The Dreaming Jewels / To Marry Medusa / Venus Plus X

The Dreaming Jewels

Eight-year-old Horty Bluett is mocked by his classmates & abused by his adoptive parents until the day his father severs three of his fingers. He runs away, taking only a gem-eyed doll he calls Junky, & joins a carnival. Finding acceptance at last, Horty never dreams that Junky is more than a toy, nor does he realize that a threat far greater than his cruel father inhabits the carnival & has been searching for Horty longer than he has been alive.

To Marry Medusa

Up until one minute ago, Gurlick was merely a specimen of Homo sapiens, and a substandard specimen at that. But now this craven, seething, barely literate drunk has ingested a spore that traveled light years before touching down on our planet. A spore that has in turn ingested Gurlick—turned him into a host for the Medusa, a hive mind so vast that it encompasses the life forms of a billion planets. A hive mind that is determined to ingest Earth as well.

Venus Plus X

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 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.