It is a revision and expansion of his 1952 novella Baby Is Three, which is bracketed by two additional parts written for the novel, "The Fabulous Idiot" and "Morality".

[3] The novel concerns the coming together of six extraordinary people with strange powers who are able to "blesh" (a portmanteau of "blend" and "mesh") their abilities together.

One day he encounters Evelyn Kew, an innocent girl completely sheltered in an isolated house by her domineering, religious father.

During this incident, the idiot barely survives a beating from the father; bleeding and nearly dead, he is found and then adopted by the Prodds, a poor farming couple, and lives with them for about seven years.

Lone builds a shelter in the forest and is soon joined by three runaway children: Janie, an eight-year-old with a telekinetic gift, and the twins Bonnie and Beanie, who cannot speak properly but possess the ability to teleport.

Prior to his death, Lone instructed the children to seek out Alicia Kew, now a spinster living alone with a maid.

His amnesia was caused by Alicia's having accidentally transmitted her memories to his mind when they first met, triggered by her strong emotional reaction to hearing the words "Baby is three".

Seven years earlier, he was Lt. Hippocrates "Hip" Barrows, a gifted engineer who worked for the US Air Force until the incident which led to his incarceration, first in an insane asylum, then in jail.

It was still operational and attached to Prodd's truck, left abandoned in the field of the now-abandoned farm, which had been absorbed into the range.

Gerry does this because Baby informed him of the consequences (if the anti-grav was discovered, it would lead either to a terrible war or to the complete collapse of the world economy) and that such a major thing will surely be traced back to the gestalt.

New York Times reviewer Villiers Gerson placed the novel among its year's best, praising it for "a poetic, moving prose and a deeply examined raison d'etre.

"[4] Groff Conklin described More Than Human as "a masterpiece of invention... written in an unmannered prose that still has a poetic, panchromatic individuality.

"[5] Boucher and McComas praised it for "its crystal-clear prose, its intense human warmth and its depth of psychological probing" as well as its "adroit plotting and ceaseless surge of action," finding it "one of the most impressive proofs yet of the possibility of science fiction as a part of mainstream literature.

[9] Writing in 1975, R. D. Mullen declared that in More Than Human, "[Sturgeon] had a theme well suited to his talents and inclinations, [and] the result is a book that pretty well avoids the mawkishness that mars most of his work.

"[10] Aldiss and Wingrove found that the novel "transcends its own terms and becomes Sturgeon's greatest statement of one of his obsessive themes, loneliness and how to cure it.