This is the complete short fiction of Cordwainer Smith, who died young, fifty or so, before his career got to fully open up, and it shows in a bittersweet way, this sense of a much bigger universe that only got partially mapped before the writer ran out of time to keep exploring it. All of it sits inside the Instrumentality, his sprawling future history built around Norstrilia and the C’mell stories and centuries of unspoken backstory you’re never handed directly.

The opening line of “The Ballad of Lost C’mell” might be one of the best openers in the genre, something like she was a girlygirl and they were true men, the lords of creation, but she pitted her wits against them and won, and reading him in general reminds me of reading Tolkien in that sense of thousands of years of history humming underneath every sentence, except Smith never once stops to explain any of it to you the way Tolkien eventually does in the appendices.

Not every story lands. The first third is the strongest stretch by a wide margin, “Scanners Live in Vain” and “The Game of Rat and Dragon” especially, and “The Lady Who Sailed the Soul” is the one I keep coming back to even though I couldn’t fully explain the plot to someone else without the explanation taking longer than the story itself. The prose has this stylized, almost incantatory quality, closer to Kafka in places, closer to Moorcock in others, never quite settling into one register long enough to get comfortable in it.

I found the whole thing almost incomprehensible in stretches and weirdly compelling anyway, which I know sounds like a contradiction but isn’t, not really, once you’re a few stories in. Not every story here is good. Most of them are, and the handful that are genuinely great are strange enough that I don’t think anyone else was writing anything quite like them at the time.