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Instrumentality of Mankind
The Instrumentality of Mankind
14 short stories set in a universe of scanners, planoforming ships and animal-derived Underpeople.
1 No, No, Not Rogov! (1959)
2 War No. 81-Q (1928)
3 Mark Elf (1957)
4 The Queen of the Afternoon (1978)
5 When the People Fell (1959)
6 Think Blue, Count Two (1963)
7 The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All (1979)
8 From Gustible's Planet (1962)
9 Drunkboat (1963)
10 Western Science Is So Wonderful (1958)
11 Nancy (1959)
12 The Fife of Bodidharma (1959)
13 Angerhelm (1959)
14 The Good Friends (1963)
"First Edition: May 1979" stated on the copyright page.
1 No, No, Not Rogov! (1959)
2 War No. 81-Q (1928)
3 Mark Elf (1957)
4 The Queen of the Afternoon (1978)
5 When the People Fell (1959)
6 Think Blue, Count Two (1963)
7 The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All (1979)
8 From Gustible's Planet (1962)
9 Drunkboat (1963)
10 Western Science Is So Wonderful (1958)
11 Nancy (1959)
12 The Fife of Bodidharma (1959)
13 Angerhelm (1959)
14 The Good Friends (1963)
"First Edition: May 1979" stated on the copyright page.
238 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1979
39 people are currently reading
6328 people want to read
About the author
Cordwainer Smith
233 books319 followersPseudonym 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 60 reviews
January 14, 2024
Instrumentality of Mankind by Cordwainer Smith
Cordwainer Smith is more famous than the real-life person behind his work. The author publishing under that name had a short career in science fiction. He was prolific considering the short span he worked in and the busy life he lived under his real name. Paul Linebarger was a famous professor, a noted East Asia scholar, and an expert in psychological warfare. He was also Cordwainer Smith. I am going into his story more in an upcoming Amazing Stories Column. I have heard many times that Cordwainer Smith was one of the best weird SF writers active in a window between the Golden Age and the New Wave. His death at 53 years old in the early 60s means we have very little to go on.
Cordwainer Smith lived up to all the hype. I knew he was a weird writer but the loudest LOL I had when read it on my bus commute, Let's just say I was not prepared for the Martian Kiju Mao Tze-Tung "I'm a pro-Soviet Demon," said the apparent Mao Tze-Tung. "and these are materialized Communist hospitality arrangements. I hope you like them."
The Instrumentality of Mankind is a 14-story collection that is set loosely in the same fictional future Smith envisioned for 13,000-16,000 AD. There is a helpful timeline published at the opening of the book. I now feel I should have looked at it a bit more. The stories were produced mostly in the last decade before the author died, but most curious is War No. 81-Q which was published in 1928, and two were published long after his death in the late 70s with the first edition of this. "The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All" and "The Queen of the Afternoon" were new to this book.
The fun thing about the 1928 story was published when Linebarger was 15 years old in a Washington D.C. schools publication. It doesn’t come off as Juvenile at all. It was clear that this soon-to-be-famous academic grew up much like many of the authors who walked that line between the major eras. He was reading SF magazines and making up his own stories early.
“No, No, Not Rogov!” Written in 1959 highlights the author’s knowledge of political issues and makes it a great introduction to the collection. The first story highlights some of the science fiction elements that CS was great at. A more common idea today the telepathy spy helmet is very cool.
“With infinitely delicate tuning he had succeeded one day in picking up the eyesight of their second chauffeur and had managed thanks to a needle thrust in just below his own right eyelid, to “see” through the other man’s eyes as the other man, all unaware, washed their limousine 1,600 meters away.” I liked that the telepathy espionage was difficult.
“Mark Elf” the story has a bit of WW II German feeling to the start. It is a German rocket test that curiously sends a Nazi into the far future. The atmosphere of this story played to CS’s talents. His knowledge of other countries and cultures is one of the keys that makes his books stand out.
My favorite story in the collection is the one that graces the cover of the Del Rey paperback. “When the People Fell” is a delightfully weird tale of Chinese colonists using balloons to land on Venus. It is a little out of date and silly but if you like retro SF that is a feature, not a bug. “The Waywonjong didn’t come to Venus. He just sent his people. He sent them floating down to Venus, to tackle the Venusian ecology with the only weapons which could make the settlement possible - people themselves. Human arms could tackle the loudies, who had been called “old ones” by the first Chinesian scouts to cover Venus.”
What most amazed me was an incredible story called “Think Blue, Count Two.” That included a spaceship with a solar sail and the description is not that far off from how the solar sails work on the breakthrough star shot. The fact that the ship in the story uses the sun for the first 80 years of the journey and has to find interstellar sources for the rest was amazingly ahead of the times.
Another great story is “The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All” which tells the story of the first ship to “Planoform” which is the Cordwainer Warp/Hyperdrive hand wavium device. The story reminded me of the TARDIS from Doctor Who and my favorite Leigh Brackett Novel The Big Jump.
As a three-decade-long ethical vegan the 1962 story from “Gustible's Planet” brought up tons of ethical issues that of course disturbed and pleased me at the same time. In the story, humans make contact with intelligent bird-like creatures the Apicians. They are telepathic and smart and when a bunch of them are burned in a spaceship accident meat-eating humans discover they are delicious. Played mostly for laughs I found this to be a misanthropic little ditty.
So yes the hype is real. Cordwainer Smith’s stories are great examples of mid-20th century transitional Science fiction that has the influences of the golden age while planting seeds for a coming revolution of the New Wave. The next review will be his Hugo-nominated novel The Planet Buyer.
Cordwainer Smith is more famous than the real-life person behind his work. The author publishing under that name had a short career in science fiction. He was prolific considering the short span he worked in and the busy life he lived under his real name. Paul Linebarger was a famous professor, a noted East Asia scholar, and an expert in psychological warfare. He was also Cordwainer Smith. I am going into his story more in an upcoming Amazing Stories Column. I have heard many times that Cordwainer Smith was one of the best weird SF writers active in a window between the Golden Age and the New Wave. His death at 53 years old in the early 60s means we have very little to go on.
Cordwainer Smith lived up to all the hype. I knew he was a weird writer but the loudest LOL I had when read it on my bus commute, Let's just say I was not prepared for the Martian Kiju Mao Tze-Tung "I'm a pro-Soviet Demon," said the apparent Mao Tze-Tung. "and these are materialized Communist hospitality arrangements. I hope you like them."
The Instrumentality of Mankind is a 14-story collection that is set loosely in the same fictional future Smith envisioned for 13,000-16,000 AD. There is a helpful timeline published at the opening of the book. I now feel I should have looked at it a bit more. The stories were produced mostly in the last decade before the author died, but most curious is War No. 81-Q which was published in 1928, and two were published long after his death in the late 70s with the first edition of this. "The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All" and "The Queen of the Afternoon" were new to this book.
The fun thing about the 1928 story was published when Linebarger was 15 years old in a Washington D.C. schools publication. It doesn’t come off as Juvenile at all. It was clear that this soon-to-be-famous academic grew up much like many of the authors who walked that line between the major eras. He was reading SF magazines and making up his own stories early.
“No, No, Not Rogov!” Written in 1959 highlights the author’s knowledge of political issues and makes it a great introduction to the collection. The first story highlights some of the science fiction elements that CS was great at. A more common idea today the telepathy spy helmet is very cool.
“With infinitely delicate tuning he had succeeded one day in picking up the eyesight of their second chauffeur and had managed thanks to a needle thrust in just below his own right eyelid, to “see” through the other man’s eyes as the other man, all unaware, washed their limousine 1,600 meters away.” I liked that the telepathy espionage was difficult.
“Mark Elf” the story has a bit of WW II German feeling to the start. It is a German rocket test that curiously sends a Nazi into the far future. The atmosphere of this story played to CS’s talents. His knowledge of other countries and cultures is one of the keys that makes his books stand out.
My favorite story in the collection is the one that graces the cover of the Del Rey paperback. “When the People Fell” is a delightfully weird tale of Chinese colonists using balloons to land on Venus. It is a little out of date and silly but if you like retro SF that is a feature, not a bug. “The Waywonjong didn’t come to Venus. He just sent his people. He sent them floating down to Venus, to tackle the Venusian ecology with the only weapons which could make the settlement possible - people themselves. Human arms could tackle the loudies, who had been called “old ones” by the first Chinesian scouts to cover Venus.”
What most amazed me was an incredible story called “Think Blue, Count Two.” That included a spaceship with a solar sail and the description is not that far off from how the solar sails work on the breakthrough star shot. The fact that the ship in the story uses the sun for the first 80 years of the journey and has to find interstellar sources for the rest was amazingly ahead of the times.
Another great story is “The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All” which tells the story of the first ship to “Planoform” which is the Cordwainer Warp/Hyperdrive hand wavium device. The story reminded me of the TARDIS from Doctor Who and my favorite Leigh Brackett Novel The Big Jump.
As a three-decade-long ethical vegan the 1962 story from “Gustible's Planet” brought up tons of ethical issues that of course disturbed and pleased me at the same time. In the story, humans make contact with intelligent bird-like creatures the Apicians. They are telepathic and smart and when a bunch of them are burned in a spaceship accident meat-eating humans discover they are delicious. Played mostly for laughs I found this to be a misanthropic little ditty.
So yes the hype is real. Cordwainer Smith’s stories are great examples of mid-20th century transitional Science fiction that has the influences of the golden age while planting seeds for a coming revolution of the New Wave. The next review will be his Hugo-nominated novel The Planet Buyer.
May 27, 2014
It's hard to tell what I liked most out of these stories. From Gustible's Planet was probably one of the most memorable for big ideas and big action, but DrunkBoat was seriously creepy and delicious. I'm always of a mind to pity all of his characters to one degree or another, and it looks like it is well deserved pity. Of course, I'm reminded of Bester's work, but this was sufficiently clever and taking a different path entirely that I cannot fault it in the slightest. (I'm only referring to DrunkBoat, here.)
The rest of the stories are either also in other editions or are less memorable, but all of them are quite good. I heartily recommend them all.
The rest of the stories are either also in other editions or are less memorable, but all of them are quite good. I heartily recommend them all.
March 22, 2015
Usually I don't read too much sci-fi literature, as I tend to prefer contemporary novels and poetry. I had a period during high-school when I was reading almost exclusively sci-fi. It was a period when I also wanted to become and astronaut. I ended up being an economist working more in IT systems for a Procurement center, so you have to imagine that the books I have read shifted a lot since high-school.
But I still can appreciate a good sci-fi novel, that for me means one that manages to create a fully functional world in the (preferably distant) future imagined. No doubt this is such a novel. But it is not necessarily a dystopia, although has elements of it. But despite those elements, many stories from this collection end up in a optimist tone. Basically, they all tell how humanity in a distant future started to lose their human traits, having the Instrumentality and technology to keep them forever happy and healthy. Basically, humans became just organic robots. But after each story, something fundamental is changing the mankind and we learn that in even more distant future, the humans regained their humanity. Interesting idea, and quite well proven by the novel, so I'll give it a 4 for premise.
Regarding the form, I believe Cordwainer is a talented writer. I admired most his ability to tell the story without bugging the first part with abundant details on how that distant world is working. We learn as we read and after you get used with this, there is no problem. For me the first few stories were harder to read as I usually like more details before I read the more story. But after them, they reused elements from previous stories and all was fine. This is why I'll give it a 4 for form.
In terms of originality, as I don't have an extensive knowledge of sci-fi literature (apart from mainstream), I consider it to be quite original. I noticed few similarities (probably an influence of the 60s) with some other novels written at the same time. Meaning some elements from the past of history reused in these stories (nobility could be an example) and some stories have some songs in it. But the rest of the concepts seem quite original, to me. So I will give it a 4 for the level of originality.
On the characters, I cannot recall any great character from these short stories. They were interesting, intriguing (especially sub-humans) or fairly average. Most of the time the focus being on the story not on the character development. This worked well for me, so I will give it a 3 for characters.
Regarding the complexity and difficulty, there are many concepts that require explanations, which is natural as the stories are set in a distant future. But I did not felt abounding with scientific terms as in case of many other sci-fi novels. So I will rate it with a 2 for complexity and difficulty.
In terms of credibility, not debating if the respective changes in human society and technology present in the stories are possible or not, I believe the world created by Smith is fairly consistent with itself. I think that he did not imagined how powerful computers could become, as they play a minor part in his stories. As this is a sci-fi novel, I cannot rate it more than 3 on credibility. This is why my rating for credibility is 2.
The last criteria is edition. I liked this e-book as it contained few spelling errors and the formatting was reasonable. But there were several annoying pagination or proof reading errors. Due to this, I'll give it a 2.
To summarize, a nice sci-fi novel, one of the good ones from the New Age of Science Fiction. I liked mostly the effort needed to created a logical world that fits the rule sets by itself. All in all, my final rating for it is 3.00, which requires no rounding on Goodreads system.
For more details on how I rated and reviewed this novel, please read these guidelines.
But I still can appreciate a good sci-fi novel, that for me means one that manages to create a fully functional world in the (preferably distant) future imagined. No doubt this is such a novel. But it is not necessarily a dystopia, although has elements of it. But despite those elements, many stories from this collection end up in a optimist tone. Basically, they all tell how humanity in a distant future started to lose their human traits, having the Instrumentality and technology to keep them forever happy and healthy. Basically, humans became just organic robots. But after each story, something fundamental is changing the mankind and we learn that in even more distant future, the humans regained their humanity. Interesting idea, and quite well proven by the novel, so I'll give it a 4 for premise.
Regarding the form, I believe Cordwainer is a talented writer. I admired most his ability to tell the story without bugging the first part with abundant details on how that distant world is working. We learn as we read and after you get used with this, there is no problem. For me the first few stories were harder to read as I usually like more details before I read the more story. But after them, they reused elements from previous stories and all was fine. This is why I'll give it a 4 for form.
In terms of originality, as I don't have an extensive knowledge of sci-fi literature (apart from mainstream), I consider it to be quite original. I noticed few similarities (probably an influence of the 60s) with some other novels written at the same time. Meaning some elements from the past of history reused in these stories (nobility could be an example) and some stories have some songs in it. But the rest of the concepts seem quite original, to me. So I will give it a 4 for the level of originality.
On the characters, I cannot recall any great character from these short stories. They were interesting, intriguing (especially sub-humans) or fairly average. Most of the time the focus being on the story not on the character development. This worked well for me, so I will give it a 3 for characters.
Regarding the complexity and difficulty, there are many concepts that require explanations, which is natural as the stories are set in a distant future. But I did not felt abounding with scientific terms as in case of many other sci-fi novels. So I will rate it with a 2 for complexity and difficulty.
In terms of credibility, not debating if the respective changes in human society and technology present in the stories are possible or not, I believe the world created by Smith is fairly consistent with itself. I think that he did not imagined how powerful computers could become, as they play a minor part in his stories. As this is a sci-fi novel, I cannot rate it more than 3 on credibility. This is why my rating for credibility is 2.
The last criteria is edition. I liked this e-book as it contained few spelling errors and the formatting was reasonable. But there were several annoying pagination or proof reading errors. Due to this, I'll give it a 2.
To summarize, a nice sci-fi novel, one of the good ones from the New Age of Science Fiction. I liked mostly the effort needed to created a logical world that fits the rule sets by itself. All in all, my final rating for it is 3.00, which requires no rounding on Goodreads system.
+--------------------------+-----------------+
| Criteria | Rating |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Premise | 4 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Form | 4 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Originality | 4 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Characters | 3 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Difficulty/Complexity | 2 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Credibility | 2 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Edition | 2 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Total | 3.00 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
For more details on how I rated and reviewed this novel, please read these guidelines.
April 13, 2024
I Must say I just have read a couple of Sci-Fi books less than 100 but The Instrumentality of Mankind by Cordwaniner Smith is one of the bizarrest Sci-Fi books which I have read. This book is a short stories collection includes 14 stories; some of them may have the most surreal plots and innovative concepts. Make Elf( a kind of prequel to The Queen of The Afternoon) The Queen of The Afternoon, Drunk boat are on the list. The world building in The Queen of The Afternoon is outstanding, would potentially be extend in a full novel length. About the future China will dominate people with telepathy technology is called Instrumentality of Mankind, and the rebellions wanted to sustain their individuality that is interesting. Drunk boat swerves plots into unexpected direction. A colonel was being interrogated on the trial and the judges were his coleaders, and they enquiring the truth of the abduction of the mystery person who was from other dimension or other galaxy.
Western Science is so wonderful was fun read for me, it is about a demon who can manifest images into corporeal forms. He met the two Russian supervisors and was asking them about the western science. In addition, he wanted to learn Even though he already had a powerful ability to do telepathy things.
Argerhelm is the most sorrowful short story in the collection. American and Russia did not know who intercepted the satellite and stored the message inside the cylinder. FBI found out the message was to Argerhelm’s brother and it was a sad message to his brother about life. It’s interesting that the messenger in the record stated that he was dead and in the between world but it is an explicit message without any confirmations to proof the statement.
Overall, some short stories in TIoM have evocative ideas; the writer studied east-Asian, so that the stories have some elements about China.
Western Science is so wonderful was fun read for me, it is about a demon who can manifest images into corporeal forms. He met the two Russian supervisors and was asking them about the western science. In addition, he wanted to learn Even though he already had a powerful ability to do telepathy things.
Argerhelm is the most sorrowful short story in the collection. American and Russia did not know who intercepted the satellite and stored the message inside the cylinder. FBI found out the message was to Argerhelm’s brother and it was a sad message to his brother about life. It’s interesting that the messenger in the record stated that he was dead and in the between world but it is an explicit message without any confirmations to proof the statement.
Overall, some short stories in TIoM have evocative ideas; the writer studied east-Asian, so that the stories have some elements about China.
August 11, 2011
I love his pseudonym, which means cobbler..from cordovan, a fine leather from Cordoba, Spain. Nice shoes!
See also my "Best of..." review for my mixed feelings on Cordwainer Smith. And in my blog, which sometimes gave a running account of my reading, I compared him to Flannery O'Connor in having a moral world view but not always sounding judgmental, just standing back and showing the behavior of people in stressful situations, or people/animal people/and other world people all bumped up against each other.
What I found amazing was how the stories tied together to create a future/history of thousands and thousands of years of various kinds of space travel, governmental systems, and values/practices. The sense of compassionate beings seeking good pervades all, even when that motive leads to odd, failed, or repressive behavior. So, you know, like life!
As science fiction goes, though, I still prefer Mary Doria Russell--"Jesuits in space"--The Sparrow and Children of God.
And Zenna Henderson, The People series, but that preference is also coming from my teen years. Perhaps a re-read is in order.
See also my "Best of..." review for my mixed feelings on Cordwainer Smith. And in my blog, which sometimes gave a running account of my reading, I compared him to Flannery O'Connor in having a moral world view but not always sounding judgmental, just standing back and showing the behavior of people in stressful situations, or people/animal people/and other world people all bumped up against each other.
What I found amazing was how the stories tied together to create a future/history of thousands and thousands of years of various kinds of space travel, governmental systems, and values/practices. The sense of compassionate beings seeking good pervades all, even when that motive leads to odd, failed, or repressive behavior. So, you know, like life!
As science fiction goes, though, I still prefer Mary Doria Russell--"Jesuits in space"--The Sparrow and Children of God.
And Zenna Henderson, The People series, but that preference is also coming from my teen years. Perhaps a re-read is in order.
April 25, 2025
After reading and enjoying Norstrilia last year, I made a note to check out Cordwainer Smith's short fiction since many people indicated that it was better than his novel. After reading this, I'm inclined to agree because he combines his great writing with an enormous helping of strangeness to deliver a really memorable reading experience. These stories all take place within his bizarre future history that Norstrilia forms a part of, with a timeline at the beginning that helps to cement a timeline in your mind.
From Nazi killing machines to genetically engineered human/animal hybrids, there's not a dull moment throughout the fourteen short stories included here. I will definitely be reading his other short story collections.
From Nazi killing machines to genetically engineered human/animal hybrids, there's not a dull moment throughout the fourteen short stories included here. I will definitely be reading his other short story collections.
August 5, 2024
Average rating: 3/5 stars.
Minor thing to start out this review: I think it’s a really odd choice to call this “The Instrumentality of Mankind”, yet only 9 of the stories take place in the titular universe. Not to mention, one of the stories is literally just an unpublished prototype of another story included in this collection. It feels like false advertising right from the get-go.
This collection has been making the rounds as a must-read, but I found this collection a slog to get through. Filled with abrupt shaggy dog stories with an science fiction twist, this collection was a huge disappointment.
”No, No, Not Rogov!” - 3/5
Competent but lacking flair. This first foray into Cordwainer Smith’s work was absolutely fine. A literal glance into the future through the eyes of Soviet scientists. I was hoping for something more, but found myself wanting.
Still, not bad. Just not great.
”War No. 81-Q” - 2/5
Very, very short story about a virtual war fought from radio-controlled aircraft. Satirical and short, it didn’t really wow me, but thankfully it didn’t waste time in its delivery. This story seems to be one of Smith’s earliest. Competent, but boring and lacking any real oomph.
”Mark Elf” - 4/5
This was a cool story. A surviving child from Hitler’s Germany awakens after being in stasis for more than 16,000 years. She discovers a world completely different than the one she knew.
While this story ends quite abruptly, it is succeeded and enhanced by the next story—a sequel to this one. Alone, it’s alright. Together with the next story, it’s the first part of a great two-part short story.
”The Queen of the Afternoon” - 5/5
Where the last story ended, this one builds. The idea of two German sisters rebuilding the world from the follies of man—making up for the sins of Nazi Germany—gripped me as poetic. It creates a natural arc that man can overcome evil and create good. Not only can he overcome, it becomes the foundation of the future of Mankind.
The fact that the main articles of change are both women is a nice sentiment too. Girl power!
Both this story and “Mark Elf” feel almost like fairy tales packaged in science fiction foil. It’s not a bad thing at all. It’s sweet and cute, heartwarming and endearing, thoughtful and idealistic.
I started this book worried because the first two stories were lackluster. But these two stories sold me on Cordwainer Smith’s writing and storytelling.
Note: I found out this sequel was unpublished until after his death. That really makes me wonder how people thought the first story was good without its better half.
”When the People Fell” - 3/5
It’s odd how this story simultaneously felt too short and too long. Smith uses the framing of an old man recounting an important day on the planet Venus—a day when the last nation colonized it by dropping millions of people into Venus without supplies or orders. The idea is wild, both believable and farfetched. Yet it didn’t capture my attention like the last two stories.
There’s a faint romantic courting that acts as another layer of the story, but it’s weak and lacking serious depth. This story wasn’t as boring as earlier stories, but nothing special except that it’s depicted on the cover of the book.
”Think Blue, Count Two” - 3/5
Odd. Goofy. Borderline surrealism. Happy ending included.
A bunch of people are sent to another planet because, no joke, the planet is full of ugly people and they need more attractive people to offset the ugly. Just . . . wow.
What follows is scientists using a mouse brain to create an AI construct that will protect the most attractive woman of the passengers. Luckily enough, because one of the men onboard goes full-on incel because he because ugly and the main character doesn’t find him attractive. But luckily the incel realizes he was wrong and they become friends.
If this all sounds too wacky and just plain strange, then you’re in the same boat as yours truly. Didn’t hate it, but I didn’t like it either.
”The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All” - 2/5
Ok. This one was surreal. A man goes insane, lying naked in a running position in a hospital because he lost his mind after an experimental FTL spaceship. Luckily, a girl is able to connect to his soul in the depths of space.
You can’t see my face, but I’m incredulous.
”From Gustible's Planet” - 3.5/5
A comedy piece about humanity meeting telepathic sentient duck aliens. Humanity accidentally finds out they’re tasty.
Short and wacky. But it worked.
”Drunkboat” - 4/5
About a page in, I went: “Wait a second! I’ve read this already.” I looked it up, and yes. I did. Kinda. This story is a heavily rewritten version of the earlier story ”The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All”. Apparently ”The Colonel …” wasn’t purchased by any magazines, and Smith rewrote it so that it would be accepted.
Honestly? It makes sense. That story was pretty bad, and this version is markedly better. There’s a mix of political intrigue, romance, and some worldbuilding.
The ending doesn’t land very well—a common theme for Smith’s work—but as a whole, I liked it more than most of these stories.
”Western Science Is So Wonderful” - 2/5
This is the first of five stories that don’t take place in the universe of the Instrumentally of Mankind. I was excited to see what Smith would do outside of his worldbuilding.
What we get is a shapeshifting martian, who loves “western science”, talking to a Soviet Russian and a communist Chinese soldier.
I think this was supposed to be a comedy, but it’s far too strange for my taste.
”Nancy” - 4/5
I actually liked this one! Loneliness and phantom loves are themes I completely dig. Not much else to say, but this was a nice one.
”The Fife of Bodidharma” - 4/5
Another solid story?! This time about a (quasi-)magical pipe! The ending line is what really sold me on this one.
”Angerhelm” - 2/5
Soviets and Americans get wind of a subliminal message from a dead poultry farmer whose message was recorded by a soviet satellite.
Where did he come up with these ideas!
Inventive, yes. Entertaining, no. This is a shaggy dog story if I ever read one. There’s a journey to find out about the message for 23 pages, but there’s just no resolution. It just ends. So frustrating.
”The Good Friends” - 1/5
The twist was soooo predictable and the dialogue unbearable. The only saving grace is that it’s very short. A huge pass for me.
Minor thing to start out this review: I think it’s a really odd choice to call this “The Instrumentality of Mankind”, yet only 9 of the stories take place in the titular universe. Not to mention, one of the stories is literally just an unpublished prototype of another story included in this collection. It feels like false advertising right from the get-go.
This collection has been making the rounds as a must-read, but I found this collection a slog to get through. Filled with abrupt shaggy dog stories with an science fiction twist, this collection was a huge disappointment.
”No, No, Not Rogov!” - 3/5
Competent but lacking flair. This first foray into Cordwainer Smith’s work was absolutely fine. A literal glance into the future through the eyes of Soviet scientists. I was hoping for something more, but found myself wanting.
Still, not bad. Just not great.
”War No. 81-Q” - 2/5
Very, very short story about a virtual war fought from radio-controlled aircraft. Satirical and short, it didn’t really wow me, but thankfully it didn’t waste time in its delivery. This story seems to be one of Smith’s earliest. Competent, but boring and lacking any real oomph.
”Mark Elf” - 4/5
This was a cool story. A surviving child from Hitler’s Germany awakens after being in stasis for more than 16,000 years. She discovers a world completely different than the one she knew.
While this story ends quite abruptly, it is succeeded and enhanced by the next story—a sequel to this one. Alone, it’s alright. Together with the next story, it’s the first part of a great two-part short story.
”The Queen of the Afternoon” - 5/5
Where the last story ended, this one builds. The idea of two German sisters rebuilding the world from the follies of man—making up for the sins of Nazi Germany—gripped me as poetic. It creates a natural arc that man can overcome evil and create good. Not only can he overcome, it becomes the foundation of the future of Mankind.
The fact that the main articles of change are both women is a nice sentiment too. Girl power!
Both this story and “Mark Elf” feel almost like fairy tales packaged in science fiction foil. It’s not a bad thing at all. It’s sweet and cute, heartwarming and endearing, thoughtful and idealistic.
I started this book worried because the first two stories were lackluster. But these two stories sold me on Cordwainer Smith’s writing and storytelling.
Note: I found out this sequel was unpublished until after his death. That really makes me wonder how people thought the first story was good without its better half.
”When the People Fell” - 3/5
It’s odd how this story simultaneously felt too short and too long. Smith uses the framing of an old man recounting an important day on the planet Venus—a day when the last nation colonized it by dropping millions of people into Venus without supplies or orders. The idea is wild, both believable and farfetched. Yet it didn’t capture my attention like the last two stories.
There’s a faint romantic courting that acts as another layer of the story, but it’s weak and lacking serious depth. This story wasn’t as boring as earlier stories, but nothing special except that it’s depicted on the cover of the book.
”Think Blue, Count Two” - 3/5
Odd. Goofy. Borderline surrealism. Happy ending included.
A bunch of people are sent to another planet because, no joke, the planet is full of ugly people and they need more attractive people to offset the ugly. Just . . . wow.
What follows is scientists using a mouse brain to create an AI construct that will protect the most attractive woman of the passengers. Luckily enough, because one of the men onboard goes full-on incel because he because ugly and the main character doesn’t find him attractive. But luckily the incel realizes he was wrong and they become friends.
If this all sounds too wacky and just plain strange, then you’re in the same boat as yours truly. Didn’t hate it, but I didn’t like it either.
”The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All” - 2/5
Ok. This one was surreal. A man goes insane, lying naked in a running position in a hospital because he lost his mind after an experimental FTL spaceship. Luckily, a girl is able to connect to his soul in the depths of space.
You can’t see my face, but I’m incredulous.
”From Gustible's Planet” - 3.5/5
A comedy piece about humanity meeting telepathic sentient duck aliens. Humanity accidentally finds out they’re tasty.
Short and wacky. But it worked.
”Drunkboat” - 4/5
About a page in, I went: “Wait a second! I’ve read this already.” I looked it up, and yes. I did. Kinda. This story is a heavily rewritten version of the earlier story ”The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All”. Apparently ”The Colonel …” wasn’t purchased by any magazines, and Smith rewrote it so that it would be accepted.
Honestly? It makes sense. That story was pretty bad, and this version is markedly better. There’s a mix of political intrigue, romance, and some worldbuilding.
The ending doesn’t land very well—a common theme for Smith’s work—but as a whole, I liked it more than most of these stories.
”Western Science Is So Wonderful” - 2/5
This is the first of five stories that don’t take place in the universe of the Instrumentally of Mankind. I was excited to see what Smith would do outside of his worldbuilding.
What we get is a shapeshifting martian, who loves “western science”, talking to a Soviet Russian and a communist Chinese soldier.
I think this was supposed to be a comedy, but it’s far too strange for my taste.
”Nancy” - 4/5
I actually liked this one! Loneliness and phantom loves are themes I completely dig. Not much else to say, but this was a nice one.
”The Fife of Bodidharma” - 4/5
Another solid story?! This time about a (quasi-)magical pipe! The ending line is what really sold me on this one.
”Angerhelm” - 2/5
Soviets and Americans get wind of a subliminal message from a dead poultry farmer whose message was recorded by a soviet satellite.
Where did he come up with these ideas!
Inventive, yes. Entertaining, no. This is a shaggy dog story if I ever read one. There’s a journey to find out about the message for 23 pages, but there’s just no resolution. It just ends. So frustrating.
”The Good Friends” - 1/5
The twist was soooo predictable and the dialogue unbearable. The only saving grace is that it’s very short. A huge pass for me.
August 19, 2014
This was a very interesting short story collection, early on we are in the extremely far-off perhaps far-out future. Some of the stories were more haunting than others, but what seemed like a simple foray ends up being such a layered Easter egg of sci-fi goodness that this was a hard book to put down. There were a few that were strictly in the realm of paranormal which was a pleasant break with all of the world-building and golden era sci-fi material. Before I knew it I had completely forgotten about The Instrumentality of Mankind which had a heavy theme in many of the stories and got lost in each brilliant story on their own merits. Smith had such a unique vision in which this will remain one of more memorable books that I’ve read.
May 3, 2014
Cordwainer Smith is a forgotten author these days, but I urge anyone who sees any book by him to pick it up, take it home and read. (Pay for it first!)
Each story is a treasure. I've rationed out my Cordwainer Smith stories so I won't run out. This man is brilliant, and needs to be read instead of so much of the claptrap they keep putting out. "Scanners Live in Vain" and "Ballad of Lost C'mell" are amazing. I don't want to say much about the plots, but will only say that they look simple on the surface, but once you get inside them, they are like beautiful Fabrege' eggs. This book is a good representative volume.
Each story is a treasure. I've rationed out my Cordwainer Smith stories so I won't run out. This man is brilliant, and needs to be read instead of so much of the claptrap they keep putting out. "Scanners Live in Vain" and "Ballad of Lost C'mell" are amazing. I don't want to say much about the plots, but will only say that they look simple on the surface, but once you get inside them, they are like beautiful Fabrege' eggs. This book is a good representative volume.
July 18, 2016
If a young adolescent Phillip K. Dick wrote short stories, I would imagine they would have read something like these very strange, warped, surreal tales.
March 8, 2025
On the basis of having read "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard," I purchased a copy of The Instrumentality of Mankind. My copy has this very cover. 11 of the 14 stories were written and published in various SF magazines between 1958 and 1963. One outlier, a story titled "The Queen of the Afternoon" was published in Galaxy in 1978. Another story, "The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All," seems to have appeared in this 1979 collection for the first time. And finally, the second story of the collection, "War No. 81-Q," was first published way back in 1928! (found here on Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/74098) That's 22 years before the second published Instrumentality story, "Scanners Live in Vain" (1950).
There's an interesting "timeline" at the beginning of this book. The stories are arranged in chronological order of events that took place in the timeline. The range of dates is roughly 2000 A.D. to about 16000 A.D. Almost every eon has an Instrumentality story or two, some up to ten.
Overall, this collection started strong. The first entry, "No, No, Not Rogov!" is a truly odd, but compelling story. It takes place in the 1940s and in the year 13,582. Two talented Soviet scientists are trying to invent and then develop a mind reading, mind control device, and accidentally connect to an event taking place in 13,582. Most of the story takes place in the 1940s and involves a love quadrangle of sorts, but the connection to the future throws a wrench into everything. I've never read another story quite like this one. It has human elements to it in the interesting love angles between the two scientists and the two Soviet watchers trying to keep them on task. But they aren't the real story. The mind control and link to 13,582 turn out to be more important.
Cordwainer Smith has a really interesting writing style. It's simple, unadorned, and gets right to the heart of the matter. He makes it feel like he's telling you the essence of the story, but then takes unexpected, surprising twists to make you realize it wasn't the story. But he resolves everything by the end. I really like his style of writing in the early stories.
Unfortunately, the latter stories were written in Science Fiction's New Wave period. Some of these stories are interesting, but those are usually despite the time they were written in, not because. I am not a fan of New Wave because of its excesses. The many experiments tried in narrative structure usually wind up being more confusing than clever.
The majority of stories in this collection illustrate confusion more than cleverness. "Drunkboat," the last Instrumentality story of the collection was particularly awful. It was a feeble attempt at humor, I think, and utterly pointless. In addition, so many of these stories are dated. The Cold War was a paramount interest of the author's, but only historians might find the anti-Soviet attitudes interesting today.
Not recommended.
There's an interesting "timeline" at the beginning of this book. The stories are arranged in chronological order of events that took place in the timeline. The range of dates is roughly 2000 A.D. to about 16000 A.D. Almost every eon has an Instrumentality story or two, some up to ten.
Overall, this collection started strong. The first entry, "No, No, Not Rogov!" is a truly odd, but compelling story. It takes place in the 1940s and in the year 13,582. Two talented Soviet scientists are trying to invent and then develop a mind reading, mind control device, and accidentally connect to an event taking place in 13,582. Most of the story takes place in the 1940s and involves a love quadrangle of sorts, but the connection to the future throws a wrench into everything. I've never read another story quite like this one. It has human elements to it in the interesting love angles between the two scientists and the two Soviet watchers trying to keep them on task. But they aren't the real story. The mind control and link to 13,582 turn out to be more important.
Cordwainer Smith has a really interesting writing style. It's simple, unadorned, and gets right to the heart of the matter. He makes it feel like he's telling you the essence of the story, but then takes unexpected, surprising twists to make you realize it wasn't the story. But he resolves everything by the end. I really like his style of writing in the early stories.
Unfortunately, the latter stories were written in Science Fiction's New Wave period. Some of these stories are interesting, but those are usually despite the time they were written in, not because. I am not a fan of New Wave because of its excesses. The many experiments tried in narrative structure usually wind up being more confusing than clever.
The majority of stories in this collection illustrate confusion more than cleverness. "Drunkboat," the last Instrumentality story of the collection was particularly awful. It was a feeble attempt at humor, I think, and utterly pointless. In addition, so many of these stories are dated. The Cold War was a paramount interest of the author's, but only historians might find the anti-Soviet attitudes interesting today.
Not recommended.
April 17, 2025
Without a doubt one of my favorite things I’ve ever read. It is a short story collection, most of the short stories taking place within his shared “Instrumentality of Mankind” universe. All of the stories, inside and outside the universe, are amazing.
The connections in the universe are super fun to follow and give a great sense of consequence to the stories, but the stories outside the universe are totally just as good (I was worried they might not be and I was wrong).
Smith has a totally unique voice that has a kind of romantic tinge to it which is not something you see a lot in sf, and that mixes with the themes about the intersection between personal and governmental interest in science in a super interesting way. Not all the stories are necessarily about that, but it comes up in a lot of them, as it was personally very relevant to Cordwainer Smith’s life and experience. Definitely worth looking up his Wikipedia page.
I loved how morally ambiguous so many of the stories are. Things just happen, and nobody can necessarily say if it was right or wrong. He just presents it to you without any moral stance about it.
Totally awesome. Highly recommend.
Not a specific spoiler but ——— I loved how many of the stories were insane things that happened and then were completely forgotten about, or removed from history, where a government was like “we don’t know what to do with this, let’s not tell anyone about this,” and we just get a secret glimpse into it.
The connections in the universe are super fun to follow and give a great sense of consequence to the stories, but the stories outside the universe are totally just as good (I was worried they might not be and I was wrong).
Smith has a totally unique voice that has a kind of romantic tinge to it which is not something you see a lot in sf, and that mixes with the themes about the intersection between personal and governmental interest in science in a super interesting way. Not all the stories are necessarily about that, but it comes up in a lot of them, as it was personally very relevant to Cordwainer Smith’s life and experience. Definitely worth looking up his Wikipedia page.
I loved how morally ambiguous so many of the stories are. Things just happen, and nobody can necessarily say if it was right or wrong. He just presents it to you without any moral stance about it.
Totally awesome. Highly recommend.
Not a specific spoiler but ——— I loved how many of the stories were insane things that happened and then were completely forgotten about, or removed from history, where a government was like “we don’t know what to do with this, let’s not tell anyone about this,” and we just get a secret glimpse into it.
December 6, 2020
Certainly not his best, and perhaps best read in sequence with the stories collected in The Rediscovery of Man. Though Smith's writing is highly enjoyable, the stories often lack satisfactory endings. One story in particular describes the almost rape and mutilation of a girl by an evil piece of scum only to have the characters illogically be together at the end. "From Gustible's Planet" I found the most enjoyable - The humorous flip side of Damon Knight's "To Serve Man".
December 20, 2012
What to add to the already glowing praise of Smith? He brought a unique voice to SF, partly because of his Chinese background, partly because I think he had such an amazing mind, almost anything he wrote would have been surprisingly good. If you are an SF Fan and haven't read Smith, I envy you - you have a whole world of surprises awaiting you.
May 27, 2019
Due to me being an idiot, this review is for both The Rediscovery of Man and The Instrumentality Of Mankind.
I hadn't heard of Cordwainer Smith until mention of him in a subreddit and, although I remembered the author's name, I failed to note that he had two similarly named anthologies. As such, I accidentally purchased and started reading "The Instrumentality Of Mankind“ when I'd intended to be reading "The Rediscovery of Man". It wasn't until when, on holiday, I stumbled upon a second hand copy of "The Rediscovery of Man" in a newsagent in Ingleton and purchased it so I could read in real life (as opposed to digitally). Upon opening the book it became very obvious that it was a similar book with different content and I realised that I'd started with what was nominally the second book.
I say nominally because both sets of stories are collections set in the same universe, but interspersed throughout a timescale spanning sixteen thousand years! The timescale isn't an issue, the stories are about disparate things that occur with no linear storyline to be followed. There are overt references to events or historical figures (some of whom feature as the protagonists in other stories) but on a per story basis, everything is self-contained. That said, as the last page of The Rediscovery of Man states: "His sparse but regular output of science fiction consisted chiefly of short stories, the best of which are collected in this volume". I strongly agree that, with on exception, the best stories are in The Rediscovery of Man.
Most of Mr Smith's writing was done between 1950 and 1980 and it's reasonably obvious when reading them that this is the case, both due to the language used and the social norms of the time that occasionally seep through. The vast majority of the stories here are science fiction, although they're of the type that agrees that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and is happy to run with the magic and not bother explaining things too deeply. As such, we have a lot of "technology", including faster-than-light travel (via some kind of 2-dimensional telepathy-enhanced psionic navigation/fumbling). If you're happy to roll with this though, there are some really well written and interesting stories!
Cordwainer Smith was actually Paul M. A. Linebarger, a noted East Asia scholar and expert in psychological warfare (which maybe explains the near-obsession with psychology and psionic powers that appear throughout most of the stories). Under his real name he authored the extremely well-regarded non-fiction book "Psychological Warfare" (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48612). There's also a lot from Mr Linebarger's other areas of interest the bleed into the stories: he throws in a lot of subtle references to things in other languages (there's quite a lot of German, but also nods in the direction of Russian and Chinese too - although I had to have the latter explained to me by the foreward).
It's hard to say much about any of the stories without getting into spoilers since they're all pretty short, so I won't, except to list my likes and dislikes: My favourite non-Instrumentality story, and possibly my favourite story from either book was "The Fife of Bodidharma", which you can find at https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.ph.... It's very much not a sci-fi story but it has the same brief and expository style that other stories I enjoyed in these collections displayed. The Fife is about...a fife! It's a magical fife with some interesting powers and we, very quickly, meet various owners of the fife as it travels through time before a very speculative and twisty end. My second favourite story (the first story of the first book and the first of the Instrumentality series), "Scanners Live in Vain" sports a similarly interesting end but it's a far slower and paints an interesting introduction to the Instrumentality universe.
After that, I have not a lot of others that I'd be really interested in seeing again, in order of interest: Alpha Ralpha Boulevard was a very suitable end to the series (it should have stopped there) and, again, the end really makes the story. Golden the Ship Was - Oh Oh Oh is a pretty short but illuminating take on psychological warfare in the super-far future. Mark Elf/Queen of the Afternoon are essentially one long story and have the most continuity of anything in the anthology and also (perhaps by dint of sheer length) provide the most illumination on the early years of the evolution of the Instrumentality.
There's also one story which annoyed me intensely: The Crime And The Glory Of Commander Suzdal (https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/smithcord...). It's predicated on limited(ish) time travel and can't be expounded upon without spoiling it. Suffice it to say: there was literally no reason for the thing that happened to happen when the thing used to make that thing happen could have just been used as intended.
I suspect I missed a lot as large chunks of the internet are very excited about the depth and layers of these stories. Overall, I found them to be mostly fun and I'm glad to have read them but I didn't get anything particularly deep and meaningful out of the experience.
I hadn't heard of Cordwainer Smith until mention of him in a subreddit and, although I remembered the author's name, I failed to note that he had two similarly named anthologies. As such, I accidentally purchased and started reading "The Instrumentality Of Mankind“ when I'd intended to be reading "The Rediscovery of Man". It wasn't until when, on holiday, I stumbled upon a second hand copy of "The Rediscovery of Man" in a newsagent in Ingleton and purchased it so I could read in real life (as opposed to digitally). Upon opening the book it became very obvious that it was a similar book with different content and I realised that I'd started with what was nominally the second book.
I say nominally because both sets of stories are collections set in the same universe, but interspersed throughout a timescale spanning sixteen thousand years! The timescale isn't an issue, the stories are about disparate things that occur with no linear storyline to be followed. There are overt references to events or historical figures (some of whom feature as the protagonists in other stories) but on a per story basis, everything is self-contained. That said, as the last page of The Rediscovery of Man states: "His sparse but regular output of science fiction consisted chiefly of short stories, the best of which are collected in this volume". I strongly agree that, with on exception, the best stories are in The Rediscovery of Man.
Most of Mr Smith's writing was done between 1950 and 1980 and it's reasonably obvious when reading them that this is the case, both due to the language used and the social norms of the time that occasionally seep through. The vast majority of the stories here are science fiction, although they're of the type that agrees that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and is happy to run with the magic and not bother explaining things too deeply. As such, we have a lot of "technology", including faster-than-light travel (via some kind of 2-dimensional telepathy-enhanced psionic navigation/fumbling). If you're happy to roll with this though, there are some really well written and interesting stories!
Cordwainer Smith was actually Paul M. A. Linebarger, a noted East Asia scholar and expert in psychological warfare (which maybe explains the near-obsession with psychology and psionic powers that appear throughout most of the stories). Under his real name he authored the extremely well-regarded non-fiction book "Psychological Warfare" (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48612). There's also a lot from Mr Linebarger's other areas of interest the bleed into the stories: he throws in a lot of subtle references to things in other languages (there's quite a lot of German, but also nods in the direction of Russian and Chinese too - although I had to have the latter explained to me by the foreward).
It's hard to say much about any of the stories without getting into spoilers since they're all pretty short, so I won't, except to list my likes and dislikes: My favourite non-Instrumentality story, and possibly my favourite story from either book was "The Fife of Bodidharma", which you can find at https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.ph.... It's very much not a sci-fi story but it has the same brief and expository style that other stories I enjoyed in these collections displayed. The Fife is about...a fife! It's a magical fife with some interesting powers and we, very quickly, meet various owners of the fife as it travels through time before a very speculative and twisty end. My second favourite story (the first story of the first book and the first of the Instrumentality series), "Scanners Live in Vain" sports a similarly interesting end but it's a far slower and paints an interesting introduction to the Instrumentality universe.
After that, I have not a lot of others that I'd be really interested in seeing again, in order of interest: Alpha Ralpha Boulevard was a very suitable end to the series (it should have stopped there) and, again, the end really makes the story. Golden the Ship Was - Oh Oh Oh is a pretty short but illuminating take on psychological warfare in the super-far future. Mark Elf/Queen of the Afternoon are essentially one long story and have the most continuity of anything in the anthology and also (perhaps by dint of sheer length) provide the most illumination on the early years of the evolution of the Instrumentality.
There's also one story which annoyed me intensely: The Crime And The Glory Of Commander Suzdal (https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/smithcord...). It's predicated on limited(ish) time travel and can't be expounded upon without spoiling it. Suffice it to say: there was literally no reason for the thing that happened to happen when the thing used to make that thing happen could have just been used as intended.
I suspect I missed a lot as large chunks of the internet are very excited about the depth and layers of these stories. Overall, I found them to be mostly fun and I'm glad to have read them but I didn't get anything particularly deep and meaningful out of the experience.
July 16, 2013
Some of the stories are amazing (like the classic "The Game of Rat and Dragon")... I was indifferent to some, and a few of them I disliked but the universe depicted is a consistent one and the theme of human behavior toward animals a very dear one to me.
June 19, 2020
The strangeness of Cordwainer Smith as a writer only deepens when one reads the story of Paul Linebarger, who is the person behind the pseudonym. The stories of Smith are exotic, a glimpse into a distant future, an imagining that humans go on and on for tens of thousands of years, iterating ourselves into a civilization in which there is not quite a government but in which there is definitely a structure, an instrumentality of humans that stands behind everything else, that intervenes when necessary, with a brutal swiftness, for reasons of its own. Yet in stating this so directly I violate Smith's own method of telling a story, which is more in tune with the fable, and in which we glimpse the instrumentality in dozens of ways throughout the short stories here. It is as if Olaf Stapledon developed an interest in narrative and wrote fiction rather than the sweeping future histories he created. All the stories here are classics of early science fiction; he was revered by his contemporaries. They are dated in their approach to women, which is their worst aspect. But character was not what Smith was about; he wrote big, strange ideas into his stories, in language that evoked a distance in time, a richness of future in which men become something else. His ideas, though, are singular. "When the People Fell" is a good example. The story is about China dropping millions of its people onto Venus in order to colonize it -literally dropping them out of the Venusian sky, knowing that most of them would die, but aware that this brutal act would create a great leap forward in which the planet would instantly become Chinese. Yet the act is simply presented, in detail but without a speck of emotion other than bemusement, as if a godlike historian were recording it all. Reading his work in a body, one sees the threads connecting them all, rich and intricate and hard to describe because they exist in themselves so fiercely, so densely. His fiction predicts the work of Philip Dick, echoes with Kafka at moments, but stands alone in terms of its elements. At its heart it is, in fact, work that is preoccupied with Christianity; Linebarger, for all his mastery of psychological warfare, knowledge of realpolitik, and vast experience among the powerful, was devout. Like all the other elements of his writing, the spiritual moments are small, vivid, and uncanny.
August 26, 2024
I am really glad that Bookpilled rated this collection of strange SF short stories so highly, and piqued my interest, in his 100 Book Challenge YouTube video. I ordered a used copy of the paperback edition, with the cover art showing the people raining down, suspended from balloons, from a seller on ebay - along with William Gibson's Burning Chrome, which is another great collection of SF short stories.
I really liked both books and wrote a separate review on the Gibson book.
The Instrumentality of Mankind was an entertaining read. Several of the stories left me with an impression that was similar to what I got from watching episodes from The Outer Limits and/or Twilight Zone TV shows, decades ago.
I do heartily recommend reading this book. The stories in it are all from the late 1950s and early 1960s and do have that kind of feel to them. The imagination and storytelling craft of Paul Linebarger, writing under the pen name of Cordwainer Smith - in order to insulate himself from fan feedback that he was worried might inhibit or end his creative output, were particularly strong. Smith deftly crafted visceral, Weird SF that really does suck the reader in and does provoke thought that persists after the stories have been read.
I was really torn about whether I was going rate this fascinating read at 4.5 stars or better, thus a 5 star - by rounding, or more in the 4.15 to 4.3 range - and thus meriting an individual four star rating. Thinking back, a bit more - about a couple of the earlier stories in the book, has pushed my overall rating of this book into 4.5 ratings territory, despite its minor shortcomings.
Many of these stories had a big element of the psychological thriller woven into their SF story lines. At least a couple of the stories, in the beginning of the book, were focused on setting up the background of the Instrumentality of Mankind. I personally liked the last nine stories the best. However, I did appreciate certain elements in some of those stories better because of the careful setup woven into the earlier stories.
I read the last 100 pages straight through, unable to put the book down.
.
I really liked both books and wrote a separate review on the Gibson book.
The Instrumentality of Mankind was an entertaining read. Several of the stories left me with an impression that was similar to what I got from watching episodes from The Outer Limits and/or Twilight Zone TV shows, decades ago.
I do heartily recommend reading this book. The stories in it are all from the late 1950s and early 1960s and do have that kind of feel to them. The imagination and storytelling craft of Paul Linebarger, writing under the pen name of Cordwainer Smith - in order to insulate himself from fan feedback that he was worried might inhibit or end his creative output, were particularly strong. Smith deftly crafted visceral, Weird SF that really does suck the reader in and does provoke thought that persists after the stories have been read.
I was really torn about whether I was going rate this fascinating read at 4.5 stars or better, thus a 5 star - by rounding, or more in the 4.15 to 4.3 range - and thus meriting an individual four star rating. Thinking back, a bit more - about a couple of the earlier stories in the book, has pushed my overall rating of this book into 4.5 ratings territory, despite its minor shortcomings.
Many of these stories had a big element of the psychological thriller woven into their SF story lines. At least a couple of the stories, in the beginning of the book, were focused on setting up the background of the Instrumentality of Mankind. I personally liked the last nine stories the best. However, I did appreciate certain elements in some of those stories better because of the careful setup woven into the earlier stories.
I read the last 100 pages straight through, unable to put the book down.
.
August 10, 2025
A fascinating collection of odd sci-fi stories very much of their place and time - Cordwainer Smith was a political scientist, a scholar of East Asian culture and an officer in the US Army during WWII specializing in psychological warfare and all three of these things are extremely evident in his fiction. He worked for the CIA while he was writing these stories and Miles Copeland, Jr. reportedly called him "the leading practicioner of 'black' and 'grey' propaganda in the Western world" - every description of a Soviet character or setting makes that clearer than aquarium water. You read these stories and you're forced face-to-face with the cultural, social, racial and geopolitical attitudes of the mid-20th century - after all, most good sci-fi is a reflection of its time and place and a commentary on the society around it. There's an odd reverence for Nazi Germany in these stories - apart from some cursory mentions of Hitler as an angry man with a mustache in distant memory, you get the uneasy feeling Smith held some genuine reverence and awe at the idea of the Aryan ubermensch. This is very much a body of work built during the years of Operation Paperclip. Smith's work doesn't exactly free itself of the cliches of its genre, either (take a drink every time someone mentions a basic concept, the other party in the conversations replies something like "What's God?" and the first guy spits out some future-speak like "I don't know, I heard it from the robots trawling the memory banks."), yet the ideas at play are bizarre and fascinating. Space travelers who fling themselves across dimensions and end up pressing themselves against the floor in strange bodily configurations trying desperately to return to the second dimension or "space³", induced hallucinations strong enough to make the person experiencing them believe they hold physical form to keep order and stave off the madness of isolation in space, a telepathy machine that gives the user a glimpse of time so far off into the distant future that it destroys their minds. This is a glimpse into a very strange, complex body of work and it provides food for some very interesting thought.
September 6, 2018
No one before or since has written like Cordwainer Smith: the strange, soaring stories, with their hints of even further unglimpsed depths and wonders, were one of the delights of my youthful exploration of SF, and are a recurring source of pleasure even now.
Unfortunately Smith was ill-served by his early publishers: his one longish novel (Norstrilia) was hacked into two parts (The Planet Buyer and The Underpeople), and the short stories (which originally appeared in magazines like Fantasy & Science Fiction) were splattered around different compilations at random.
Now Norstrilia has been restored and published intact, and the shorts have all been collected into one properly-edited volume: The Rediscovery of Man (N.B. not the abridged Gollancz paperback of the same title).
This is one of of the more substantial anthologies, and may serve as a complement to The Best of Cordwainer Smith, as they have no stories in common.
Unfortunately Smith was ill-served by his early publishers: his one longish novel (Norstrilia) was hacked into two parts (The Planet Buyer and The Underpeople), and the short stories (which originally appeared in magazines like Fantasy & Science Fiction) were splattered around different compilations at random.
Now Norstrilia has been restored and published intact, and the shorts have all been collected into one properly-edited volume: The Rediscovery of Man (N.B. not the abridged Gollancz paperback of the same title).
This is one of of the more substantial anthologies, and may serve as a complement to The Best of Cordwainer Smith, as they have no stories in common.
August 18, 2019
It is always hard to rate and discuss collections. Some are five-star, some are three, and each is so unique that it is even difficult to categorize or group the stories. I will say, though, that I will look for more of Cordwainer Smith to read. Recommended for SF fans in general—something for everyone, from techie to social to mental to alien creatures. Also recommended to those interested in psychological fiction, as many of the stories deal with the effects space travel can have on the mind.
A unique voice in SF, Smith really focuses on the characters. Space is just the setting in which universal humanity interacts with inevitable results. Humanity is the constant among the change in times and place, which I think is very wise.
Some of my favorites were “When the People Fell” and “Think Blue, Count Two,” which deal with the power of the unexpected, the peaceful takeover. All the stories, though, pick up on trends Smith saw in his day and the reality of humanity and our behaviors.
A unique voice in SF, Smith really focuses on the characters. Space is just the setting in which universal humanity interacts with inevitable results. Humanity is the constant among the change in times and place, which I think is very wise.
Some of my favorites were “When the People Fell” and “Think Blue, Count Two,” which deal with the power of the unexpected, the peaceful takeover. All the stories, though, pick up on trends Smith saw in his day and the reality of humanity and our behaviors.
May 9, 2025
For awhile I was collecting , and adding to the TBR pile, a lot of Best of anthologies. Looking for a brief read I went with Smith's Instrumentality collection, and...
Wow. I mean yeah, I didn't love it enough to give it more stars. If you're a science fiction reader I think I have to recommend that you at least try Smith's work. The concepts, etc. that he deals with feel more like a book written today, than decades ago.
All right he sometimes comes off as dated, especially when it comes to women. But, he goes from science fiction, to psychological science fiction to surrealism. Which kind of makes sense as his military career included the U.S. Army's early attempts at psychological warfare.
No one story stands out, but the wording, style and lyricism does.
Wow. I mean yeah, I didn't love it enough to give it more stars. If you're a science fiction reader I think I have to recommend that you at least try Smith's work. The concepts, etc. that he deals with feel more like a book written today, than decades ago.
All right he sometimes comes off as dated, especially when it comes to women. But, he goes from science fiction, to psychological science fiction to surrealism. Which kind of makes sense as his military career included the U.S. Army's early attempts at psychological warfare.
No one story stands out, but the wording, style and lyricism does.
May 6, 2020
The most interesting parts of this book are the introduction and the little graph at the beginning that show the timeline of Smiths universe.
As for the stories themselves, they range from terrible to decent. The decent stories had interesting concepts, but weren't carried out to their full potential, or just lazily thrown together and under developed. The dialogue was cheesy, the characters were forgettable, and the prose consisted of short, choppy sentences throughout the entire book.
Basically every stereotype of bad science fiction can be found in this book.
As for the stories themselves, they range from terrible to decent. The decent stories had interesting concepts, but weren't carried out to their full potential, or just lazily thrown together and under developed. The dialogue was cheesy, the characters were forgettable, and the prose consisted of short, choppy sentences throughout the entire book.
Basically every stereotype of bad science fiction can be found in this book.
June 16, 2025
Very enjoyable collection of 14 short stories that test the bounds of imagination and creativity in sci-fi. My favorites have to be Gustible’s Planet, Western Science Is So Wonderful, and The Fife of Bodidharma. These stories offer such an amazing peek into the potential ways to use sci-fi as a conduit of ideas in literature. This collection features near future/far future sci-fi, hard/soft sci-fi, fantastical sci-fi, philosophical sci-fi, and much more. A great read for someone who wants quick stories that offer lots of enjoyment!
June 14, 2017
I just love this collection of short stories.
Often, when I recommend a book, I tend to gravitate towards perfect books, carefully crafted with no flaws to be noticed. This one is full of flaws, all kind of them, but the final result is nevertheless stunning and moving. Do I feel at ease recommending it, knowing that most will at least like it? No, I don't. Do I still recommend it? Yes, absolutely: maybe you will not like it one bit, but for others this may be the book of their life.
Often, when I recommend a book, I tend to gravitate towards perfect books, carefully crafted with no flaws to be noticed. This one is full of flaws, all kind of them, but the final result is nevertheless stunning and moving. Do I feel at ease recommending it, knowing that most will at least like it? No, I don't. Do I still recommend it? Yes, absolutely: maybe you will not like it one bit, but for others this may be the book of their life.
July 5, 2019
This is a great collection of stories. I love the interconnections of most of the stories. Although, the period in which they were written is apparent in a lot of the stories. Politics. There are a lot of German and Russian references. Also, there is an included timeline at the introduction. Some of the stories seem to not fit into that timeline, but are still great. Pohl writes an excellent introduction.
May 22, 2020
Fascinating sci-fi stories from a different era yet so innovative today. Cordwainer Smith amazingly integrated geo-politics, science fiction and imagination in stories that are unbelievably tangible yet vague. With concepts of mind-control drugs, the gravity of love and demi-gods from outer space, applied in a pre WWII era the Instrumentality of Mankind today is as much a historic epic as a science fiction.
September 12, 2020
Quite an enjoyable read, hard to get into (involved in) but once the link has been established it is good, and makes sense. The real link doesn't occur till the final chapter, it is worth the effort to read up until the end at which point everything in this tome will seem relevant. It was clearly written during the Cold War, as it refers to the USSR and the Americans as the two hostile forces within the human (space) realm.
August 19, 2021
This book is a collection of short stories written by Cordwainer Smith, the pseudonym of Paul Linebarger, an expert in psychological warfare. Many of his stories, including some in this collection, are set in the universe of The Instrumentality of Mankind, a far-future world. I remember reading some of his stories forty-odd years ago. However, most of these stories did not impress me. I gave the collection 3 stars.
July 28, 2025
Fantastical visions of the future by Cordwainer Smith. I found much humor in the stories. Some parts may feel a little dated as there are obvious references to the binary and trinary power pulls between certain cold-war nation-states. However, those specific stories do a wonderful job of recapturing some of the absurd moments and relations of the cold war era. Other stories by Smith reference a far future Instrumentality which governs the worlds of men.
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