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.

Review: The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer

Before we begin, I want to point out that my last-ever review of The Avengers: The Lost Episodes has gone up at Unreality SF. I've really enjoyed this series, and I will miss it. A beautifully written, performed, and produced slice of the 1960s here in the 2010s. Like I said in this review, it captured everything I enjoyed about the old black-and-white 30-minute Danger Mans back in the day.

Hardcover, 990 pages
Published 1994 (contents: 1841-1994)
Acquired March 2008
Read March 2017

The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF

edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer

A thousand-page anthology devoted to a subgenre feels like an argument to me. A shorter book would claim to be nothing more than a sampling, while even a thousand-page book devoted to whole genre of science fiction couldn't rightly claim comprehensiveness. But with one thousand pages and over sixty stories from a single subgenre, The Ascent of Wonder can claim to be defining that subgenre's entire form and purpose. Unfortunately, it gets off to a rough start: I found the introductions (there are three!) by Gregory Benford and Kathryn Cramer more befuddling than illuminating, but I keyed in on a passage from David Hartwell's introduction: "Hard sf is about the beauty of truth. It is a metaphorical or symbolic representation of the wonder at the perception of truth that is experienced at the moment of scientific discovery" (30). I don't know that I entirely agree, but it's an intriguing formulation that explains why Hartwell and Cramer picked the stories they did for this anthology.

Judging by the stories included here, Hartwell and Cramer's definition of hard sf is a lot more capacious than my own. I love Cordwainer Smith, and "No, No, Not Rogov!" is indeed about the "perception of truth that is experienced at the moment of scientific discovery," but the inclusion of stories like this make me think that definition isn't specific enough-- I don't think Smith cares about science except as a source of beautiful imagery and fantastic ideas, and if sf is to be "hard" I feel like it needs something more than that. It's not that Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" or Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore's "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" or Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question" are bad stories, or even stories uninterested in science, but it's that they're not invested in following the implications of actual science in a way that, say, Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations" is-- a story that despite its flaws (or maybe because of them) epitomized the hard sf ethos of logic over all else. There are times I found myself wishing Hartwell and Cramer had included some kind of counterpoint story: if "Nine Lives" by Ursula K. Le Guin (a story that has clones in it, but no science behind them) or "The Very Slow Time Machine" by Ian Watson (which has a neat concept at its heart, but not as far as I can tell, one from actual science) or "The Longest Science Fiction Story Ever Told" by Arthur C. Clarke (which is an unfunny joke about unfunny jokes) are all hard sf, then what isn't? Show me the other side of the subgenre so I can see its edges more clearly.

That said, with over 150 years of stories to pick from, Cramer and Hartwell assembled an excellent collection of stories, and despite some dubious enclosures, I do feel I understand the parameters and possibilities of hard sf more than I did before reading. Some were by authors I knew and loved already: James Blish's "Beep" has a clever and interesting conceit that would make Steven Moffat's head spin. Donald Kingsbury's "To Bring in the Steel" was a surprising tale of a Paris Hilton-esque media floozy discovering a new side of herself on an asteroid mine; after enjoying Psychohistorical Crisis so much, I ought to seek out more of his work. "Waterclap" was an interesting Isaac Asimov story I hadn't read before, but let down by the fact that Asimov can imagine a moon colony and an underwater colony, but can't imagine a woman having any role in either outside of childbearing... in 1970! Le Guin's "The Author of the Acacia Seeds" wasn't a story, but had neat enough ideas (about ant language!) to succeed regardless. And I'm always happy to reread James Blish's "Surface Tension," which is in my sci-fi top five. David Brin's "What Continues, What Fails..." shows science fiction at its best as well, combining future reproduction with black hole physics to deliver a testimony for the human need to reproduce and leave a mark on the universe. (I did appreciate that unlike most anthologists, they included the contextual material with Rudyard Kipling's "With the Night Mail," though I wish they hadn't dumped it all at the end, after the actual story.)

There was the occasional outright bad one: Rudy Rucker's "Message Found in a Copy of Flatland" was sort of a non-story, not doing anything that Flatland didn't do itself; I got the feeling that it was in the book because being a novel, Flatland itself couldn't be. And James P. Hogan's "Making Light" is an unfunny joke stretched out way too long with dubious claims to be science fiction, much less hard sf. I think it's only in here because Hogan didn't write much short fiction, so Cramer and Hartwell had limited options (his novel Inherit the Stars is probably one of the best examples of the subgenre).

I was kind of a sucker for stories involving academia, I guess for obvious reasons. "Davy Jones' Ambassador" by Raymond Z. Gallun was surprisingly interesting, a tale of a professor (who's married to a dean) chasing a giant leviathan. I particularly loved Katherine Maclean's "The Snowball Effect," a rare sociological hard sf tale about a sociology department head defending his program against budget cuts by an overeager administrator by accidentally transforming a local knitting club into a global power. Michael F. Flynn's "Mammy Morgan Played the Organ; Her Daddy Beat the Drum" was surprisingly moving tale of a physics professor hunting ghosts as he destroys his academic career.

This review just scratches the surface of the good stuff contained within. (I want to read more Bob Shaw and Gordon R. Dickson now, for example, and I was very glad to see H. G. Wells's "The Land Ironclads" in this context.) Presumably no anthology is perfect, but I suspect this one comes closer than most: it's probably a better sf anthology than any I've read outside of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame series. I discovered a lot of new stories, developed a new appreciation for a subgenre I've thought little about, and have some new authors to look up.

Review: The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith

Hardcover, 671 pages
Published 1993 (contents: 1928-79)

Acquired February 2015

Read April 2015

The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith
edited by James A. Mann

The Rediscovery of Man collects all of Cordwainer Smith's short science fiction. I previously read a book that collected most of it, When the People Fell, and rereading my review, I find that I largely stand by it: the best stuff is "Scanners Live in Vain," "The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal," "A Planet Named Shayol," and the three Casher O'Neill stories. Like When the People Fell, this book collects the stories in their chronological order in Smith's "Instrumentality of Mankind" future history, with "out-of-continuity" tales thrown in at the end. It would be nice to read Smith's work in publication order, I think, to see the contrast that provides.

There are some stories collected here that weren't in WtPF, ones about the Underpeople, the animals-mutated-into-human-ish-life-forms servitor race: "The Dead Lady of Clown Town," "Under Old Earth," "Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons," "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard," and "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell." None of these made much of an impact. I don't know if it's because none of them were as good as the great stories I mentioned in paragraph one of this review, or because I wasn't reading them carefully because they were nestled among stories I didn't have to read carefully on account of them being rereads. But anyway, still an excellent book, and I look forward to finishing off Smith's sf oeuvre with Nostrilia in a couple years, I'm sure.

Short SF&F Week: When the People Fell by Cordwainer Smith

Kindle eBook, n.pag.
Published 2007 (contents: 1950-75)
Acquired June 2012
Read August 2012

When the People Fell
by Cordwainer Smith

I got this book in a Baen eBook Bundle-- for paying twice as much as I'd pay to get one book, I got five. I dimly knew Cordwainer Smith as someone who wrote classic sf, but I didn't have very specific memories of him except enjoying "The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal."  This book-- which collects about about half of Smith's short fiction, most of it set in the "Instrumentality of Mankind" future history-- won me over in short order. Even when the stories aren't plot- or character-interesting, the ideas are amazing and lyrical, the prose completely unlike anything else from 1950s sf, the narratives playful with stories layered inside stories. I mean, I love Isaac Asimov, but it's hard to imagine that at the same time that he was churning out robot and Foundation tales, Smith had come up with something as distinctive as this.

It's enough to make me do a story-by-story review, something I don't do much anymore.

"No, No, Not Rogov!"
One of several  World War II-centric stories in the book, this is about a pair of Soviet scientists, their keepers, and the machine they built to read American brainwaves that connected them to something they couldn't have imagined. There's a tragedy of repression and detachment here, hidden under a (perfectly) perfunctory style.

"War No. 81-Q" (Rewritten Version)
In the future, wars are licensed and no one dies. The elaborate mechanics of this premise make the story a delightful and imaginative read, no matter what it actually does with the premise.

"Mark Elf" and "The Queen of the Afternoon"
These were probably my least favorite stories in the book. The ideas come thick and fast, but too much so: they feel random and arbitrary (though I can't be displeased with the talking bear) rather than part of an immense universe. They're about a couple of German girls launched into space during World War II who crash back down in the far future and end up leading a not-very-interesting revolution against not-well-defined bad guys.

"Scanners Live in Vain"
Apparently I read this before, as I called it a "highlight" in an old review, but I only remembered the vaguest of outlines. I can't tell why, as this story is amazing. The difficulties of love, an incredible and unique future with a cool civilization, a terrible choice. Like the best sf, it reveals to its reader both an unknown world and something of himself. Few stories are this good. And to think that having come up with such a premise, Smith only mined it for one story-- Asimov would have kept the Scanners going with increasingly unnecessary sequels for decades.

"The Lady Who Sailed The Soul"
About Helen America, the first woman to pilot a sleeper ship through space, and her strange love story. Pretty sweet.

"When the People Fell"
Despite giving its (great) title to the collection and some strong imagery, this one doesn't have a lot to offer for some reason. As close to perfunctory as Smith's stories come.

"Think Blue, Count Two"
One of those stories that makes you hate yourself for being a human being, but in a good way. A girl who has the right personality to make anyone think she's their daughter is guarded by a telepathic mouse brain in a plastic cube.

"The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All"
This one is all right again. It gets a little goofy, but I didn't mind too much.

"The Game of Rat and Dragon"
In the future, the only way for ships in deep space to protect themselves against telepathic mind-destroying dragons is to link human telepaths to cats who fly football-sized spaceships that launch light bombs.   Yup, you read that right. Another great idea done well.

"The Burning of the Brain"
Somehow, less happens in this one than you would think.

"From Gustible's Planet"
Delightfully bonkers story about a race of aliens who inadvertently rekindle humanity's carnivorous instincts. Near-genocide has never been so hilarious.

"Himself in Anachron"
A man travels through time backwards, and Smith uses this as an excuse to mess up cause and effect. I'm surprise Steven Moffat hasn't ripped this off for Doctor Who, but it's smart.

"The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal"
This one is still "so mad it has to be brilliant."  I summarized the plot to my wife and her advisor while we were driving together, but that doesn't do it justice. Much love to the turtle people who crew Suzdal's spaceship for generations while he sleeps.

"Golden the Ship Was--Oh! Oh! Oh!"
Good, but not as good as the title.

"Drunkboat"
This is pretty similar to "The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All". One is a rewritten version of the other, but I'm not sure which way it goes. Maybe it's just because I read it earlier, but "The Colonel" was better. I'm not sure why they're both counted as in-continuity, unlike the two versions of "War No. 81-Q."

"A Planet Named Shayol"
The Instrumentality's prison-planet turns out to be the most horrifying thing I could have imagined: a planet where people are infected with a cancer that makes them grow body parts that can be harvested to use as spare organs-- and they live forever. Gross, but triumphant.

"On the Gem Planet"
The first of three stories about Casher O'Neill, a man wandering the galaxy to find the resources to reclaim his home planet from his dictator uncle. In this one, he helps some people figure out what a horse is for. There's more to than you'd expect from that description, I guess.

"On the Storm Planet"
Casher O'Neill returns in one of my favorite stories in the book, a harrowing journey into a house no one ever returns from... because no one ever wants to. The twists never stop, and Casher is a great protagonist, and he gets an ever greater companion here.

"On the Sand Planet"
The resolution to the Casher stories is not everything it could have been. There are some great moments, but then he discovers a secret telepath city which doesn't have anything to do with anything as far as I could tell. There is room for dozens of Casher adventures between "Gem Planet" and "Storm Planet"; someone should write them.

"Three to a Given Star"
Three people have their minds turned into the controls of a spaceship, a giant robot, and a terrible weapon. It's epic and heartfelt.

"Down to a Sunless Sea"
This is the only story in the book where looking at the title didn't remind when what it was about. Either it was bad, it was forgettable, or I was in a hurry because the book was almost over.

There are just a few non-Instrumentality stories at the end. "Western Science Is So Wonderful," about a Martian demon who tries to join the Chinese Communist Party but moves to Connecticut instead is the best, but the only uninteresting one is the original version of "War No. 81-Q." Despite not being set in the Instrumentality, most have the same feel, and I imagine its tiny things that keep them "out" of that continuity.

When I finished this, I immediately knew I needed to read more Cordwainer Smith; he's the first new writer I've read in a long time who provoked such a reaction. An sf great whose career was tragically short.