Norstrilia

On the fabulously wealthy planet Norstrilia—properly Old North Australia—vast, diseased sheep produce stroon, the only substance in the universe capable of granting human beings near-immortality. The Norstrilians consequently possess almost limitless wealth, which they defend by maintaining a deliberately harsh, old-fashioned society modelled upon an Australia remembered across thousands of years and several layers of historical misunderstanding. The future has conquered death but retained sheep farming and social disapproval.

Rod McBan the 151st is the last male heir to the Station of Doom, one of Norstrilia’s great estates. He is intelligent, awkward and considered defective because his telepathic abilities work unreliably. On a planet where young people must pass examinations to prove themselves worthy of adulthood, this is more than a minor educational inconvenience. Failure can result in death, making Norstrilian assessment procedures notably firmer than current recommendations.

After surviving the tests and an attempt upon his life, Rod turns to an ancient family computer for help. Through an audacious series of transactions in the stroon futures market, he becomes the richest person in human history and technically buys the planet Earth. Financial regulators intervene to ensure that nobody can repeat the manoeuvre, but allow Rod to keep his fortune, perhaps because even the Instrumentality of Mankind occasionally wants to see how an especially interesting administrative error develops.

Rod travels to Earth disguised as an exceedingly expensive piece of cargo. There he encounters a civilisation of immense age, elaborate pleasures and profound inequality. Humanity enjoys artificially extended life while the Underpeople—animals genetically transformed into humanlike servants—perform much of the work without receiving human rights. They bear names reflecting their animal ancestry, including the cat-derived C’mell, one of Cordwainer Smith’s most memorable characters and considerably more humane than many legally recognised humans.

Rod’s fortune attracts officials, criminals, revolutionaries and people eager to improve his circumstances by separating him from his money. His journey becomes entangled with the struggle of the Underpeople and their mysterious leader E’telekeli. Having purchased Earth by accident, Rod must decide what ownership means and whether wealth on a planetary scale can achieve something more useful than producing additional advisers.

Cordwainer Smith—one of the pen names of Paul Linebarger—created one of science fiction’s strangest and most distinctive future histories in the Instrumentality of Mankind stories. Norstrilia is the only full-length novel set within that universe. Its future feels ancient, mythic and alarmingly modern at once, filled with telepathy, immortality, talking animals, market speculation and bureaucracies whose rules remain incomprehensible despite thousands of years of administrative development.

The novel first appeared in separate parts as The Planet Buyer and The Underpeople before being united in complete form in 1975. It is comic, melancholy and gloriously peculiar: a coming-of-age story in which a vulnerable young rancher becomes richer than civilisation, visits the planet he owns and discovers that the most important inhabitants are legally classified as animals. Readers wanting conventional space adventure may wonder whether something has gone wrong. Nothing has gone wrong; this is simply Cordwainer Smith.

This 1985 Del Rey edition is in Fine condition. It has passed through four decades with remarkably little wear and remains an excellent copy for collectors of classic science fiction, admirers of the Instrumentality stories or anyone seeking sound financial guidance from an ancient computer connected to an immortality-drug futures market.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, where purchases are generally limited to individual volumes rather than inhabited planets. Offers for Earth will nevertheless be considered if accompanied by cleared funds.

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