Rating: 
Summary: Cordwainer Smith, The best of the old SF writers.
Review: When Heinlin wrote of BEMs, rockets and the need to find men who could memorize binary code to communicate with computers 200 years in the future, Smith(Paul Linebarger) gave us the Lords of Instrumentality and the horrors of ships lost between space. Truely better than his comtemporaries, why didn't he become as popular?
Rating:
Summary: So little, you could cry
Review: When I picked up this book (after getting it from a friend), I had some doubts, even if the person in question never had let me down before with book recommendations.
After reading the introduction, about all the "unspoken and unwritten" clues and history events, I was even more sceptical.
However, I was completely wrong in my premonition.
Smith combines modern philosphy, avant-garde thinking and religion in what to me is one of the greatest dreams of our time.
A Sci-Fi writer is often forced to grapple and come to terms with todays problems so that a future can be presented and Smith does that in a finely tuned, delicate and yet enchanting and engrossing way.
His interest in religion and populatory control shine like a guiding light in darkness. What must happen with religion? How must a state operate in order to contain and control a potentially destructive (as humans often are) population when it is spread across the stars?
What happens to love? Love - in sci-fi, where it often is just a bonus the hero picks up after the adventure, plays an important role in Smith's work. So does religion. And morality.After finishing the short stories and frantically reading my way through Norstrilia, my first feeling was a deep sadness. This was all you see. The two books are the only things that are easily available to the savvy or not-so-savvy reader today. I know that Smith wrote other things under other names, but the fiction left me tear-eyed, shaking, laughing and thinking.
Smith sits on my Sci-Fi throne together with Herbert and Dick, not having Asimovs slow, almost stuffy style, but keeping it serious but playful, strange but enchanting. Read it. And read it again. And again. And again... and again.
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