Ματαίως ζουν οι Σαρωτές

by Cordwainer Smith

Μεγαλωμένος στην Κίνα από Αμερικανούς γονείς ο Κορντγουέινερ Σμιθ στάθηκε μια από τις πιο μυστηριώδεις προσωπικότητες στο χώρο της Ε.Φ., αφού η πραγματική του ταυτότητα αποκαλύφθηκε μόνο μετά το θάνατό του.
Στο έργο του κατόρθωσε να συνδυάσει δημιουργικά τη φιλοσοφία των δύο πολιτισμών που τον ανέθρεψαν, πλάθοντας ένα προφητικό έπος για το Μέλλον του ανθρώπινου είδους: όλα τα διηγήματά του, αν και αυτοτελή και αυτόνομα, απαρτίζουν ένα μωσαϊκό γεγονότων που εκτείνεται από το 2000 μ.Χ. ώς το 16000 μ.Χ.
Χάρη στην εκπληκτική άνεσή του να χειρίζεται το μεγαλειώδες και το ανθρώπινο, ο Κορντγουέινερ Σμιθ θεωρείται μια από τις πιο γοητευτικές μορφές της Ε.Φ., ένας από τους πιο αυθεντικούς συγγραφείς της.
Περιέχει τα διηγήματα:
-Ματαίως Ζουν οι Σαρωτές (Scanners Live In Vain)
-Το Παιχνίδι του Ποντικού και του Δράκοντα (The Game of Rat and Dragon)
-Η Μπαλάντα της Χαμένης Γ'μελλ (The Balland of Lost C'mell)

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Short Stories, Audiobook, Space Opera, Novella, Cyberpunk

127 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1950

About the author

Pseudonym of:
Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger

Linebarger also employed the literary pseudonyms "Carmichael Smith" (for his political thriller Atomsk), "Anthony Bearden" (for his poetry) and "Felix C. Forrest" (for the novels Ria and Carola).

Linebarger was also a noted East Asia scholar and expert in psychological warfare.

Reviews

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Among Smith's very best, dropping you straight into a far future full of bizarre and wholly original terms and concepts with an absolute minimum of exposition and the creativity dial set to eleven. You can't read this and *not* want to know more about the fascinating universe he gives such a tantalizing glimpse of.

[Richard Derus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating: 3.5* of five

Prescient, and a little unnerving, was Cordwainer Smith. This tale makes the Earths, spread over the galaxy, accessible to each other only via the dead habermans...criminals, dregs of society, expiating their sins by being murdered, diced into bits, and reassembled so that they can operate the ships connecting the Earths since they can't feel the Great Pain.

Or, as we'd call it today, interstellar radiation.

We really can't get too far from home because of the Great Pain of cosmic rays, gamma-ray bursts, etc etc etc. And I'm not altogether easy in my mind that someone, somewhere, isn't right now designing habermans.

Dark and disturbing and almost 70 years old, this story remains timely, reminding us that every goal has a pricetag, and every price must be carefully calculated against its cost.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

5.0 stars. Classic short story set in the universe of the Instrumentality of Mankind. Set around 6000 A.D., interstellar travel has been discovered to cause great pain and suicidal tendencies in people. This problem was resolved by having passengers travel stored in cold sleep, while the crew of the spaceship is composed of Habermans: convicts and criminals who have undergone medical mutilation to have the brain severed from all sensory input except the eyes. This procedure allows them to travel in space but also completely alienates them from society.

The Habermans are supervised in space by Scanners, who have voluntarily agreed to undergo the same medical mutilation and are respected by all of society for their sacrifice and their role in uniting mankind through space travel. The Scanners lives are difficult and very lonely and their only joy comes from "cranching" — brief intervals where they use a device that temporarily restores normal brain connectivity.

The story itself involves the apparent discovery of a new method of space travel that will eliminate the need for scanners and habermans and make space travel available to everyone and the reaction of the Confraternity of Scanners to that discovery. A well-written and hugely original science fiction short story.

[David Sven · Rating 3 out of 5]

Listened to this on the SFF Audio podcast www.sffaudio.com - The book was around an hour and a half and then the discussion was on the next podcast. As is often the case, I enjoyed the discussion more than the book itself.

Firstly, if you are going to bother listening to this, do yourself a favour and don't read the goodreads blurb - half the fun of the book is trying to figure out what's going on and the blurb will just go ahead and spoil stuff - and some of the stuff is open to interpretation anyway.

This was written in 1945 and published in 1950. So it was cool to see how someone from that era perceived the problems of space flight and what solution they come with. That's about as much as I can say I think without ruining the story. Worth a listen especially if you include the podcast discussion.


3 stars

[Paul Ataua · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good short story, but one that you have to work at to understand. Set in 6000AD when interstellar travel leads to the death wish and therefore needs Habermans, like convicts, and the supervisory Scanners to fly the ships while the humans are kept in ‘cold sleep’. And so the complicated story begins with Martel the scanner, who is different from the others because he is married to a normal woman, decides to ‘cranch’. Worth the read, but one that requires concentration.

[Gnarly Authenticity . · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the building blocks of my psyche.

[Mack · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the greatest and most unusual sci-fi stories ever.

[Ivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome story! Very entertaining

[987643467881 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like most good short stories, I think this one is open to quite a few interpretations. My own personal take on it is that it's specifically an allegory for someone dealing with depersonalization and derealization disorders, and more generally about alienation on a mass scale – from ourselves (both physically and emotionally), from the people close to us, from society, from nature, from reality itself...? It was an uncomfortable read, but a meaningful one.
It took me a while to work out what I found so uncomfortable about the story; it wasn't until I asked myself why it was that the scanners lived in vain that it came to me:

Detached scanners (essentially humans who have been turned into robots) can handle the pain of infinite unknown, and yet they are detached from both the pleasures and pains of the human condition/existence.
Normal “others” cannot handle the pains and uncertainties of the infinite unknown (or even the complexities of the information that can be found out and made known) and so naively/blindly navigate through it with the help of scanners, only knowing as much as they can handle, and just enough to allow them to still enjoy the human experience.
That is, until someone discovers a way for normal humans to go out into the unknown space without succumbing to the pain of the unknown – being surrounded by “life”/nature apparently makes the pain more bearable.

So, in my interpretation, scanners live in vain because there was no need to go to such extreme lengths to dehumanize their existence and to turn their lives into such cold and mechanical ones in order to get their job done for some dubious grand purpose – in the end there is a more humane/natural way to get achieve it. (Perhaps there is also the question of whether there actually is any grand purpose that justifies the loss of humanity?)

Although I enjoyed the story, the end is a bit too optimistic for me: it implies that, with the right antidote, it's simple enough to regain lost humanity on a grand/societal scale, and on a more personal level, to rid oneself of their disasosiative disorders. Despite this optimism however, the final aspect of the story, which is perhaps its most memorable one for me, is that although it turns out to be quite quick and easy to turn a human into a scanner and a scanner back into a human, its definitely more complicated and costly (not just in terms of psychological/emotional/mental resources, but also economic ones) for a human to do the job of a scanner without turning into one (to some extent at least).

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is a human? Remove all connection to the physicality of the experience and what have you in the place of a being? This is at the root of what it means to be a scanner in this tale. Rich in its layers, the work explores the limitations of people when they are denied experiences that seem human - eating, smelling, feeling, and more. And yet, there’s more - the story richly pulls concepts of what does it mean to be obsolete? What does it mean to stand for progress at the expense of one’s being?

A tale made timeless by its innate showing of being as much a study of human values and thought as it is a work of speculative fiction, this story leaves one wondering and perhaps realizing if any one who engages in any form of living could live in vain. It felt like a reasonable reading alongside Brave New World as both deal with removing one’s self from society - and while both works readily demonstrate this in a varied manner, it is worth noting that both of them question who is the most human - the human or the “scanner” and the human or the “savage.”

This short work also manages to consider the inhumanity of bureaucracy, of consistency, and so forth. The author readily weaves many analytical threads that seem to only make the work deeper with age and while the descriptions may seem at times aged, the morality and humanity of the work seems immortal in examining what it is to live and have purpose.

[Simon Esmond · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very strange story. I was moved by the sacrifice that a Scanner makers to become a Scanner; the selflessness necessary.

[Rob Hopwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scanners Live in Vain by Cordwainer Smith


Scanners Live in Vain is a short story published by Cordwainer Smith in 1950, and it is considered a seminal work of science fiction. It was finished in 1945, but did not find a publisher until five years later, partly because its content was considered “too extreme”.

It was fortuitous that the story came to be noticed at all, since it was published in a science fiction magazine with a very low circulation (Fantasy Book). However, that publication happened to carry a piece of work by the more well-known author Frederik Pohl, who read Smith's story and recommended it to others. After a hiatus of about five years, Smith began to write other stories set in the same universe (The Game of Rat and Dragon in 1955, and Mark Elf in 1957), including some which provide the backstory to this one.

The narrative begins abruptly by throwing a series of unexplained terms at the reader, stimulating curiosity about what could be going on, although quite a lot can be deduced from the context.

The story is set in a distant future in which space travel has become commonplace (circa AD6000 according to the Concordance to Cordwainer Smith). The protagonist at one point states that he was (born in?) the 182nd Year of Space, which presumably refers to the Second Age of Space if we take the whole Instrumentality chronology into account.

Nevertheless, space travel is fatal to humans if they do not hibernate for the duration of long flights due to something called the "Great Pain". A special group of people is therefore created through a process of physical modification, and these individuals are able to stand the pain of traveling in a conscious state through deep space. The cost of this modification, however, is the loss of all human senses (apart from sight), and instruments attached to the body must be continuously monitored by their users to "scan" both basic physical functions and everything in the environment around them instead of feeling these things naturally. Most of these modified humans are criminals (habermans) who have been forcibly drafted into service, but the Scanners who oversee them on space flights have made the sacrifice voluntarily (habermans by choice) and are therefore held in the highest esteem within society. Only through a special process called "cranching" can Scanners temporarily experience their human senses and emotions again, and this cannot be done too often or for too long without adverse effects.

Next to the members of the Instrumentality, the Scanners enjoy the highest position in society, and would only feel threatened if a discovery were to come to light that might render their role obsolete. They do not consider such a scenario very likely, but if it were to occur would they all agree on what should be done about it?

The Concordance suggests a reason why the author may have chosen the word “haberman”, but the explanation seems to conflate at least two different explanations of the origin of the German term “Haberfeldtreiben”. According to the German version of Wikipedia, the Haberfeldtreiben were informal “tribunals” organized by the local members of agricultural communities in Bavaria to shame persons were deemed to have acted wrongly but whose behavior was not punishable by law. The people involved would disguise themselves so as not to be recognized and surround the home of the “wrongdoer”. They would then proclaim that they were meting out punishment in the name of Emperor Charlemagne, and proceed very loudly to read out poetry and sing songs which mocked the victim and generally to make a racket (often in the night) which drew the attention of all local residents to the “crime” of the person accused. Haberfeld itself means “oat field”, and some commentators believe that “fallen maidens” were forced to run through the crops while being mocked and possibly whiplashed. The heyday of the practice seems to have been during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it was formally banned in 1922. The same article points out that one scholar has counted twenty different possible explanations for the origins of the term Haberfeldtreiben, and now it is not possible to say which one is most accurate. A key point which the Concordance brings out which seems to prove that Cordwainer Smith at least had this practice in mind is the fact that the grandfather of Charlemagne was Charles Martel, and Martel is the name of the protagonist in this story. Of course, there is a logical problem in that the habermen of the Haberfeldtreiben were the persecutors, whereas the habermans in Scanners Live in Vain are the criminals, described in the story as “the scum of Mankind. Habermans are the weak, the cruel, the credulous, and the unfit. Habermans are the sentenced-to-more-than-death.” But this should not worry us too much, since the author probably took the name from an assortment of ideas in his head and was not seeking to be strictly logical in this etymological detail. The Martel link seems to me a pretty conclusive indication that Smith was thinking about the abovementioned tradition. The Concordance also states that “A possible alternative or additional meaning is from halb (German) = half: halfman?”

Vomact the Senior Scanner naturally reminds us of the Vom Acht family mentioned in Mark Elf (1957) and The Queen of the Afternoon (1978). In the latter story, Carlotta Vom Acht is already known by the title of The Vomact, and her sister Juli succeeds her in his position. Scanners Live in Vain states that Senior Scanner Vomact “was said to be a descendant of some Ancient Lady who had traversed, in an illegitimate and inexplicable fashion, some hundreds of years of time in a single night. Her name, the Lady Vomact, had passed into legend; but her blood and her archaic lust for mastery lived on in the mute masterful body of her descendant.” The Lady Vomact in question is generally supposed to be Juli Vom Acht of The Queen of the Afternoon.

Chang is one of the Scanner colleagues of Martel. The narrative relates: “It’s strange, thought Martel, that more Chinese don’t become Scanners. Or not so strange, perhaps, if you think that they never fill their quota of habermans. Chinese love good living too much. The ones who do scan are all good ones.” It thus seems that certain Chinese cultural traits have survived into AD6000. One obvious reason why Chinese men may not be eager to become Scanners relates to the importance of producing heirs and continuing the family line in Chinese society. Martel is unusual among Scanners in that he is married, and Vomact describes Martel’s marriage as a “brave experiment”. Even so, with only a few days in a “cranched” state each year, he would likely have difficulty producing children. Furthermore, the traditional Chinese culture seems to foster a practical turn of mind which may promote “good living”. Of course, by AD6000 Chinese people may have acquired more of a taste for luxury, but at present they are known the whole world over for being industrious and realistic. This is not to say that Chinese people do not ever act for purely altruistic reasons, but it does mean that they tend to avoid extremes which are unlikely to bring commensurate benefits. As a person who has been living in Taiwan for decades, I observe that certain behaviors which are major problems in the UK hardly exist here at all. Among these is the wanton vandalism of public facilities. The people I have asked about this in Taiwan seem rather nonplussed at the question being asked at all. They reply that why would someone want to waste their time and energy wrecking something for no reason. First of all, there is the risk of getting caught and being punished by the authorities, and secondly the offender gains no benefits from the act even if he or she is not apprehended. This is a very logical and practical way of thinking. Thus, Martel discerns that although not many Chinese people become Scanners, those who do are good ones.

I think that the meaning of the title “Scanners Live in Vain” may have more than one connotation. Most Scanners believe that only by becoming obsolete would their sacrifice and lives have been in vain. This is the more overt meaning which is very obvious in the story. But at the same time, much of the narrative, including the finale, revolves around Martel’s desire for normality and a closer relationship with his wife. It is therefore evident that Martel feels that Scanners live in vain because they miss out on the kinds of human experiences which create a sense of meaning in the existence of most people.

This short work showcases Cordwainer Smith's vision in several areas, for example in his idea of how a futuristic government and society may operate, the influence new technology may have upon human psychology, and the advantages and disadvantages of physical modification. Of course, a major factor which makes it relevant to the reader is that it, like many other notable works of science fiction, probes the central and fundamental question of what it means to be human.

[Pontus Doverstav · Rating 4 out of 5]

Throws you into the deep end with a lot of terminology at the start, not enough to have you entirely confused, but it waits a bit before explaining it all. Though short in length, the world feels fleshed out enough, and most of the pressing questions are answered.

While the ending seems happy at the surface, I don't think it's entirely so. How will the confraternity of Scanners fare in this new world order? How will each individual Scanner handle the return to normal life? Will Martel face any repercussions from his fellow Scanners as they all must know that he killed Parizianski?

My biggest gripe would be the way the Scanners and all related concepts are explained - as part of the confraternity of Scanners meeting ritual, they go through the history of the Scanners and their duties, which helpfully explains it all to the reader. It works as an info dump I guess, but it didn't feel entirely natural.

[Ryan Dash · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. The story was confusing at first; it is intended to be figured out as it goes along. Overall, the idea was solid and the plot did it justice. The novelette's biggest flaw is that the committee meeting, which is the meat of the story, was too long for what it needed to do.

[Nicolas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Premier des tomes de la nouvelle édition(1) des Seigneurs de l’Instrumentalité, ce recueil de nouvelles (on pourrait presque dire fix-up) nous dresse un portrait du futur proprement fascinant : partant de la guerre froide, les différentes nouvelles détaillent les étapes qui permettront à l’humanité de se libérer des chaînes de la mortalité, du système solaire, et peut-être même celles de sa propre humanité...
Ce qui est, dès le départ, très intéressant, dans ce récit, c’est qu’à chaque fois l’auteur prend le parti de désorienter son lecteur. Ainsi, la toute première nouvelle nous présente des russes proprement héroïques, travaillant véritablement pour le bien du prolétariat, alors que leur invention, capable de contrôler et de dominer les esprits, semble tout à fait machiavélique dans ses principes et ses buts. De la même manière, il est très difficile, je trouve, de percevoir l’héroïsme dont font preuve les sondeurs qui donnent leur nom à ce recueil, quand bien même on en comprend en partie la cause. J’ai pour ma part énormément apprécié cette désorientation, provenant aussi bien de l’univers développé (entre les sous-êtres, les robots, les humains véritables et autres créatures étranges, on a parfois bien du mal à s’y retrouver) que des récits proposés (de très belles et très poignantes histoires de couples, de cruelles mésaventures arrivant parfois aux plus malchanceux, quelques beaux moments de bravoure pouvant montrer les chats sous un jour honorable), et qui permet à Cordwainer Smith de donner la pleine mesure de son énorme talent. Je n’ai finallement qu’un seul bémol, concernant les deux dernières nouvelles qui, si elles offrent une intéressante ouverture vers des problèmes éthiques (un robot est-il un humain ?) ne m’en semblent pas moins un peu inférieures, ou tout au moins très différentes du ton donné durant tout ce recueil. Au final, ce premier tome est à mon sens (et j’ai bien l’impression que c’est partagé, au vu des réactions lors de mon dernier mercredi Lillois de la SF) l’un des chefs d’oeuvre de la SF, par la sensibilité et le goût de l’anticipation qu’il montre. En tant que tel, il est une lecture indispensable à tout lecteur du genre.

(1) J’avais en effet un souvenir fort ancien d’une édition, parue chez Pocket, en trois tomes de ces mêmes Seigneurs de l’Instrumentalité. Pourtant, il semble que la nouvelle édition soit bien mieux fournie, dispose également d’une traduction revue, bref, soit mieux.

[Pamela · Rating 5 out of 5]

My intro to Cordwainer Smith (love the pseudonym!), and what an intro! Fascinating, fun, different, and a bit of workout to get a grip on what is going on, where, and with whom. That's welcome; I'm tired of reading a certain type of literary style...

What fun, and want to read more by this author. His bio, by the way, is filled with surprises: "Smith" had a PhD in East Asian Studies, served in the military, was considered an expert in psychological warfare (yikes), and was a godson to Sun Yat-Sen.

Yes, you just read that last clause.

The man himself was evidently as much of a tangle as his characters. Enjoy!

[A.N.G. Reynolds · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been hemming and hawing between 4 and 5 stars *simply* because I felt the climax/ending was entirely too rushed. I wanted the conflict to last a little longer and the wrap-up to be a little more fleshed out.

I think I'll stick with 5 stars because, despite this, I really enjoyed Smith's wildly imaginative future and fascinating moral and ethical dilemmas.

[Jason · Rating 1 out of 5]

Super fucking weird. I don’t recommend.

[Adhémar D'Umbrava · Rating 4 out of 5]

J'aime pas trop la SF. Mais comment ne pas aimer des histoires si humaines de gens tellement loin de nous ?

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just phenomenal.

[Ben Redding Cooper · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s amazing to me that this story is now 80 years old. Incredibly far ahead of its time in many ways, great world building in a short span.

[Reet · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got this book from the library, the rediscovery of man, just so that I could read the short story scanners live in vain.

Scanners Live in Vain, 2stars
About a fraternity of men who are turned into instruments, and are called Scanners, where their brains are disconnected from their lungs, their heart, etc. So that they can go out into space with humans that are in deep freeze, and they can assure that the pilots remain alert and healthy. They can't be hurt by the vacuum and cold of space.

" he had pledged.
he had gone into the Haberman device.
He remembered his hell. He had not had such a bad one, even though it had seemed to last 100 million years, all of them without sleep. He had learned to feel with his eyes. He had learned to see despite the heavy eyeplates set back of his eyeballs to insulate his eyes from the rest of him. He had learned to watch his skin. He still remembered the time he had noticed dampness on his shirt, and had pulled out his scanning mirror only to discover that he had worn a hole in his side by leaning against the vibrating machine.( a thing like that could not happen to him now; he was too Adept at reading his own instruments. ) he remembered the way that he had gone up and out, and the way that the great pain beat into him, despite the fact that his touch, smell, feeling, and hearing were gone for all ordinary purposes. He remembered killing habermans, and keeping others alive, and standing for months beside the honorable scanner-pilot while neither of them slept. He remembered going ashore on Earth four, and remember that he had not enjoyed it, and had realized on that day that there was no reward."
This story uses animals to protect humans in space. So I didn't like it.
" 'tell me, darling! Tell me, or I'll eat you up!'
'That's just right!'
'what?'
'you're right. It should make you want to eat me. It's meat.'
'meat. Who?'
'not a person,' said she, knowledgeably, 'a beast. A beast which people used to eat. A lamb was a small sheep - you've seen sheep out in the wild, haven't you? - and a chop is part of its middle - here!' she pointed at her chest."
🙄
There is a man named Adam Stone, who invents a way to go into space without using habermans and scanners. The scanners vote to kill him, so that they don't lose their jobs. The protagonist, martel, decides he will try to save his life. So he goes to his place and tells him what the scanners have decided.
" 'quick, can you tell me how you have done it, so that I may believe you?'
'I have loaded ships with life.'
'life?'
'Life. I don't know what the great pain is, but I did find that in the experiments, when I sent out masses of animals or plants, the life in the center of the mass lived longest. I built ships - small ones, of course - and sent them out with rabbits, with monkeys - '
'those are Beasts?'
'yes. With small beasts. And the beasts came back unhurt. They came back because the walls of the ships were filled with life. I tried many kinds, and finally found a sort of Life which lives in the waters. Oysters. Oyster beds. The outermost oysters died in the great pain. The inner ones lived. The passengers were unhurt.'
'but they were beasts?'
'not only beasts. Myself.'
'you!'
'I came through space alone. Through what you call the up and out, alone. Awake and sleeping. I am unhurt. If you do not believe me, ask your brother scanners. Come and see my ship in the morning. I will be glad to see you then, along with your brother scanners. I am going to demonstrate before the chiefs of the instrumentality.' "

[Carmen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like to read Goodreads reviews to get a sense of other peoples' takes. I don't see a lot of responses like the one I had, so I will offer my interpretation.
This short story is squarely about "What does it mean to be human?" CS frames his question well, and then delivers, mostly.
Scanners have been intentionally deadened in order to allow humans to travel in space. They are a kind of sacrifice so that humans can reach the heavens, as it were. In turn, they are treated with great deference. But their lives can hardly be called lives at all. Maybe this is how post-WWII American men felt about returning to boring office jobs and supporting families? (Hey fellas, the women don't like the setup either.)
CS demonstrates great skill in imagining and portraying the sensoria of these men living in dead bodies, and the effect they have on others. The atmosphere is both creepy and moving. While reading it I imagined actors having a great time with this premise. Think Edward Scissor-Hands.

The center of this story is a threat to the Scanners and their brotherhood. A man has come up with a technological solution that will make Scanners obsolete. Their sacrifice will have been in vain, just as the title warns us. Tellingly, a majority of the Scanners votes to kill the inventor. This rather brilliantly constructed parable of the human condition reminded me of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov. I rushed to see how CS would end it. Alas, I don't think he knew how. I had to take a star off for the happy ending; it was out of character with the rest of the story and quite jarring, like discovering an inch of velveeta under your perfectly prepared filet of sole.

[Raymond V. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Possibly my favorite sci-fi novel of all time. The ideas suggested in this novel had me completely entranced in my 20s and allowed me to see the universe and human history, past and future, in a different light. The whole Instrumentality of Man universe is just so fascinating and feels so real. He doesn't explain anything, he just drops you in the middle of a complete, fleshed out world with human history spanning tens of thousands of years. What's even more interesting to me is knowing that he was a man that had a lot of pertinent knowledge about what was possible and what was already real, that the average person doesn't have access to. He had military intelligence ties and was possibly the highest authority on psychological warfare, who literally wrote the textbook on it that was used by militaries all over the world for years. I appreciate how many of his ideas which seemed totally farfetched when he wrote them, such as the cross-species gene splicing, animal hybrids, etc. that comprise the slave races in the novels, are now very feasible and most likely are being developed in secret. I signed up for Goodreads just to give this novel and author five stars.

[Scott Doherty · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story is set in the far distant future, when space travel has become routine. However in order to withstand the unexplained pain of space humans are transformed into Cyborgs called scanners which render them mute from all senses and able only to see and hear.
The unexplained terms and references at the beginning was a little of putting and I was left wondering what was going on and thinking I missed something. Once this passes it all falls into place and is really rather enjoyable. Its a short story unlike any that I have read before and was enjoyable.

[Norman Cook · Rating 3 out of 5]

Originally published in Fantasy Book, Vol. 1, No. 6, January 1950. 2001 Retro Hugo Award finalist - Best Novelette

Smith throws out a lot of technobabble without much in the way of explanation, so you have to work at it to understand what's going on. Smith is working very hard to sound futuristic but eventually, most of the terms are defined. The story is a clear influence on subsequent sf writers. The idea of turning men into electromechanical servants can be seen as recently as the Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells. The only female character is no more than a plot device.

I read this story on Project Gutenberg Canada.

[Miles Isham · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read a very thin collection of Scanners Live in Vain, Game of rat and Dragon and Mark Elf published by Wildside press. Smith has a powerful theme running through these stories of deep space travel being a direct path to death or screaming insanity for a normal human that hasn't really been explored by other writers I've read. These tales are all interesting and inventive with a distinctive style. I've marked it down due to the thin content and the short story failing of ending suddenly and slightly unsatisfactorily. Fascinating though.

[Laur-Marian Mertea · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this short story, but it falls short in some points:
- the ending felt very rushed and extremely happy (like a Disney story) , contrary to the dark atmosphere of the story;
- sometimes the dialogues felt redundant.

Good points:
- the "Instrumentality of Mankind" - an intriguing and weird universe that is worth a more in-depth check;
- the brute force of the narrative.

Overall: 3/5 and I'll definitely check out more stories from Cordwainer Smith.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

-Read in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One-

Wildly imaginative story of a heavily modified sect of humans that aid in space travel. It’s also incredibly confusing, and brought back the blundering around in the dark sensation that I had while reading Neuromancer. I was probably more in awe than satisfied while reading, but I’d still recommend it.

[Željko Filipin · Rating 3 out of 5]

What if you made a huge sacrifice for humanity in altering your body so humans can survive space travel, but then somebody finds a solution to space travel that makes you (and others like you) obsolete? The Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Volume One, 1929-1964 #13