The Rediscovery of Man

I don’t usually gravitate toward short story collections, I like a character I can sit with for a few hundred pages rather than twenty, but this one got recommended to me twice in one month by two people who otherwise don’t agree on anything, so I gave it a shot. Cordwainer Smith, it turns out, was a pen name for a man who spent his actual career in psychological warfare and East Asian studies, and once you know that the strangeness of these stories starts making a different kind of sense.

The stories span the Instrumentality of Mankind, a future history stretched across tens of thousands of years, told mostly through myth and fragment rather than a clean timeline, and the effect is genuinely disorienting in a way that mostly worked for me. One of the great opening lines in the genre shows up here, the girlygirl pitting her wits against the true men and winning, and there’s a real charge to how Smith writes his uplifted animal-people, the underpeople, without ever quite letting you settle into a comfortable read of who’s actually the more civilized party.

Not every story lands. A few of the later, stranger entries lean so hard into invented vocabulary and compressed myth-logic that I found myself rereading paragraphs just to keep the thread, and I know other readers have bounced off exactly that. But the best pieces in here, “Scanners Live in Vain,” the C’mell stories, are doing something genuinely singular that I haven’t found an equivalent for anywhere else in the genre.

My copy’s an old SF Masterworks paperback, spine already creased before it got to me, cover a little sun-faded along one edge from sitting in someone’s window for who knows how long. Feels like the right condition for a book this strange and this old to arrive in.