Customer Reviews

Godbody (Signet)

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A Christ figure comes to a small American town, bearing a message of love and compassion, expressed through making love. Some hear the message and are changed, others seek to destroy it. Despite the focus on love through sex, this is not camouflaged pornography, but a sincere attempt to present this vision by a master of speculative fiction.

Sturgeon presents the story through the first-person accounts of the people in the town, and handles this technique well.

Robert Heinlein, Stephen King, and Stephen Donaldson all praise the book highly.

This was my favorite book for quite a while. I read it while I was young, a teenager. I don't like it any less now, but I am no longer dealing with the same issues and don't think about it as much. It is to Sturgeon's credit, though, that every reader review here has given the book the highest possible rating. He was an enormously underrated American author; better than anyone else in SF and as good as any American author of the 20th century (though to appreciate his skills, you'd have to read more than just Godbody). Fortunately, his short stories are being collected and released, the first five volumes being available currently through Amazon. As for Godbody, it is available in libraries (particularly in big cities), in used book stores, and through used book searches. Email me if you have difficulty finding it.

Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men" is a short, yet poignant story about relationships between people. "Godbody" is also a short, equally poignant story about the relationships between people and God. Sturgeon's final book is his most important, and will bring you a new awareness of yourself and your beliefs.

Godbody is Sturgeon's magnum opus. It captures the human condition--to be asleep, unaware--and through the evolution of the book, told in rotating 1st person, the journey to awarness. The book embodies the amazing qualities of its author, conveying the blinding warmth of his spirit.

I remembered this book from my much younger days and thought I'd read it again now. It was a lot more impressive in my 30s than now in my 60s. Sturgeon can write, no doubt about it. But the Christ figure embodied in the hero, Godbody, is a lot more believable to the young than to the more mature reader. The message of eros instead of agape loses its charm to the elderly reader.

Not really Sci-Fi, but a captivating, breathtaking story. A fine dose of sex added in for flavor. Sturgeon shows with this that he is quite versatile in style and very fluid and original in the art of writing literature. As good as More Than Human and The Dreaming Jewels.

A remarkably achievement in writing! The story is told through a serious of first person chapters. Each character has his own unique voice, manarisms, point of view, and character. Each character's voice and personalty are so different that I found it hard to believe the book was written by just one person. Anyone even remotely serious about learning the craft of writing must read this book!

Sturgeon does a masterful job of showing what the brotherhood of diciples and the message of Christ would be without all the trappings that several centuries have added to it. The social and psychological implications of this are not only well thought out, but placed in a context that is more understandable to the modern reader.

I found "Godbody" to be one of those rare books, like Bach's "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" and Cohelo's "The Alchemist", that simply must be experienced, rather than described. A great test to see if someone is willing to think past their own preconceptions. Also, manditory reading for anyone who enjoys R.A.Heinlien and/or Spider Robinson. Great Stuff!!!

I discovered Theodore Sturgeon more than fifty years ago, when I was a lonely, bookish little kid. His stories were sometimes all the hope I had. He understood the meaning of lonely as no one else I know of, in my sixty-four years. He made me laugh, he made me cry, he scared me, he comforted me, he made me dream, he helped me like myself and my world better. I never met the man, but I always felt that he knew me -- better than the teachers, the parents, the friends who thought they did. And unlike many stories I read back then, his have remained fresh and relevant, old friends that have grown along with my world.

Robert Heinlein said it more eloquently than I could aspire to match (of course!) -- it seems as though Mr. Sturgeon somehow knew he wouldn't be with us much longer. He summed up everything -- all he'd said, and all he hadn't said yet. He distilled that down to its *essential ten percent. The result is this book.

*In case you don't know this, "Sturgeon's Law" asserts that 90% of everything is (to paraphrase politely) trash.

I honestly believe that anyone who reads Godbody will be the better for it. I buy a copy for everyone I like, sooner or later, if they don't already own one. When they thank me, I tell them about the Sturgeon Project -- a republication of all the man's insightful, magical short stories. Eleven volumes thus far, beautiful hardbound treasures on my bookshelf, and I'm anxiously awaiting volume 12, which I hope contains my two favorite stories from a collection called Sturgeon is Alive and Well. Maybe, some day, someone will film them all.