Norstrilia, by Cordwainer Smith.

Rod McBan is a likable teenager who has had four childhoods. Unable to spiek or hier like normal Norstrilians, three times he has faced the Garden of Death, and three times the decision has been to give him another childhood in the hopes that he would develop normally.

But this time, there will be no more childhoods.

The story begins:

THEME AND PROLOGUE

Story, place, and time—these are the essentials.

1

The story is simple. There was a boy who bought the planet Earth. We know that, to our cost. It only happened once, and we have taken pains that it will never happen again. He came to Earth, got what he wanted, and got away alive, in a series of very remarkable adventures. That's the story.

2

The place? That's Old North Australia. What other place could it be? Where else do farmers pay ten million credits for a handkerchief, five for a bottle of beer? Where else do people lead peaceful lives, untouched by militarism, on a world which is booby-trapped with death and things worse than death?

Old North Australia has stroon—the santaclara drug—and more than a thousand other planets clamor for it.

But you can get stroon only from Norstrilia—that's what they call it, for short—because it is a virus that grows on enormous, gigantic misshapen sheep. The sheep were taken from Earth to start a pastoral system; they ended up as the greatest of imaginable treasures.

The simple farmers became simple billionaires, but they kept their farming ways. They started tough and they got tougher. People get pretty mean if you rob them and hurt them for almost three thousand years. They get obstinate. They avoid strangers, except for sending out spies and a very occasional tourist. They don't mess with other people, and they're death, death, death inside out and turned over twice if you mess with them.

Then one of their kids showed up on Earth and bought it. The whole place, lock, stock, and underpeople.

That was a real embarrassment for Earth.

And for Norstrilia, too.

This is the only novel that Cordwainer Smith wrote. I usually recommend it to people as an easy introduction to his works and an engrossing story in its own right. It was pulled together from various tales, as the introduction by Cordwainer Smith scholar Alan C. Elms explains.

You can get Norstrilia at Amazon.

Contents

Introduction, by Alan Elms

Theme and Prologue
At the Gate of the Garden of Death
The Trial
Anger of the Onseck
The Old Broken Treasures in the Gap
The Quarrel at the Dinner Table
The Palace of the Governor of Night
The Eye Upon the Sparrow
FOE Money, SAD Money
Traps, Fortunes and Watchers
The Nearby Exile
Hospitality and Entrapment
The High Sky Flying
Discourses and Recourses
The Road to the Catmaster
The Department Store of Hearts' Desires
Everybody's Fond of Money
Tostig Amaral
Birds, Far Underground
His Own Strange Altar
Counsels, Councils, Consoles and Consuls

Appendix: Variant Texts