Cordwainer Smith: Quest of the Three Worlds (1966)

Edition: Gollancz, 1987 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 967

Four linked short stories, set later in Smith's imaginary future than any of his other completed fiction have been put together to make up this novel. They all concern the character Casher O'Neill, exiled from the planet Mizzer when his uncle, its dictator Kuraf, is deposed. (The names in the stories tend to refer to other things; Casher's sounds like a Cairo street name, Mizzer like the Arabic name for Egypt, and Kuraf is an anagram of that of Faruk, Egypt's last king.) Although Casher didn't approve of his uncle's corrupt regime, he doesn't think much of the man who has taken over either, and begins a quest to try and improve things on his home planet. This leads him to sort out bizarre problems on other worlds in the hope of obtaining help, and these problems are the subjects of the original stories.

These three stories are fascinating, and Casher is an interesting character who grows as a result of his experiences. The final story, originally entitled Three to a Given Star, does not fit in so well, Casher's involvement being tangential and the major tension of the novel already resolved. It is also one of Smith's poorest stories and by appearing as the ending of Quest of the Three Worlds, can only serve to undermine its quality as a novel.

Cordwainer Smith: Norstrilia (1974)

Also published as the two novels The Planet Buyer (1964) and The Underpeople (1968)
Edition: Gollancz, 1988 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 948

Like much of Smith's work, his only singly conceived science fiction novel (The Quest for Three Worlds being a linked collection of stories) was rescued from obscurity to become a classic of the genre. It has a publication history only too familiar for the non-mainstream in America in the sixties; following magazine appearances of extracts in 1960, it was butchered into two novels and only made its first appearance as originally intended in the late seventies.

The background to the story requires knowledge from several of Smith's short stories, describing what he called the Rediscovery of Man and available in the collection of that name. The planet of Norstrilia is the only source of the drug stroon, vital for human longevity treatment; it has made everybody there immensely rich, though they have preserved the simplicity of their way of life - based on that of sheep farmers in Australia - with massive import duties on all luxuries.

Rod McBan the hundred and fifty first inherits the Station of Doom on Norstrilia, but in order to escape from a deadly enemy begins a series of financial manipulations which end with the purchase of the planet Earth. He travels there, and has many adventures with people who want to part him from his wealth, and with the genetically altered animals known as Underpeople who appear in quite a number of Smith stories.

The main aspect of the novel which impresses even today is its sheer inventiveness. Every chapter, if not every page, has an unusual concept, and all of them are seemingly effortlessly made part of Smith's extraordinary vision of the far future. There is also the bizarre ironic prologue, which I suspect is one of many aspects of Smith's writing to be based on Chinese narrative techniques unfamiliar to most Western readers. Even if Smith is widely admired, he remains an idiosyncratic writer even today; his daring can still take your breath away.

Cordwainer Smith: The Instrumentality of Mankind (1979)

Edition: Gollancz, 1988 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 937

The oligarchy which rules mankind in the background to most of Smith's science fiction is known as the Instrumentality. This may make it seem an ideal title for a collection of his short stories, but of these fourteen there are at least six - and I would say seven - which are not part of his ambitious future history. The short stories not in The Instrumentality of Mankind are collected in The Rediscovery of Man, and there the stories are set in the Instrumentality but only four or five deal with the events given the name which provides its title; neither collection really has a title appropriate to its content.

The stories in The Instrumentality of Mankind are all in some way "also-rans". (This is not surprising given that the other collection's original title was The Best of Cordwainer Smith.) Many of them have an unfinished feel, which is mainly because the ideas they contain are not as fully developed as they are in Smith's most successful stories. This is the case, in particular, with the stories about the origins of the Vomact family. War No. 81Q, while an immense achievement for a teenager, is clearly juvenile. Gustible's Planet is basically a parody of Smith's usual style.

The stories are not without interest, and for many authors this would amount to a pretty good collection. The Instrumentality of Mankind, however, is very much in the shadow of its counterpart.

Cordwainer Smith: The Rediscovery of Man (1975)

Alternative title: The Best of Cordwainer Smith
Edition: Gollancz, 1988
Review number: 923

In the fifties and sixties, Cordwainer Smith was one of the most original writers in the science fiction genre. His stories include many undisputed classics - Scanners Live in Vain, The Game of Rat and Dragon, The Lady Who Sailed the Soul, The Dead Lady of Clown Town, for example - and introduced a level of psychological interest which was much greater than usual in a field generally considered fit only for the cheap pulp magazines. (Under his real name, Paul Linebarger was responsible for the US Army's textbook on psychological warfare.)

The original title of this collection reveals its purpose; it was presumably changed for this reprint because it would affect re-publication of the rest of Smith's output - a novel, another volume of independent short stories, and a collection of related ones. As the best of his work, it provides an excellent introduction to every aspect of his writing.

What is it that was - and in many cases still remains - distinctive about Smith's writing? He has a unique ability to express the alien in a single phrase; examples include referring to space travel as "going into the up-and-out" and the first lines of his earliest published story, Scanners Live in Vain: "Martel was angry. He did not even adjust his blood away from anger".

There is a breadth of vision about Smith's writing which marks him apart from his contemporaries. Like two of the most successful science fiction authors of the period, Robert Heinlein and (to a lesser extent) Isaac Asimov, Smith's stories can be fitted into a consistent conception of a future history spanning hundreds or thousands of years. (Smith's, reconstructed from the stories as his notes don't survive, covers about twelve thousand years.) Comparing Smith with these other authors, a clear difference is immediately obvious. Most science fiction of the time is concerned with technological change; there is a tendency to assume that American capitalism will always be the mainstream of human culture. Smith, on the other hand, is interested far more in social and psychological change, with technology being used only to illuminate his ideas.