Norstrilia (written as two short novels in the 1960s but not published as one until 1975 after the author’s death), is a unique masterpiece by Paul Linebarger who wrote under the name Cordwainer Smith. The story begins with an odd preface that throws the key elements of the book at you in the manner of a carnival barker. Or a cross between that and the speaker of a Shakespearean prologue, announcing the nature of the play about to unfold before you. It’s a wacky introduction that sets up the reader for strange marvels that sound a little incoherent and sends you into an opening chapter where the unusual world of the planet Norstrilia, part of the universe presided over by the Instrumentality of Mankind, begins to make sense. But follow closely because it’s a lot to take in right from the start.
Rod McBan, the 151st of that name, is either about to inherit a ranch called the Station of Doom (despite the name, the richest on the planet of Old North Australia or Norstrilia), or he is about to be killed if his mental defect is judged unworthy of Norstrilian life. That defect consists of his hit-or-miss telepathic powers. All other people of Norstrilia can spiek and hier, that is, communicate through thought alone, but Rod can only muster an occasional explosive telepathic fit when angry (or sometimes a sweeping mental power that brings him the thoughts of everyone for miles around) and has to use his ears and voice most of the time to listen and speak. So Rod has to appear on this day before three judges who will decide his fate. He is ritually washed and prepared as if for his death by his family. But Rod survives this first ordeal, only to find that he has an enemy, called the Onsec, a childhood friend who hates him so much he is determined to have him killed. Rod narrowly escapes an attack by a powerful robotic bird and realizes he has to do something to protect himself.
Now, the source of wealth on this planet is a substance called stroon which extends human life for thousands of years. It is produced by gigantic infected sheep which only thrive on this planet. Because no other planets can produce stroon, it is the most valuable commodity in the human universe and has made everybody on the spare, stark Norstrilia incredibly wealthy.
But the Norstrilians didn’t want all that wealth or the amazing things it could buy, so an earlier government taxed all the money and forced the people to surrender all their expensive possessions. The people returned to their simple lives on their dry, sparse lands with their gigantic sheep fed and cared for by machines. Except that an earlier Rod McBan had held back a powerful computer which he concealed deep within a temple-like building that no one could see except for the genetically coded generations of Rod McBans. The current Rod McBan finds the computer in hopes that it can help him evade an all but certain death at the hands of his enemy.
The computer, which is sentient, tells him he could do this if he corners the market on stroon and becomes rich enough to buy Old Earth and escapes to live there. So the computer sets to work in a heavy overnight session of online trading, and suddenly Rod is the richest man in the universe.
But that only plunges him into new troubles since if he goes to Earth everyone will want to kidnap or kill him to get control of his riches. To survive, he has to undergo another kind of ritual death. He is cut into pieces, freeze-dried and fitted into a small box. Then he is taken to Old Mars where a doctor reassembles him but disguises him in the form of a cat person. This turns him into one of the great class of underpeople, intelligent beings based on animal genetics but given human form and minds. On Old Earth, these are the servants and slaves of the real humans who keep them strictly segregated. As Rod quickly discovers, it is death to go to areas restricted to real humans, and he must pass for a dumb cat acting as a courier.
Accompanying him on his earth adventures is C’mell, a cat woman who has been designed as a “girlygirl” or a sort of sex slave for real humans. She happens to be one of the most brilliant people Rod meets, and she is also tasked with bringing him secretly to the Master of the underpeople, who lives deep down below the surface. This is a half-man, half-bird who is clearly a religious leader and moral guide for the millions of underpersons.
Though there are many aspects of the hero’s journey in Rod’s adventures, including death and rebirth and travels to the underworld, his is more a story of spiritual and moral enlightenment, if a fairly zany and unpredictable one. But there is another dimension to the story that has to do with popular perception and myth-building. Rod himself is pretty much a simple fellow who wants to do the right thing. Yet Cordwainer Smith keeps emphasizing that everyone he meets, and many he doesn’t, use him for their own purposes.
Not only is Rod disguised for his journey to Old Earth, he is also accompanied by a dozen other Rod McBans, that is, robots and one human disguised to look like him. Smith gives us flashes of how these other Rod McBans fare through the eyes of people trying to get control of him and late in the novel through the stories that have been made up about him. One Rod McBan is actually a woman who was a servant in his household, and she/he attracts a woman who wants to marry him/her. Other stories, that people believe as the absolute truth, cover the range of rumor and myth. Rod McBan was only an invention of the lords of the Instrumentality so that they could buy the Earth. Rod McBan wasn’t from Norstrilia but was a hominid from some other world who used pirate money to buy the world. Some of the Underpeople long to see Rod as a savior, promised in their beliefs, who will come to liberate them.
Cordwainer Smith’s world strikes me as a cross between something Kurt Vonnegut or Philip K. Dick might come up with, but it has Smith’s unique vision. While it’s possible to dwell on the bizarre aspects of this universe, I kept pausing at the many beautiful and insightful passages that suddenly spring out of the flow of encounters with strange beings. And the novel is full of Smith’s poetry. People sing ancient songs or make up new ones as the mood hits them. All the verse reads better as song lyrics than poetry, but that’s just my bias.
Cordwainer Smith produced just this one novel, a kind of modernist fable that makes you think about your own reactions to the strange elements of the story. All his short stories, which I have yet to read, apparently fit into the same grand scheme of the Instrumentality universe. I’m told they are full of inconsistencies and bizarre twists about how things work in that universe, but then it wouldn’t be Cordwainer Smith if everything followed a single pattern and a set of predictable adventures. Smith’s writing is always amazing, unforgettable, full of human insight and completely unexpected. That’s what makes it great, at least for this reader.
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