The Rediscovery of Man

I wish I could bought it!

Cordwainer Smith whose real name was Paul Linebarger wrote a series of stories set in the far future in an era of genetic modifications of humans and animals alike in which animals modiified into humanoid forms serve humans who have not always changed for the better and risk losing their souls. Humanity travels and colonizes the stars using planoforming vessels. Cyborgs and robots are common place.

A strange colony of people guarded by Mother Hiltons' Lil Kittoons and descended from Australians provides immortality to humans in the form of stroon extracted from giant sheep mutated by an alien virus on Nostralia.

Its normal to be telepathic, and a Turtle girl called T'ruth who lives in the palace of an old man sleeping thru his final extended years, surrounded by a permanent hurricane, is one of the most powerful of those telepaths, animal or human, and aids a young man on a quest for healing and power and forgiveness and learning how to implement both revenge and justice on his homeworld.

The Lords and Ladies of the Instrumentality rule most of the Galaxy from their tower on Old Old Earth.

The leader of the animal rights movement and the Underpeople is a mutated humanoid, part Daimoni, and part Eagle, trying to save animals and humans alike by preaching the illegal religion of D'Joan, a matryred dog woman.

A cat woman called C'mell descended and modified from Persian cats is one of the most beautiful and skilled courtesans in the World and has become temporary wife to a Nostralian boy who will briefly become one of the wealthy and most dangerous powers of the Galaxy.

Either by buying the omnibus edition or older paerback and hardbacks Visit the Worlds Envisualized by Cordwainer Smith where horses climb up the sides of a crystal gorge, ornithocopters literally have bird brains, and religion is illegal but still practised and the Chinese colonized a terraformed Venus !

Galaxy bookshop is next to the QVB in Sydney. It is one of Sydney and Australia's longest and longest running SF stores. It's on the same block as Abbeys!

This has been an unsolicited plug for Cordwainer Smith and Galaxy tho if any kind publisher lurking would like to send me books to review ...? Email me!

Enjoy Cordwainer Smith's Visions of a possible Future in whatever edition you encounter it!

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