Book cover of The Best of Cordwainer Smith

Book description

"No one ever wrote like Smith, with his special blend of intense myth-making and rich invention!"—Publishers WeeklyCordwainer Smith was one of the original visionaries to think of humanity in terms of thousands of years in the future, spread out across the universe. This brilliant collection, often cited as the first…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Best of Cordwainer Smith as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

It's hard to describe these collected stories beyond saying they're just wild. Set several thousand years from now—all in the same future history, from AD 6000 to 16000—Smith's flights of imagination are so out there, even by today's standards, that they really must have blown people's minds when he was writing in the 1950s and 1960s. Perhaps their oddness is why he doesn't have the name recognition of his contemporaries like Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, or Arthur C. Clarke, or maybe it's simply because he passed away at only fifty-three in 1966 and wasn't able to build the long legacy…

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On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

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