Rating: 
Summary: An unusual boy's Fortean odyssey
Review: "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.
Rating: 
Summary: More an adventure story than an SF novel
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: This is a classic
Review: I suspect someone who doesn't like science fiction would still thoroughly enjoy this novel. Sturgeon had a great ability to make the reader sympathize with outsiders--in this case, carnival sideshow performers. Horty, the main character, is a little boy along the lines of Harry Potter: he has an unpleasant family (only his situation is worse--he gets maimed by his
step-father). He runs away, taking with him his only possession, a toy with jeweled eyes. Only it turns out the jewels are more than jewels. Warm, humane, sympathetic novel.
Rating:
Summary: Moving debut
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Great Afternoon Reading
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: I tell you: order it and pray Amazon can find it.
Review: It is really a great book, and note I'm not an easy reader. I liked it so much that I sent an e-mail to S. Spielberg suggesting it as his next film subject. (Well, Mr. S.S. why didn't you reply?) The plot is rich of wonder and poetry, cruelty and revenge.
If you find an (hard to find) below this
title do not matter. I'm very confident Amazon
can locate it (even second hand).
Rating:
Summary: Imaginative Fiction
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: A moving first novel
Review: Sturgeon was always very much a humane writer. This shows in
this, his first novel. Even thought it's not listed as a
"juvenile," it pretty much comes across as one. The hero
is a little boy with abusive step-parents. He even gets his
hand maimed. He ends up on the streets, where he joins a carnival with a circus sideshow. Toss in two Jewels from Space, with an intelligence that can't be understood by humans, and now Sturgeon's Dickensesque novel turns into science fiction. Not perfect by any means, but it's always been my favorite
Sturgeon novel.
Rating:
Summary: A moving first novel
Review: Sturgeon was always very much a humane writer. This shows in
this, his first novel. Even thought it's not listed as a
"juvenile," it pretty much comes across as one. The hero
is a little boy with abusive step-parents. He even gets his
hand maimed. He ends up on the streets, where he joins a carnival with a circus sideshow. Toss in two Jewels from Space, with an intelligence that can't be understood by humans, and now Sturgeon's Dickensesque novel turns into science fiction. Not perfect by any means, but it's always been my favorite
Sturgeon novel.
Rating:
Summary: Sturgeon's moving yet imperfect first novel
Review: The Dreaming Jewels (also published under the title The Synthetic Man) is the first novel by Theodore Sturgeon, one of science fiction's most legendary writers. Sturgeon had already found success publishing short stories by 1950, but this first novel proved he could sustain longer fictional pieces without losing his vintage magic. The Dreaming Jewels is by no means a perfect novel, but it does showcase Sturgeon's remarkable talent for humanizing his stories and thus focusing his literary microscope on humanity and its proper place in society. Science fiction as a genre can, in general, be criticized for a coldness and overemphasis on science rather than people, but Sturgeon clearly had a special gift for delving into the hearts of his fictional creations. The main character of the novel is a boy named Horty. Sturgeon delivers a sometimes heartbreaking description of the little fellow's life. Orphaned as a baby, he spent time in an orphanage before being taken in (for all the wrong reasons) by a horrible judge and his weak-willed wife. All he really has in life is an old jack-in-the-box, the eyes of which consist of two remarkable crystals. As the novel opens, Horty has been caught eating ants underneath the school bleachers; here is your first clue that Horty is not your typical kid. His guardians, never kind and caring at the best of times, are furious, and the ensuing dramatic confrontation ends with Horty running away, leaving three severed fingers behind. He sneaks on to a carnival truck and finds himself living happily, disguised as a girl for reasons the novel makes plain, among a host of strange but caring "outsider" type of people. During his stay of several years, his severed fingers grow back and he does not grow at all, further clues that he is not a normal human child. The owner of the carnival is a rather vicious fellow out to destroy humanity with a source of crystal power he researches and experiments with obsessively. Eventually, all of the people Horty has known, both the good and the bad, come together for an inevitable confrontation. Horty can only survive by figuring out exactly who and what he really is. The relationships between Horty and his carnival friends are really quite touching, and the evil of those who would use or abuse Horty is equally disturbing. Sturgeon can put an incredible amount of emotion into the shortest of sentences, and the reader definitely becomes emotionally involved in the story. One of the problems with The Dreaming Jewels, though, concerns the nature of the important crystals described in the story and the means by which they can provide power to anyone who can truly communicate with them. Some of the mystery is stripped away in the first few pages of the novel, although the small reference I refer to could be overlooked by the casual reader. The fantasy elements, in the end, just come off as slightly absurd. This does nothing to rob the novel of its immense human warmth, but it did have a somewhat negative impact on my reading of the book.
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