Cordwainer Smith Quest of the Three Worlds (1966)
The first thing I read by him - which was Stardreamer, a posthumously published collection of short stories - was so weird and amazing as to immediately imprint Smith's made-up name onto my consciousness, meaning future titles would be snapped from the shelf of the book store without even pausing to examine the cover. This is the second thing I've read by him, and it is unfortunately not very good at all.
The ideas are nice, and as pleasantly peculiar and surreal as I had hoped, but they're embedded in the sort of story you might expect given the presence of quest in the title. It rambles and digresses with the rhythm of a folk tale, but one of the ones people stopped telling because they weren't actually that gripping in the first place; and everyone says everything three or four times in a variety of poetic variations. For example, it is mentioned that Finisteris was once a beautiful woman no less than four times over the first three pages of part four, which might not be so bad but that we have no idea who Finisteris or Samm or Folly are supposed to be. They turn up in part four like characters from an entirely different novel introduced to Smith's book by virtue of a book binding accident. I had no idea what was going on or why I was expected to care.
The first thing I read by him - which was Stardreamer, a posthumously published collection of short stories - was so weird and amazing as to immediately imprint Smith's made-up name onto my consciousness, meaning future titles would be snapped from the shelf of the book store without even pausing to examine the cover. This is the second thing I've read by him, and it is unfortunately not very good at all.
The ideas are nice, and as pleasantly peculiar and surreal as I had hoped, but they're embedded in the sort of story you might expect given the presence of quest in the title. It rambles and digresses with the rhythm of a folk tale, but one of the ones people stopped telling because they weren't actually that gripping in the first place; and everyone says everything three or four times in a variety of poetic variations. For example, it is mentioned that Finisteris was once a beautiful woman no less than four times over the first three pages of part four, which might not be so bad but that we have no idea who Finisteris or Samm or Folly are supposed to be. They turn up in part four like characters from an entirely different novel introduced to Smith's book by virtue of a book binding accident. I had no idea what was going on or why I was expected to care.
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