Instrumentality of MankindCordwainer Smith
Instrumentality of Mankind
by Cordwainer Smith · first published 2011
4mentions
2recommended by
4HN commenters
2016–2025first – last mentioned
50% recommend50% neutral
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…Smith. Those books are quite strange though. I wouldn't even call them ahead of their time, I would call them sui generis. Completely idiosyncratic. One brilliant weirdo's brain. I keep spare copies of The Instrumentality of Mankind and The Best of Cordwainer Smith around, and a couple months ago somebody asked me about them. I hesitated before lending them to him, because it's impossible to guess whether a given person will like…
on “Throngs of Himself: On Paul Linebarger, a.k.a. Cordwainer Smith (2018)” ↗Norstrilia I absultely second. Actually, all of Cordwainer Smith is worth a read, but stories set in The Instrumentality of Mankind certainly are. The culture novels by Iain M. Banks are also amazing, ship names in particular, but also themes. And then there is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (or is this too recent) another…
on “My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before” ↗Yes indeed. I can't find this information online but I remember an anecdote according to which Cordwainer Smith had explained the entire timeline of the Instrumentality of Mankind in terms of current goings-on on the international stage. Of (some of) which he had a certain privileged vantage point, of course. I mainly read his works translated in my native Greek at a time when…
on “Self-replicating radiation-shield for deep-space exploration: Radiotrophic fungi” ↗Your viewpoint was not uncommon in older SF, like the Eternals in Zardoz, the Spacers of Asimov, or under the Instrumentality of Mankind of Cordwainer Smith. You might start by considering how Banks, Niven, Stross, and others have managed to write novels about a post-scarcity future. I have two observations. First, few novels are written…
on “If You Live 30 Years You'll Live 1000 Years” ↗