In [Venus Plus X], Sturgeon makes subtle use of various conventions of the science-fiction genre and of social conventions, particularly sexual conventions. The well-nigh-perfect society of the Ledom, a new form of "humanity," is explained as a consequence of their hermaphroditic sexuality. Everybody is equipped with both male and female sexual organs. Impregnation is a mutual affair. With the lack of sexual differentiation goes, it is assumed, a corresponding lack of other dichotomies…. In a series of alternating chapters devoted to the conventionalized sexual responses of a pair of contemporary American families, Sturgeon presents, as an effective satiric contrast, our alternative and divisive situation. This arrangement serves to disguise the fact that Venus Plus X is really a short story skillfully padded out. The utopia theme simply does not allow for very much in the way of narrative elaboration.

Sturgeon is aware that the English language, as it has developed, is incompatible with utopia, and consequently the Ledom don't use it. The Ledom language appears to be scientific in its unusual exactness and avoidance of metaphorical statement…. The only book referred to is a technical manual.

Aesthetic appeal is, however, a function of the total environment, which is essentially pastoral. Johns is first struck by an extensive tree-spotted area of even, springy greensward. There is a technology, however, as instanced by the impossibly curved buildings, which defy the laws of gravity: "nothing was ever square, flat, vertical, or exactly smooth."… Presumably the shapes approximate those found in nature. It transpires that the incredible engineering of Sturgeon's scientifically based fairyland depends upon invisible force fields. By means of a skillful domestication of the impossible, the reality of this utopia insinuates itself. But the technological aspect is incidental…. The most important aspect of the Ledom society is an exclusively pastoral retreat known as the "Children's One." The children who inhabit this area with their kindly guardians live in very basic homey cottages…. According to Johns' instructor, Philos, the value of such a simple pastoral existence derives from the survival skills it imparts. A dependence on technology stunts such skills. The children, representatives of the future and survival, appear to be objects of worship to the Ledom and at the center of their "charitic religion"… with its participatory love celebrations. Although the Ledom don't sleep, they do dream. (pp. 118-20)

What of Charlie Johns' role in all this?… Johns, an airplane pilot of the mid-twentieth century, blanks out to find himself, on regaining consciousness, in a womblike container. This circumstance might be taken as a pointer to the psychological origins of the utopian impulse in regression fantasies of a return to the womb…. Because the environment Johns surveys is futuristic and because he is a reader of science fiction, he assumes and is encouraged in his assumption that he has been scooped up by some Ledom time machine and that he is now in Earth's future. The reader for whom Sturgeon is writing, similarly habituated to the conventions of science fiction, goes along with Johns' assumption. Here Sturgeon is subtly toying with the conventions of the genre.

It turns out that the Ledom society is contemporaneous with Johns' society. The Ledom do not come by their bisexuality as a result of natural evolution but as the result of genetic experimentation…. This "utopia" is situated in an inaccessible valley domed over to look like a continuation of the surrounding mountains. Like most "utopias," this one is a bounded area and has its "Edge."…

A second surprise for the convention-bound reader concerns Charlie Johns himself. Johns is dead. While flying his plane, he crashed into the camouflaged dome. The Ledom, who place a particular value on objectivity as a means of overcoming problems, require objective knowledge as to how humanity, at this point in time, would react to their sexual eccentricity. If the reaction is favorable, the Ledom experiment is successfully concluded. But Johns is dying as a result of the crash. Thanks to an information-transference device known as the "cerebro-style,"… the Ledom obtain a complete record of Johns' mind and identity before he dies. This record they imprint on the brain of the one human being preserved in their "utopia," Quesbu the "Control Natural." Because all babies are doctored by an automatic and unseen process at birth, should humanity destroy itself entirely, without Quesbu, the human form might be irrecoverable. It is, then, Quesbu, with Johns' grafted mind and personality, who, in finally expressing revulsion at the artificial nature of the Ledom, provides the objective evidence that it is not yet time for the Ledom to cease their caretaker role and step aside in favor of humanity and the establishment of a genuine utopia…. The finished utopia is now seen, with conviction, as a scattered motif in a novel that is, in fact, concerned almost entirely with the transition to utopia. But Sturgeon has succeeded in suggesting, as a science fictional motif, a utopia when man, having attained a new plane of existence as a result of natural evolution, will inhabit a pastoral Arcadia. While other conventions in this novel are exposed as forms of imposture, this convention is allowed hopefully to stand. (pp. 120-22)