The Ballad of Lost C'mell by Cordwainer Smith

Readers were intrigued, wanting to know more about the world of this cult of space-faring supervisors, the titular Scanners who cut off all sensory input to the brain, dehumanizing themselves in order to survive the ‘great pain of space’ involved in interstellar travel. A quintessential Cordwainer Smith story, Scanners Live In Vain would’ve been forgotten if not for the fact that another contributor to this particular issue was the SF writer and editor, Frederick Pohl who – impressed by the originality of this new writer and struck by the story’s imagery – decided to re-publish it in 1952 in an anthology he was editing, which took the story to a wider audience, and needless to say, was an instant hit. Scanners Live In Vain first appeared in 1950 in an obscure publication called Fantasy Book, a magazine now only remembered for publishing this story. It contained all the ones I’d earlier in Space Lords, plus Smith’s first – and perhaps his most celebrated – short story, Scanners Live In Vain.

The search for more of his books, however, proved futile, until one day almost a year later and just as serendipitously, I stumbled upon a Gollancz SF Masterworks copy of The Rediscovery of Man, a collection of some of Cordwainer Smith’s best short stories. I wanted to dive further into the world of the far future that Cordwainer Smith had created – because each story had only revealed a part of a much larger whole, each self-contained but with enough hints of greater wonders that lay in store in Smith’s ‘weird and wonderful universe’. My favourite being The Ballad of Lost C’mell, with its fantastic opening line, ‘She was a girly girl and they were true men, lords of creation, but she pitted her wits against them and she won.’ By the time I finished the four short stories contained in that book, I was a Cordwainer Smith fan for life. It was to be one of the best discoveries of my reading life. It was 15 years ago, while rifling through the shelves of a second-hand bookstore – on to be exact – that I stumbled upon a much-read copy of a book called Space Lords by an author called Cordwainer Smith, with the description above jumping up at me in big bold letters from the back cover. Where living weapons guard the most important secret-the secret of immortality.Ī universe ruled by an omnipotent elite known to men as the Lords of the Instrumentality. Where men ‘built’ from animals labor for mankind-and plot in secret.

Take a trip 40,000 years into the future to the weird and wonderful universe of Cordwainer Smith.Ī universe where giant planoforming ships ply the spacelanes.

The Ballad of Lost C'mell by Cordwainer Smith