I can't tell you what this book is like.

Sure, I can say it has 671 pages of acclaimed stories—every short story that Cordwainer Smith ever wrote.

I can say that the devoted people at the New England Science Fiction Assocation outdid themselves in creating the most accurate texts possible.

But still... what would you know about the essence of the book, the fascination of seeing how Cordwainer Smith tells a tale?

So I'm going to let my father himself introduce his own book, by quoting the beginnings of some of the stories.

If that makes you want to read more, you can get The Rediscovery of Man quickly from Amazon.com, or the British Amazon.

Contents of The Rediscovery of Man

Introduction by John J. Pierce
Editor's Introduction, by James A. Mann

Stories of the Instrumentality of Mankind

No, No, Not Rogov! (read the beginning)
War No. 8 1 -Q (rewritten version)
Mark Elf
The Queen of the Afternoon
Scanners Live in Vain (read the beginning)
The Lady Who Sailed The Soul
When the People Fell
Think Blue, Count Two
The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All
The Game of Rat and Dragon
The Burning of the Brain
From Gustible's Planet
Himself in Anachron
The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal
Golden the Ship Was-Oh! Oh! Oh!
The Dead Lady of Clown Town
Under Old Earth (read the beginning)
Drunkboat
Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons
Alpha Ralpha Boulevard (read the beginning)
The Ballad of Lost C'mell
A Planet Named Shayol
On the Gem Planet
On the Storm Planet
On the Sand Planet
Three to a Given Star
Down to a Sunless Sea

Other Stories

War No. 81-Q (original version)
Western Science Is So Wonderful
Nancy
The Fife of Bodidharma
Angerhelm
The Good Friends

Please note: There is a British paperback with the identical title (The Rediscovery of Man) which is available at the British amazon.com, but it is a reprint of the old Ballentine paperback, Best of Cordwainer Smith, and it only contains a dozen stories. Confusing!

From "No, No, Not Rogov"

That golden shape on the golden steps shook and fluttered like a bird gone mad—like a bird imbued with an intellect and a soul, and, nevertheless, driven mad by ecstasies and terrors beyond human understanding—ecstasies drawn momentarily down into reality by the consummation of superlative art. A thousand worlds watched.
      Had the ancient calendar continued, this would have been AD 13,582. After defeat, after disappointment, after ruin and reconstruction, mankind had leapt among the stars.

From "Scanners Live in Vain"

Martel was angry. He did not even adjust his blood away from anger. He stamped across the room by judgment, not by sight. When he saw the table hit the floor, and could tell by the expression on Luci's face that the table must have made a loud crash, he looked down to see if his leg were broken. It was not. Scanner to the core, he had to scan himself. The action was reflex and automatic. The inventory included his legs, abdomen, Chestbox of instruments, hands, arms, face, and back with the mirror. Only then did Martel go back to being angry. He talked with his voice, even though he knew that his wife hated its blare and preferred to have him write.
      "I tell you, I must cranch. I have to cranch. It's my worry, isn't it?"

From "Under Old Earth"

I need a temporary dog
For a temporary job
On a temporary place
         Like Earth!

—Song from The Merchant of Menace

1

There were the Douglas-Oyang planets, which circled their sun in a single cluster, riding around and around the same orbit unlike any other planets known. There were the gentlemen-suicides back on Earth, who gambled their lives—even more horribly, gambled sometimes for things worse than their lives—against different kinds of geophysics which real men had never experienced. There were girls who fell in love with such men, however stark and dreadful their personal fates might be. There was the Instrumentality, with its unceasing labor to keep man man. And there were the citizens who walked in the boulevards before the Rediscovery of Man. The citizens were happy. They had to be happy. If they were found sad, they were calmed and drugged and changed until they were happy again.
      This story concerns three of them: the gambler who took the name Sun-boy, who dared to go down to the Gebiet, who confronted himself before he died; the girl Santuna, who was fulfilled in a thousand ways before she died; and the Lord Sto Odin, a most ancient of days, who knew it all and never dreamed of preventing any of it.
      Music runs through this story. The soft sweet music of the Earth government and the Instrumentality, bland as honey and sickening in the end. The wild illegal pulsations of the Gebiet, where most men were forbidden to enter. Worst of all, the crazy fugues and improper melodies of the Bezirk, closed to men for fifty-seven centuries—opened by accident, found, trespassed in! And with it our story begins.

From "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard"

We were drunk with happiness in those early years. Everybody was, especially the young people. These were the first years of the Rediscovery of Man, when the Instrumentality dug deep in the treasury, reconstructing the old cultures, the old languages, and even the old troubles. The nightmare of perfection had taken our forefathers to the edge of suicide. Now under the leadership of the Lord Jestocost and the Lady Alice More, the ancient civilizations were rising like great land masses out of the sea of the past.
     I myself was the first man to put a postage stamp on a letter, after fourteen thousand years. I took Virginia to hear the first piano recital. We watched at the eye-machine when cholera was released in Tasmania, and saw the Tasmanians dancing in the streets, now that they did not have to be protected any more. Everywhere, things became exciting. Everywhere, men and women worked with a wild will to build a more imperfect world.