Talk talk talk sex escape talk talk hippies lecture drugs talk talk talking while dong things end.
To expand on that a bit:
Talk, talk, talk. There is a sizable chunk of Dave Van Arnam’s Starmind
Tylerbody blinks Tylereyes and whistles with Tylerlips. It is a creative solution to the impossibility of finding an adequate pronoun for the multimind. Creative, perhaps, but not very good. Later, when the personalities experience moments of great union, THEY see through THEIR eyes and learn about THEMSELF. I found MYSELF glancing ahead to see how long these all-cap pronouns were going to last.
There are some fun parts along the way — for instance the book, written in 1969, credits the Beatles’ music from the 1980’s (their ‘middle years’) with helping to spark a global cultural revolution. Alas, that revolution petered out after global biological warfare killed half the population of Earth, but the country folk (or as I call them, ‘hippies’) have been carrying on.
Meanwhile, up in space, the giant asteroids that have been outfitted with pseudogravitic multiwave generators haven’t up to this point accomplished much except cost a lot and suck down gigantic amounts of power. Think of them as super-huge microwave ovens that don’t really heat things up very well. But as the three minds become more integrated they realize something: Those microwave ovens will work better than anyone ever imagined, if only the right person were to stick THEIR head in it. So THEY do. And it’s awesome.
And thus mankind is given the stars, as long as they can construct just the right three-brained people to stick their heads in the microwaves. And, as no other intelligence has come up with the idea of merging people’s brains and sticking them in gigantic, inefficient, microwave ovens, mankind goes on to rule the galaxy. But that, we are told, is another story. Maybe one without so much talking in it.
