by severa
"Cordwainer Smith" was one of the pen names of Paul Linebarger (1913-1966), the one he used to write science fiction. Linebarger led an interesting life - his godfather was Sun Yat-sen, one of the fathers of modern China, he was an advisor to Chiang Kai-shek, and he was a professor at Johns Hopkins who worked for the CIA and wrote the first textbook on psychological warfare - but it's his work as Cordwainer Smith that's best known today.
It isn't a large body of work, just one novel and a few dozen short stories, and his work wasn't that popular in his lifetime. But Smith was always highly regarded by his peers and his work has certainly outlived him. A writer's writer, but also a must read for science fiction fans.
Most of his stories take place in a single shared universe, the Instrumentality of Mankind. These stories are spread across thousands of years, following the expansion of humanity into space after a devastating war, and the gradual loss of cultural vitality as the galaxy becomes an engineered utopia. Smith returns again and again to the same set of ideas - animals uplifted to intelligence but enslaved, space travel as something inherently painful and tortuous - that build on themselves through each iteration, until what at first seems disjoint reveals itself to be a fully thought out world despite its vast scope.
All of Smith's short stories have been collected in a single volume, The Rediscovery of Man, which has organized his Instrumentality stories in more or less chronological order. So you only need to acquire that book plus his novel Norstrilia to read all of Smith's works.
