The Lords of the Instrumentality is a four book edition containing the science fiction novels and short stories related to the universe often called Instrumentality of Mankind. As far as I know, this is the first edition of its kind, compiling all the works by Cordwainer Smith in this magnificently imaginative and lyrical universe.
Cordwainer Smith is the pseudonym of Paul Linebarger, used exclusively for his science fiction works. He also wrote narrative novels and poetry, and several non-fiction works. He studied Political Sciences, and he also was an expert in east Asia countries, specially China, and actually worked for the USA goverment as advisor in several wars. He wrote Psychological Warfare, a text which is still considered classic in its subject.
Despite those seemingly cold facts, Smith is a very lyrical writer, using often the structures of chinese fables for his stories. This is specially obvious in many of his short stories related to the Instrumentality of Mankind. In these stories, Smith outlines the future using tremendous originality and imagination. While some of the tales almost go into the fantasy realms, it’s pure science fiction. As Arthur C. Clarke said, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. And that’s what Smith does. He doesn’t drown into technobabble and details, it’s not hard science fiction.
Instead, Smith conveys the emotions of his characters in a very poetic manner, with love stories, deep passions, and peace messages. All that intertwinned into an absolutely fantastic, but at the same time, very realistic depiction of a possible future. It’s the way Smith lays subtle details and references between the stories, and how he writes the stories as if they were legends and myths of a far past, being told by someone who has heard the story a thousand times.
The delirious imagination can be compared to some of Stanislaw Lem’s most entertaining works: The Star Diaries, and The Cyberiad. But Smith’s style is quite different. Smith also encoded some of his knowledge of politics and countries in the stories. It’s easy to understand some of the metaphors and analogies, although many others are very subtle, and subject to multiple interpretations.
As I mentioned, there are four books. They’re arranged in a way that the stories are sorted more or less chronologically; although the variety of Smith’s stories sometimes makes it difficult to know where a story goes, or even if it’s related to the Instrumentality of Mankind. The first book, Think Blue, Count Two, contains 14 short stories. Smith’s works were mainly short stories, and three out of all four books are composed solely of short stories.
From this first book, I’d remark the one which gives the name to the book. And another, which is one of Smith’s most famous stories, Scanners Live In Vain. Explaining the argument of any of these stories would be quite complex; Smith’s stories don’t admit much reduction. You could just say that scanners are some kind of robotized space navigators, and that in the story, one of them tries to make them obsolete. For anyone who has read the story, it’s painfully inexact, although true. Smith’s stories are so detailed and variated (but not complex at all) that trying to reduce them to a mere argument is a quite futile work.
Althought I’ve only mentioned two stories, all of them are noteworthy. The whole book tells a vague story about what happened to the humankind after the last nuclear war, the return of the Vomact sisters to a world inhabited by animals who can talk, the scanners and first space travels, and several stories framed in this universe, although telling very little details of it. One of these stories is The Crime and Glory of Commander Suzdal, which is one of my all-time favourite science fiction short stories. In it, the punishment planet Shayol is mentioned, but it wasn’t until I was able to read a small anthology of Cordwainer Smith some years ago that I could learn about Shayol.
In the second book, The Dead Lady of Clown Town, we get to know more details of the Underpeople, animals genetically modified into talking antromorphical “almost-human”. This book is again a collection of 8 short stories. The Instrumentality, managing the destiny of the humanity, has given a safe but tame life to every human. It’s a sterile happiness. The underpeople, treated like properties or machinery (not even as slaves), starts to emerge as a power of its own, serving and helping the humanity, but also seeking for their own rights. The humanity tries to escape from his fatalist eternal happiness through The Rediscovery of Man, and we get to know a bit about Norstrilia (the only planet where the life-elongating drug stroon is produced) and some of the most famous and influential Lords and Ladies of the Instrumentality.
From this book I’d mention Under Old Earth as the epytome of Smith’s imagination, in an almost surrealist way, and The Ballad of Lost G’Mell, a lyrical love story with G’Mell, who will later appear in the second part of Norstrilia. G’Mell is probably one of the most gorgeous and appealing heroines ever written about; and furry lovers should stop reading bad comics and cheap porno stories and read some Cordwainer to know some furry heroines (G’Mell is a cat subperson).
All in all, both books contain twenty stories, ranging from “it’s very good” to “unbelievably great”. The sheer amount of imaginative descriptions and details will drown you in a sensitive and cruel future of mankind, always changing and never boring. I really recommend these books to any science fiction reader, as something basic in the science fiction history.
I’ll dedicate a new article to the next book in the series, The Lords of the Instrumentality III: Norstrilia.
Norstrilia - The Lords of the Instrumentality (III) »« Elige or Elije?
