The Best of Cordwainer Smith
3.0 Stars
1-1-2015

A collection of enjoyable and weird sci-fi short stories. The stories are from the distant past (1950's and 1960's?), and are set in the far, far future. The stories are not sci-fi in the sense that they have lots of science, rather they are futuristic fantastic tales that are occasional metaphors for modern issues. The stories range widely. Some are adventures, some are romances, some are about religion and civil rights for cat people, some are about whether an engineered and perfected society would suck the enjoyment out of life. I think my favorite is Alpha Ralpha Boulevard, where some citizens are newly released from their technological paradise and have a sort of "first contact" with a material world not carefully crafted to cater to them. In general, the writing is brisk and the world building inventive. It suffers a bit from the common 1960's tropes (mixing psionics and sci-fi, conflating physical beauty and meaning, the idea of an emotional or metaphysical oneness or transcendence that will change things forever). It also has lots of cat-girls?