The Instrumentality of Mankind by Cordwainer Smith: Norstrilia

Over ten years ago, a Baen ebook bundle introduced me to Cordwainer Smith with the collection When the People Fell, which collects a bit more than half of Smith's short fiction. I loved it enough to seek out and purchase The Rediscovery of Man, a complete edition of Smith's short fiction from NESFA Press. Smith wrote a lot of very good sf in his tragically short career, but only one sf novel, Norstrilia, which was also published by NESFA as a companion volume to Rediscovery of Man. Like most of Smith's short sf, Norstrilia is set in Smith's "Instrumentality of Mankind" future history; it was originally published as two separate novels on account of its length (sf novels in the 1960s were much shorter than those today!), The Boy Who Bought Old Earth/The Planet Buyer and The Store of Heart's Desire/The Underperople and then later recombined into one; this edition collates all of Smith's variations over the years into an appendix, making it as complete as possible. 

Norstrilia by Cordwainer Smith

Originally published: 1964-68
Acquired and read: October 2025

The thing one must state up front is that, based on the evidence of Norstrilia anyway, Smith was a much better short story writer than novelist (he did write three non-sf novels under other names). Norstrilia has a lot of captivating scenes and chapters, the kind of raw material I can imagine Smith weaving a highly effective short story out of. As a novel, though, I'm not entirely sure it hangs together. Clearly Smith is going for a sort of bildungsroman structure. It focuses on a young man named Rod from the planet Old North Australia, whose inhabitants manufacture "stroon," the drug that grants immortality; he hears that a rival is coming for him, so he engages in an economic counteroffensive that ends in him purchasing Old Earth. He then travels to the Earth to view his purchase; there he encounters the "Underpeople" (elevated animals with human characteristics) and must navigate attempts on his life while also trying to learn something about himself.

There's a lot of stuff going on in this book. Maybe I'm imposing a structure on it Smith didn't intend, but if it's meant to be a bildungsroman, I'm not sure how it all adds up in the end. What is Rod meant to learn that takes him from boyhood to manhood? The book seems pretty aimless; Rod kind of lurches from circumstance to circumstance and then the book wraps up.

Yet I can't deny that Smith probably had more imagination and more poetry in his little finger than many sf writers have in their whole bodies. I loved the history of the temple on Rod's family estate; I loved the story of how Rod acquired the Earth by accident; I loved the idea of there being a whole army of Rod duplicates sent to the Earth to draw Rod's enemies off his trail, and one of them falling in love. There was a lot going on in this book, and even if I don't quite know what the destination even was, the journey was never not interesting. But it's also hard to imagine ever rereading it, while I can much more imagine going back to The Rediscovery of Man time and again.