The novel is told along two threads. The main one involves an apparent time-travel snatch of a contemporary man into a futuristic utopian enclave. Sort of a man who awakes situation, wherein the narrator views with wonder while not doing much of anything himself. This smallish utopia, Ledom, is distinguished by human inhabitants who are bisexual: that is, having characteristics of both sexes physically in each body. According to Sturgeon here, this physical bisexuality, upon a clean social slate without history, will result in happy and fulfilled people.

No conflict? No jealousy? No ambition? — Really? The emotional sensitivity and subtlety of perception that are so striking in Sturgeon's shorter science fiction are absent.

The title would have been more accurate as Venus Plus Y, or Mars Plus X: that is, an XXY chromosome combination. These might not have seemed sufficiently sexy and science fictional.

Ledom folk enjoy a lot of arts and crafts, and singing on the lawn. Science is allowed, but one must wonder about the integrity and stability of a society whose entire human history must be locked away into oblivion. And is a society without sexual difference supposed to be fun? It would take a lot of crafty singing to make up for it. I'm surprised that Sturgeon of all people would attempt to describe such a society as a goal for anyone.
  

The lesser novelistic thread is episodes of a couple of contemporary families, with their petty conflicts, jealousies, and ambitions. This seems like Sturgeon trying to write like Philip K. Dick, wryly and satirically of our own quirks; but not succeeding. This material is presented as supporting evidence of what's wrong with our everyday society, but otherwise unconnected to the primary story line.
  

H. G. Wells' utopian novel Men Like Gods is written in a more old-fashioned style, but with a grander vision; and it has a plot that moves. Robert A. Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon also deals with eugenics, and besides is fun to read.

Utopias tend to be safely isolated on islands in sea or space or time (a Golden Age), or beyond a barrier. Fans of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged may recognize in Venus Plus X a variation upon the arrival of Dagny Taggart at Galt's Gulch. Sturgeon himself was more impressed by The Fountainhead than Atlas Shrugged; the latter was published just a few years before Venus Plus X, and also is a study in utopia and dystopia. Sturgeon may have solved the barrier problem with a more science-fictional thoroughness than Rand applied to it.
  

In a Postscript, Sturgeon says that Ledom "comes from a can of my favorite tobacco spelled backwards." I think Ledom might as well be Model backwards. Ledom fails as a utopian model society, and Venus Plus X fails as a novel. For Sturgeon completists only.

© 2006 Robert Wilfred Franson

Utopias at Troynovant:
Utopia in Power, or Dystopia