Norstrilia

4/5

An absolute acid trip of a book. Cordwainer Smith packs the pages so full with fantastical, fun, and outlandish ideas that I have a hard time understanding how he made it fit into the svelte 275 page size. Every ten to twenty pages, Smith hits you with something new and wacky, that takes you the next ten to twenty pages just to absorb and half understand. Invisible palaces, massive sick sheep that produce an immortality drug, animal-human hybrids that act as servants for mankind, dehydrated space travel, bird assassins, and bird gods. If you can believe it, all of these ideas are used to explore wealth, and it's impacts on society. How does wealth and power corrupt the individual? Can society function when individuals are free from show more any adversity? What role does mutual hardship play in our lives?

I think if this book has a major flaw, it's that there's simply too much to tie together. It feels a little clumsy at points, as Smith tries his best to make sense of it all. I've heard that most of his short stories are set in this same universe, and precede the events in Norstrilia. I'm looking forward to diving into some of those other works, and then giving Norstrilia a re-read, which should give me way more perspective.

Even so, I highly recommend this one. I've never read anything like it, and I suspect I won't ever.

*Re-Read Update 2026*

I'm pleasantly surprised with how well Smith's imaginative world has held up against the many titles that I've read over the years. I think that some of my critiques about its clumsiness are warranted, though I think that most of that is due to its format; that being short stories tied up both into a novel and into a broader universe. There are many references to things that go completely unexplained, which I'm sure are explored more in his many other short stories. I'll wait to read Norstrilia again until after I have the broader context of the Instrumentality under my belt. Still, this was loads of fun to dive back into, and I'm maintaining the score I gave it initially. show less

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 show more 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 his collected short fiction in The Rediscovery of Man time and again. show less

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 show more 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. show less

This is the only full length novel published by Smith, and after reading this you can understand why. As a full length novel Norstrilia is only marginally successful. It's more a series of related short vignettes, that move along in jumps and starts (indeed two were previously published as short stories). There is little sense of structure (although the very ending brings us back to where we started, providing a rather effective as a denoument). The dialogue tends to be stilted, and the descriptive prose is nothing to write home about. So why read it? Smith is an amazingly inventive author, who describes myth-making galaxy changing events that no other author could have conceived. Norstrilia, like virtually all of Smith's fiction, is show more part of the "Instrumentality of Mankind" storyline, recounting important actions by characters who play key roles in the evolution of that fascinating tale of our future. show less

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.

Obviously I'm a fan of Cordwainer Smith, though I as mentioned, his longer works left me cold. Nostrilia is the keystone in the Rediscovery of Man arc, 15000 years in the future when the Lords of the Instrumentality return Old Old Earth to danger and vice, and the Underpeople (animals made to look like humans) rise to join the community of sentient beings in their own way. This book is almost indescribably strange, a picaresque romp through the dark of Jungian soul, and the heights of human ambition.

Cordwainer Smith writes like no one else, and that's one of the biggest compliments that I can give him. His stories, set in the far future, create a time that is so distant most of us simply can't imagine it. Norstrillia is his one novel, a sparkling gem of one. The planet is well known to readers of his stories, as it holds the sick sheep that provide the key to immortality. The theme of rejecting this is not an uncommon one, but another result of it, the embrace of dead cultures, is not. The actual story of the novel is about a man from the planet who wins Earth in a contest, and goes there to find the struggle there that leads to the rediscovery of man, including the underpeople, who are manipulated animals. (I must admit here I show more have never been sure of exactly how the underpeople look - do they have the apperance of humans despite being animals, or are they some combination?) This idea is also one that has been used before, but these underpeople are not a "genetic manipulation is bad" symbol or a source of humor. It is impossible to show what the book manages to do in this review. But if you read it, you will find yourself unable to resist his other work. And you will be glad you gave in. show less