The Best of Cordwainer Smith

By Cordwainer Smith, J. J. Pierce (editor),

Book cover of The Best of Cordwainer Smith

Book description

"No one ever wrote like Smith, with his special blend of intense myth-making and rich invention!"—Publishers WeeklyCordwainer Smith was one of the original visionaries to think of humanity in terms of thousands of years in the future, spread out across the universe. This brilliant collection, often cited as the first…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Best of Cordwainer Smith as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

It's hard to describe these collected stories beyond saying they're just wild. Set several thousand years from now—all in the same future history, from AD 6000 to 16000—Smith's flights of imagination are so out there, even by today's standards, that they really must have blown people's minds when he was writing in the 1950s and 1960s. Perhaps their oddness is why he doesn't have the name recognition of his contemporaries like Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, or Arthur C. Clarke, or maybe it's simply because he passed away at only fifty-three in 1966 and wasn't able to build the long legacy…

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Truth told, folks still ask if Saul Crabtree sold his soul for the perfect voice. If he sold it to angels or devils. A Bristol newspaper once asked: “Are his love songs closer to heaven than dying?” Others wonder how he wrote a song so sad, everyone who heard it…

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