The Best of Cordwainer Smith

Cordwainer Smith/Dr. Paul Linebarger was an undoubted genius of science fiction, a visionary writer who plotted out over 15,000 years of radical history under the rule of the Instrumentality, by turns technocratic elites, corrupt and decadent overlords, and deeply moral saviors. His stories touch on love, pain, and the almost-human lives of the underpeople, animals turned into slaves so that true humans may live a life of leisure and near immortality.

Some of the stories are breathtaking masterpieces: “Scanners Live in Vain”, “The Game of Rat and Dragon”, The Crime and Glory of Commander Suzdal”, and “Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons” are all first-rank pieces of short fiction. The thing is that the rest of the stories, many of them longer, leave me rather cold, as they wander through Smith’s meditations on morality and the human condition and experimentation with non-Western styles. But the four stories I mentioned are brilliant torches. Read them.