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.
Rating: 
Summary: Absolutely INCREDIBLE!
Review: This is an outstanding book. This is the quintessence of great science fiction, and all forms of literature in general. If you do not read this you are depriving yourself of one of the best works of the GREATEST SCIENCE FICTION AUTHOR OF ALL TIME. The Dreaming Jewels was full of intriguing, involved characters and a plot to boggle the mind. Read it as soon as possible.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding...Sturgeons best!
Review: 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!
Rating:
Summary: I love this book.
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: It didn't impress me...
Review: While this early horror novel starts out with a very intriguing opening paragraph -- "They caught the kid doing something disgusting out under the bleachers at the high-school stadium, and he was sent home from the grammar school across the street. He was eight years old then. He'd been doing it for years." -- it quickly strains suspension of disbelief past the breaking point. This is the story of Horty, a human photocopy produced by strange, living crystals that exist among us without us being aware of them. Except for one man, the Maneater, the evil, sociopathic owner of the carnival where Horty winds up after being evicted by his adoptive parents. Although there are no details in the text to date this novel to the 1950s, it comes off sounding impossibly old-fashioned, far less relevant to our world today than the works of Jane Austen or Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or even Sturgeon's contemporary Richard Matheson. This novel is better left forgotten.
Rating:
Summary: Starts strong, but ultimately better left forgotten
Review: While this early horror novel starts with a very intriguing opening paragraph -- "They caught the kid doing something disgusting out under the bleachers at the high school stadium, and he was sent home from the grammar school across the street. He was eight years old then. He'd been doing it for years." -- it quickly strains suspension of disbelief past the breaking point. This is the story of Horty, a human photocopy produced by living crystals that exist among us without us being aware of them. Well, almost all of us. One man has discovered these crystals: the Maneater, the sociopathic owner of a carnival where Horty winds up after being evicted by his adoptive parents. Although no details in this novel explicitly date the text to the 1950s, the decade in which it was published, it comes off sounding impossibly old-fashioned, far less relevant to today's world than Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or even Sturgeon's contemporary, Richard Matheson. This novel is better left forgotten.
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