The Short Fiction of Cordwainer Smith

This collection gathers the early public-domain short fiction of Cordwainer Smith, the pen name of the scholar and soldier Paul Linebarger, and one of the strangest and most original voices in science fiction. His stories belong to a vast future history called the Instrumentality of Mankind, spanning thousands of years and filled with underpeople bred from animals, planoform starships, and a mythic, dreamlike sense of the far future. Even the earliest of them, such as the famous Scanners Live in Vain, read unlike anyone else’s work, told in a haunting, almost legendary voice. For readers new to him, these tales open a wholly distinctive imagined universe. This free PDF and EPUB presents his collected early stories.