he distant planet Norstrilia—Old North Australia—is a peaceful, rather primitive world, inhabited by farmers who raise sheep. Gigantic, monstrous, diseased sheep that produce stroon—the santaclara drug—the elixir of immortality. This makes these simple farmers the wealthiest people in the universe—and the most resented.
Though he is poised to inherit all the wealth of a long-established family, the orphaned young man Rod McBan isn't like other Norstrilians. For one thing, he is emerging from his fourth childhood. He has been brainwashed back to mental babyhood three times because he cannot "hier" or "spiek"—he cannot hold a normal, everyday telepathic conversation, like everyone else on Norstrilia. However, sometimes the fog muffling his mind lifts. When this happens, his emotions blast everyone half-senseless for miles. To enter adulthood, Rod, like every Norstrilian, must survive the Garden of Death. As a telepathic cripple, he doubts he'll survive. And if he does, he'll be destroyed by the Onseck Houghton Syme. The current Onseck (ruler of Norstrilia) is a short-lived, stroon-allergic man, and a bitter enemy from a childhood Rod cannot remember.
Rod seeks the counsel of his oldest friend, the computer of the Palace of the Governor of Night. It's a forbidden, all-mechanical war-computer—the only one on the planet. It finds a way for Rod
to bankrupt Norstrilia, buy Old Earth and escape to his new possession.
Of course, it isn't that simple. Now that Rod is the richest man in the universe, virtually everyone wants to steal his wealth and/or kill him. To have a slight chance of reaching Earth, he must be dismembered by a brilliant monkey-surgeon and sneaked off Norstrilia—while his nurse, Eleanor, is turned into his exact duplicate and sent to Earth on a different, but equally dangerous, interstellar planoform ship. And if Rod does achieve Earth and reintegration, there are more dangers waiting. He doesn't understand the threat of Earth's underpeople—a vast, permanent, desperate servant-class of intelligent, humanoid animals. He doesn't know the danger of the extraordinarily beautiful (and even more extraordinarily intelligent) catwoman C'mell. And then there is the Instrumentality of Mankind—the secretive, subtle and powerful government of Earth. Its Lords and Ladies have reintroduced disease, discord and death to Earth. And they have no reason to like the man who has bought the homeworld of humanity.
A visionary with prose like poetry
Many readers who've taken up SF since the 1970s haven't heard of Cordwainer Smith, which is a colossal shame. Smith is one of science fiction's most lyrical and most influential authors, and
indisputably its most imaginative. Nobody wrote like Smith. Nobody thought like Smith. Nobody even titled like Smith! Newcomers would never guess from the plain one-word Norstrilia (Nor-STRILE-ya) that Smith often crafted poetic titles: "The Lady Who Sailed The Soul," "When the People Fell," "The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All," "Golden the Ship Was—Oh! Oh! Oh!" His names and terms are equally evocative: the Lord Redlady and the Lady Panc Ashash, the Moho and the Rediscovery of Man, the pinlighters and the planoform ships, the Go-Captains and the Stop-Captains, the Manshonyaggers and Waterrocky Road. ... Like the bare plot outline of Norstrilia, this random grab bag of terms hardly suggests the rich, fantastic complexity of Cordwainer Smith's millennia-spanning "Instrumentality of Mankind" future history.
A brief biographical sketch: Cordwainer Smith had the typical variegated life/"checkered past" of a writer—only more so. Raised in China, Japan, Germany and France, Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger
(1913-1966) was the godson of pre-Communist Chinese leader Sun Yat Sen, who gave him the name Lin Bah Loh, "Forest of Incandescent Bliss." Dr. Linebarger wrote the book on psychological warfare—literally. He wrote Psychological Warfare (1948). A professor of Asiatic politics at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, he was also a speechwriter/ghostwriter for such political figures as Dwight D. Eisenhower. He traveled the world, frequently carrying out "assignments" for the CIA and U.S. Army Intelligence. Under a variety of pseudonyms, he wrote mainstream and suspense novels. Under the name Cordwainer Smith, he wrote over two dozen SF stories, mostly in his Instrumentality of Mankind future history, and a single SF novel (another Instrumentality story), Norstrilia.
Norstrilia is not Smith's strongest work. His SF forte is the short story, and in this form he wrote several classics, among them "Scanners Live in Vain," "The Game of Rat and Dragon" and "The Dead Lady of Clown Town." Norstrilia does not have the tautness of his short fiction. It is episodic, and sometimes not sufficiently developed (the section with the Catmaster is especially rushed). However, Norstrilia is a vital work in the development of SF and an indispensable section of the Instrumentality of Mankind series, as well as a good novel.
