Venus Plus X - Softcover

Sturgeon, Theodore

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375703748 ISBN 13: 9780375703744

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1999

Synopsis

Charlie Johns has been snatched from his home on 61 North 34th Street and delivered to the strange future world of Ledom. Here, violence is a vague and improbable notion. Technology has triumphed over hunger, overpopulation, pollution, even time and space. But there is a change Charlie finds even more shocking: gender is a thing of the past. Venus Plus X is Theodore Sturgeon's brilliant evocation of a civilization for whom tensions between male and female and the human preoccupation with sex no longer exist.

As Charlie Johns explores Ledom and its people, he finds that the human precepts he holds dear are profane in this new world. But has Charlie learned all there is to know about this advanced society? And why are the Ledom so intent on gaining Charlie's approval? Unsettling, compelling, and no less than visionary, here is science fiction at its boldest: a novel whose wisdom and lyricism make it one of the most original and insightful speculations on gender ever produced.

About this title

Review:

In Venus Plus X, Charlie Johns, a 20th-century man, awakes in a future in which hunger, overpopulation, bigotry, and war have been eliminated--and gender has vanished. Everything humanity knows about its divided nature is no longer true--and perhaps never was.

Theodore Sturgeon and Philip Jose Farmer were among the first SF writers to deal with sexuality in an open, adult manner. Sturgeon's approach was further distinguished by his uncommon awareness of sexual diversity and his passionate belief in the healing power of love. His story, "The World Well Lost" (1953), was the first SF work to present homosexuality sympathetically, and Venus Plus X (1960) was among the earliest SF works to explore and challenge gender-role stereotypes, and surely the first to do so with a vision of a single-sex, androgynous human race. --Cynthia Ward

From the Back Cover:

"One of the masters of modern science fiction." -The Washington Post Book World

"The Sturgeon magic does not diminish with the years. His stories have a timeless quality and a universality which is beyond fantasy and science fiction." -Madeleine L'Engle

"The corpus of science fiction produced by Theodore Sturgeon is the single most important body of science fiction by an American." -Samuel R. Delany

"A master storyteller certain to fascinate." -Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0375703748
• ISBN 13: 9780375703744
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224