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Sunburst (SF) - Phylis Gottlieb ****

This is a re-read of a 1964 science fiction novel that in some ways holds up very well, though there are some issues. Sunburst is what you might call an anti-superhero novel. After an accident at the local nuclear power plant, Sorrel Park is now the only town in the US with a coal-fired power plant and is cut off from the rest of the country.

Initially this isolation of the town was to stop others hearing more about the nuclear disaster, but when children born after radiation exposure begin to develop psi abilities, the place remains locked down as they prove to be disastrous - after a night of horrendous behaviour they are captured and put in the Dump, surrounded by a field that suppresses psi abilities, stopping them from getting out.

As we get into the story the government is getting ready to open up Sorrel Park. The central character, 13-year-old Shandy, who has a had a difficult life after her parents died when she was young, gets pulled into the influence of the scientists who run the Dump, and their tame young man with psi abilities who looks for others like him in the community. She is odd in being impervious to psi - her mind cannot be read, not can she be hurt by psi manipulation.

A lot of the book is conversation and Shandy's attempts to discover just what she is and what her purpose in life is - but despite that not sounding promising it works surprisingly well because of the anti-superhero approach. This book is a counter to the 'superhuman' SF stories that had come before, such as A. E. van Vogt's Slan, or for that matter superhero comics. The people with psi abilities are not superhuman but almost subhuman.

Gottlieb has Shandy suggest that animals seem to have a weak kind of psi, a sort of sixth sense - and that most of those with psi (but not all - something explicitly mentioned as an oddity) are more animal-like in their mentality, less rational and emotionally rounded humans. (Arguably seemingly true of some of the superheroes we have seen.)

While Gottlieb's approach is refreshingly different it is also of its time. She does make use of long discarded anthropological typing (things like mesomorphs and ectomorphs) where a particular build is reflected to a degree in personality. And she uses a term once commonplace but now thankfully discarded for those with Downs Syndrome. But as long as you are able to put this aspect of it aside, it's a thoughtful and interesting attempt to pull apart the whole concept of the superhuman.

This book is long out of print (my copy, which doesn't even have a copyright date in it was priced at 75c) - but if you come across it in a secondhand bookshop is worth a look.

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