Review of Norstrilia by Cordwainer Smith

One of the joys of Jack Vance is the manner in which he surfs the edge of the absurd. Constantly on the verge of being swamped by a wave, he perpetually shoots the pipe, always emerging into the colorful yet familiar waters of pulp science fiction. Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia (1975), with its wild possibilities and worlds and characters, feels similar. But instead of shooting the pipe, Smith busts out a triple flip into the froth of the absurd beyond.

Norstrilia is the wild and wacky, far-future story of Rod McCan and his quest to be a hiering and spieking inheritor of his family's legacy. A naive teen Aussie, Rod's family have become immensely rich raising exponentially large, sick sheep. Yes, vast, mouth-breathing ewes. They have a hundred or so of the animals, harvesting them for stroon, A Dune-esque immortality drug sold to the wider universe at top dollar. Yes, you read that correctly: hiering and spieking, which in Norstrilia are the telepathic ways everyone communicates. Except Rod, who is so desperate to gain those skills he has been reborn multiple times. But each time he lacks the skills. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and at the beginning of the novel he asks his AI computer friend for ideas. He gets one: buying Earth. And that is just the beginning.

While Norstrilia is a novel, its pace and dynamic nature lend it the feel of Smith's collection of stories in the same setting: The Rediscovery of Man. Murderous swallow bots, cat women, temporary shoebox coffins, little blue men, galaxy overlords, pyramid schemes, surgeon monkeys—it's the definition of milieu, not to mention never explains itself. It recognizes that to provide 'hard science' is to kill much of the story. Furthermore, it recognizes that for as absurd as the scenes may be, they actually draw closer to human reality than a lot of the so-called 'realistic science fiction' out there. (Terry Pratchett did the same.)

Undoubtedly mainstream science fiction readers will bounce, and bounce hard off Norstrilia. It ain't commercial and it ain't too accessible. Smith switches gears in a transmission that seems to have no top gear, and his prose is jittery by design. Style matches story. And yet there is a clear guiding hand, a lucid writer fully cognizant of the tangled web he is weaving, and having a blast creating sci-fi toys on the fly.

And yet—and yet—beneath it all there is a human heart beating. Smith stomps his foot, toots his trumpet, and smashes the cymbals of his little one-man band, but there is an eye staring hard at the reality, the human reality of the more things change, the more they stay the same. People can populate the galaxy and build the wildest gadgets imaginable, but motivations, for better and worse, remain the same throughout. And who better to exemplify this than a bumbling teen raising mega sheep to feed a universe of mortality starved sentiences?

In the end, Norstrilia (like The Rediscovery of Man) is likely the most singular, most unique science fiction you're ever to read. Sitting decidedly off-center to popular science fiction, look before you leap. If you want comfortable story you've read in one form or another before, this is not it. If, however, you are looking for something decidedly off the beaten path, Norstrilia may be it. Wacky is as wacky does, but there is a clear intelligence guiding the book to its. This is genre with proper, human soul that, for my money, possesses a million times more imagination than most any space opera out there.