Norstrilia explores these questions and many more in Smith’s uniquely entertaining, irreverent, and hilarious way. Which is the more rewarding path? What good is money and wealth if you live a frugal and spartan existence? On the other hand, what good are indulgence and self-gratification, the fruits of wealth, if one becomes inured to the pleasures they afford? Which path leads to happiness and fulfillment which to misery and sorrow? One could characterize this quandary as Epicureanism-or to be less charitable, hedonism-versus Stoicism-or to be less charitable, asceticism. In the end, for all its (literally) alien strangeness, Norstrilia is very much a human story, and one of the central questions it explores is almost as old as mankind itself (or as old as wealth and commodity are, anyway). The prose and style reminded me of a less-polished version of Kurt Vonnegut: chock-full of humor, irony, absurdity, and, of course, preposterously madcap hijinks of every sort. However you read it though, Norstrilia is an engaging, thoughtful, and slyly funny book. Norstrilia is part of Smith’s Instrumentality series, and is preceded by two collections: The Instrumentality of Man (the first in the series), and The Rediscovery of Man (the second).Īs Norstrilia contains many allusions to characters and events from these preceding volumes, I would definitely recommend reading them first (although unfortunately, in my ignorance of the correct order of the Instrumentality cycle, I did not, and thus missed a lot of references I would otherwise have understood. Quite a departure from the fixation on cats that appeared in most of the previous stories.A fun, funny, and deeply quirky book, Norstrilia is, regrettably, the only novel-length work ever written by the great under-appreciated SFF author Cordwainer Smith, whose output was dominated by short stories. Putting aside for the moment some amusement about a member of the Mercer family being sent to eternal punishment for treasonous crimes, this is an excellent examination of the notion of retribution, and of the cruelty and humanity that organically arise within any system of justice. The highlight of the collection is the final story, A Planet Named Shayol. They say that fifty thousand a year were killed on the roads alone.

Think of the millions of vehicles that ran on those roads, the people filled with greed and rage and hate, rushing past each other with their engines on fire. So much of it is so dated or so innocent that one gets caught off-guard by the occasional critique of modern life: Don't think about the roads. Pretty odd stuff, a lot of it downright silly - like the existence of mind-destroying monsters in the space between stars, and mankind's use of cats to combat them.

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