The Rediscovery of Man

One of the strangest books I’ve read up here, and that’s saying something given what else has come through this tower. It’s the collected short fiction, all of it, the whole Instrumentality future stitched together from stories written across twenty some years, and I read it the way you’d want to, a story or two at a sitting, closed it, let the light change, came back later. Doesn’t reward being rushed.

Smith, actual name Paul Linebarger, was apparently a political science professor who advised on psychological warfare, and it shows, there’s something in how these stories get told like half remembered myth, legend sixty thousand years downstream of us, that reads less like plotted fiction and more like liturgy. “Scanners Live in Vain” opens the collection and it’s the one everybody mentions first, and “The Dead Lady of Clown Town” is the one people keep circling back to as the best of the set, a novella about an underperson named D’joan playing out something close to a Joan of Arc story with genetically uplifted animals standing in for the persecuted. “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard” and “A Planet Named Shayol” both stuck with me too, Shayol especially, a prison world that gets under your skin and stays there.

Not every story lands. A couple made no sense at all, might be intentional, might not, and one story leans on some genuinely dated attitudes that are hard to read past even understanding when it was written. The prose swings between clumsy and gorgeous sometimes in the same paragraph. But the scope of the thing, the sense of a whole deep history glimpsed sideways, is like nothing else I’ve read.

Four stars. Slow reading, worth every evening it took.