Honestly, I like the short stories better, but this novel had a lot of charm. Very sixties sentimentality, mixed with the man who sold the world kind of ideas, and yet, it fit perfectly with the extended future histories that made his writings really special. ( )

Although it does occasionally show some signs of age, this book is set so far in the future that hardly matters. Apart from that, it is so lyrical in its tone that you hardly care about the fairly limited plot, if you look at it from a completely objective point of view. Cordwainer Smith is another 'forgotten' writer from the early sixties, though this mainly because he was not primarily a writer but, as Paul Linebarger, spent much of his time in the far east in various posts interacting with the Korean and Chinese governments. Norstrilia is his only novel but the Instrumentality of Man provides the background to quite a few short stories (some of which are collected in 'The Rediscovery of Man) and it's Linebarger's Far Eastern experience that informed that background. ( )

http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2013/10/09/cordwainer-smiths-norstrilia/

Cordwainer Smith was a pseudonym of US author Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, who under his own name was Sun Yat Sen’s godson, an expert in psychological warfare and an adviser to the US military in a number of combats up to but not including Vietnam. He wrote quite a lot of science fiction of which this is his only novel, but many if not all of his short stories and novellas are set in the same universe as Norstrilia – and they leave tantalising traces in the narrative here, such as a number of references to the much feared but never explained Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons, or the likewise never explained ‘underhuman’ saint D’joan.

‘Norstrilia’ is a corruption of ‘North Australia’: the story begins and ends on the planet of Old North Australia 15 thousand or more years from now. The Norstrilians are fabulously rich but deliberately simple people, presumably based on the impressions Australians made on Linebarger when he spent six months in Canberra in the 1950s. The Norstrilians’ wealth comes from giant sheep, not from wool but from the by-product of a sickness that has infected all the flocks … The book is very funny, and full of bizarre inventions – such as a lethal sparrow the size of a football, or beings known as underhumans who are basically animals genetically engineered to have human intelligence and other qualities, or the more or less self-explanatory Department Store of Heart’s Desires, or a future Earth where illness and enmity have had to be artificially reinvented to stop humans from going extinct from boredom. Some of the inventions are of the ooh-he-thought-of-that-in-1964 variety (the novel was first published as two separate stories in the 1960s). There are computer networks, videophones and CCTV. There’s cheerful female-to-male transition (anatomical details passed over in discreet silence). The plot hinges on spectacular manipulation of the global financial markets, though as this is fantasy there is no crash. There’s a totally gorgeous cat underhuman, named (according to the internets) after Linebarger’s own cat. At one point the hero has to restrain himself from running to kiss his computer – a moment imagined 40 years before the iPhone was invented. And there’s a revolutionary movement motivated, almost certainly without deliberate reference to Che, by love both for the oppressed and the oppressor.

It’s a rollicking read, rarely a dull moment, that reminds me of why I love genre fiction. ( )

An odd coming of age story of sorts. It reads like a transitional form between Arthur Clarke and Ursula Le Guin. ( )

Cordwainer Smith (not his real name is an interesting author writing in the sci-fi genre. He wrote a series of short stories and Norstrilia his only novel. When he was not writing sci-fi he was a member of the Foreign Policy association and professor of Asiatic Politics at John Hopkins University. he is well thought of in the sci- fi fraternity with his short stories and Nostrilia both considered as classics in the field.

He had a fantastic imagination and his stories mostly written in the late 1950's and early 1960's are a delight. No hard science here just pure 50's sci-fi, mostly well written and featuring a cast of brilliant characters. For those that are familiar with the short stories then this novel which is set in the distant future will provide another good read. The Lords of the Instrumentality, C'mell the girlygirl catwoman. the go-captains, Mother Hittons Littul Kittons (a defence system) and the underpeople all feature. What more do you want? ( )