were heightened due to some rather pleasant reviews. However, Dreaming Jewels followed the same juvenile ideas and/or writing style of the stories in Starshine. I'm not even sure if one could classify this into the genre of SF. If Sturgeon hadn't throw in some big science words, this book definitely would have been classed as fantasy. Carnies don't belong in sci-fi! Further, the plot twists are placed in predictable places in the story while the dialogue is simple and dry.

"The Dreaming Jewels" by Theodore Sturgeon is an interesting science-fiction novel which was first published in February of 1950 in "Fantastic Adventures". This was Sturgeon's first novel. It was nominated in 2001 for the Retro-Hugo award for novellas which were written in the year 1950. I am not sure why they re-categorized the story as a novella, as it is clearly of novel length. Unlike many stories from that era, this one does not suffer at all from age. That is probably due to it focusing not on technological advances, but rather ideas and character.

The story is centered on eight-year old Horton "Horty" Bluett who is sent home from school when he is caught eating ants. His adoptive parents punish him severely, his father, in particular, is so sever that he nearly severs three fingers from Horty's left hand. Horty also is very attached to a toy which he had from the orphanage. His attachment was so great that he nearly died when it was taken away. Horty runs away from home, and ends up meeting Havana, Bunny, and Zena who take him back to the Carnival where they work.

The early part of this story reads more like a fantasy or horror story than a science-fiction one, and indeed those who want hard science-fiction would do better of looking elsewhere. However, Sturgeon does an artful job of bringing the story back into the realm of science-fiction as it moves towards its conclusion. Sturgeon includes many interesting themes, such as communication, outcasts, and alien life forms, and creates a story which is largely unique.