Paperback, 240 pages
English language
Published Feb. 25, 2003 by I Books.
Norstrilia is a science fiction novel by American writer Paul Linebarger, published under the pseudonym Cordwainer Smith. It is the only novel he published under this name, which he used for his science fiction works (though several related short stories were once packaged together as a short novel Quest of the Three Worlds). It takes place in Smith's Instrumentality of Mankind universe, and was heavily influenced by the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West. The novel is in part a sequel to Smith's 1962 short story "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell", featuring some of the same characters and settings.
Fantastic. Sweet and bittersweet, weird and retro but also a bit timeless - Cordwainer Smith is sublime and this story was a nice little joy and distraction.
Cordwainer Smith was a genius, no doubt about it, and I would have given Norstrilia five stars if not for the horrible mishmash that barely cements the two halves of the book together. Norstrilia suffers, in other words, from the old fashioned affliction that panged so many books written by short story writers in the 1950s and 1960s: it was cobbled together from two novellas, and boy, do the sutures show. This slender little volume has an astonishingly good opening; not just a great hook but a dazzling entry point into a future setting that is well populated with realistic characters (the men, anyway). Slightly past the halfway point, the story flags and the dialogue becomes as bad as the beginning was good. It recovers to some degree, and it ends better than expected, but why wasn't the thing put through a proper rewrite at the time? I almost wish …
Cordwainer Smith was a genius, no doubt about it, and I would have given Norstrilia five stars if not for the horrible mishmash that barely cements the two halves of the book together. Norstrilia suffers, in other words, from the old fashioned affliction that panged so many books written by short story writers in the 1950s and 1960s: it was cobbled together from two novellas, and boy, do the sutures show. This slender little volume has an astonishingly good opening; not just a great hook but a dazzling entry point into a future setting that is well populated with realistic characters (the men, anyway). Slightly past the halfway point, the story flags and the dialogue becomes as bad as the beginning was good. It recovers to some degree, and it ends better than expected, but why wasn't the thing put through a proper rewrite at the time? I almost wish I had read the novellas themselves in sequence, rather than this "definitive edition."
