Search Worlds Without End

Welcome to the strangest, most distinctive future ever imagined by a science fiction writer. An insterstellar empire ruled by the mysterious Lords of the Instrumentality, whose access to the drug stroon from the planet Norstrilia confers on them virtual immortality. A world in which wealthy and leisured humanity is served by the underpeople, genetically engineered animals turned into the semblance of people. A world in which the great ships which sail between the stars are eventually supplanted by the mysterious, instantaneous technique of planoforming. A world of wonder and myth, and extraordinary imagination.

(Note that this collection was originally published in 1975 as The Best of Cordwainer Smith, the 3rd book in Ballantine's Classic Library of Science Fiction. It was then republished as The Rediscovery of Man in 1988 as VGSF Classics #25, then again in 1999 as a Gollancz SF Masterworks edition. It is a different collection from the NESFA press collection The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith, which has different contents).

Table of Contents:

• Cordwainer Smith: The Shaper of Myths - essay by John J. Pierce
• The Instrumentality of Mankind (timeline) - essay by John J. Pierce
• Scanners Live in Vain (1950) - novelette
• The Lady Who Sailed the Soul (1960) - novelette by Genevieve Linebarger and Cordwainer Smith
• The Game of Rat and Dragon (1955) - short story
• The Burning of the Brain (1958) - short story
• Golden the Ship Was -- Oh! Oh! Oh! (1959) - short story by Genevieve Linebarger and Cordwainer Smith
• The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal (1964) - short story
• The Dead Lady of Clown Town (1964) - novella
• Under Old Earth (1966) - novelette
• Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons (1961) - novelette
• Alpha Ralpha Boulevard (1961) - novelette
• The Ballad of Lost C'mell (1962) - novelette
• A Planet Named Shayol (1961) - novelette

Rod McBan owned Earth.

One night of frenzied manipulation had made an obscure rancer on a far planet the richest man in history, and the sole owner of Man's home planet. It had also made him the target of every criminal in the Universe.

There was one way Rod McBan could reach the planet he owned - alive. But it meant he would have to die first...

The Planet Buyer and The Underpeople were combined into the novel Norstrilia.