Under Old Earth and Other Explorations Cordwainer Smith This collection, as with the majority of Cordwainer Smith’s work, is set among the worlds of the Instrumentality – his vision of far future humanity. Smith was primarily a short story writer – only writing one novel – and this book contains some of his finest work. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,25,50,4,11,15,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-c-2","category-fiction","category-rated","category-science-fiction","category-short-stories","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2038,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75\/revisions\/2038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Under](\"http:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/wp-content\/uploads\/2006\/06\/underolearth.thumbnail.jpg\")
<\/span>This collection, as with the majority of Cordwainer Smith’s work, is set among the worlds of the Instrumentality – his vision of far future humanity. Smith was primarily a short story writer – only writing one novel – and this book contains some of his finest work.
\nFor much of this collection I found it a chore to finish the stories.
\nSmith had some fantastic ideas, with some very astute insights into the future of humanity, the milieu is superbly realised with every nuance thought through, but his writing can be as dry and unexciting as cold toast.
\n(As an aside Smith’s real name was Paul Linebarger, and he was a professor of Asiatic Studies and an expert on psychological warfare. I suppose I could blame his writing style on this background, but I’m clueless when it comes to literary theory)
\nHighlight for me would be the story of the deposed ruler, who instead of coming back to his kingdom with an army, sneaks in and saves his people by subtly altering the mind of the dictator who replaced him.
\nThis is worth a quick read if you have a keen interest in the past giants of science fiction, or if you are particularly keen on short
\nstory collections. It really wasn?t my kind of thing.<\/p>\n