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Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons, by Cordwainer Smith

Posted: Sat Mar 29, 2008 9:26 pm
by Omphalos
If you have never read a Cordwainer Smith story before, you I recommend that you find a few and give them a try. Cordwainer Smith was, IMHO, a great writer of short stories and its a shame that he died in relative obscurity. He was a professor of international affairs and worked for the CIA. He was also the godson of Sun Yat-sen and a close confidant to Chang Kai-shek. In his later years he was a very accomplished author on the topic of psychological warfare and was an intelligence operative who worked in Australia and China. As interesting as Smith's (real name: Paul Linebarger) real life was, his fiction is amazing, though I have noticed that people either love him or cannot stand him. Though I dont know very much about the topic, I have been shown a lot of elements of traditional Chinese narrative that run through his stories.

Here is one of his short stories. Its set in the Instrumentality of Mankind Universe that Smith wrote, I think, all of his stories in. This story is a set up to his so-so (only) novel, Norstrilia, and its about madness. If you have not read my review of this book yet, go give it a shot now. This book is startlingly similar in its set up to Dune.