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I found the first part of this book to be gripping. It is set on a planet where the majority of people live under the yoke of a small privileged class. It is a totalitarian society where mass production is banned. This includes printing. Everything has to be bespoke. In return, obedient hardworking citizens qualify for a sort of basic income. But they live under strict supervision of the bureaucracy and the church.

The central characters are a father and son who find themselves unable to tolerate this tyranny. They face perils and revelations as their rebellion intensifies. Vance creates compelling characters and the story unfolds through their passions and personalities. His language is rich, you will learn a lot of new words if you stop to look them up... if you don't then the context will define them enough to keep the story rolling.

Perhaps it was just my mood as I read the last section of the book, but towards the end it seemed to be a bit rushed, it was a lot of exposition without the same page-turning pace and character-driven plot. Other readers might be more attuned to the way Vance is unpacking a mythology of the future. Perhaps I should have paid more attention to the otherworldly Punch and Judy show and its puppet master at the start of the book.

Nonetheless I greatly enjoyed this novel. Vance is one of those legends of the genre who haven't quite found mainstream fame, and somehow I'd missed out on reading any of his books. I like playing catchup, even I'm more than 50 years late. As usual, these old books invariably reflect the prejudices and privileges of the time they were written. Vance does a really terrible job with female characters. I have also been re-reading Cordwainer Smith, active in a similar period. He's flawed too, but he proves that it was possible for a male writer to create prominent female characters with vibrancy, power and agency, so the likes of Vance should not be excused.

This is the sort of book I loved to devour when I was nine or ten years old. Authors like John Christopher and Nicholas Fisk had a big influence on me and I still enjoy catching up with their work today.

This one is set in a post-apocalypse future where a privileged minority live in high-tech cities. The underclass (called "savages" by the gentry) are banished to the wildlands beyond the city walls, except for a few who are kept as a servant class, effectively slaves.

The protagonist falls foul of the vicious politics of the city leaders and gradually learns how brutal the system is. He finds that life among the rebellious "savages" is better than the comfortable tyranny within the city walls. It's like an inversion of Christopher's earlier novel "The Guardians", where a working class city kid learns about the elite gentry of the English countryside. Both novels, but "Wild Jack" especially, have a whiff of HG Wells' "The Time Machine", with its Eloi gentry and Morlock underclass. Christopher is following the pattern of his "Tripods" trilogy, which is an acknowledged riff on "The War of the Worlds".

As far as I'm concerned the British class system is a travesty, including the ultimate upper class degenerates, the monarchy. Books like this help erase the base propaganda of arse-licking royalist scum, and they are still relevant today. It just occurred to me that I read "Wild Jack" around the 50th anniversary of its first appearance.

Cordwainer Smith's slim body of work has been packaged and repackaged in many different ways. The first collection I read titled "The Rediscovery of Man" was a paperback, and the first story in it was "Scanners Live in Vain". The SF Masterworks edition seems to be the same as that collection.

A later edition is subtitled "The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith", and it is this more substantial book which I am reviewing here. It's worth seeking out. There could be some confusion about which one you have, possibly exacerbated by the "incomplete" SF Masterworks cover being used for the "complete" edition in some online entries. You can quickly tell if you have the longer one because the first story in it is "No No, Not Rogov", one of four stories detailing the early stages of Smith's so-called future history of the "Instrumentality of Mankind". It also has some marvelous illustrations from the original magazine publication of his stories.

Once you have the "complete" edition, you only need to get his one published novel "Norstrilia" and you are a Cordwainer Smith completist.

I've just read a short essay by Ursula le Guin, praising, critiquing and analysing Cordwainer Smith's work. She writes: ‘Cordwainer Smith’s stories were an amazement to me when I first read them. Forty years later, they still are…exuberant language, brilliant invention and hallucinatory imagery’.

As usual, le Guin gets it right, but sometimes I love Cordwainer Smith, at other times I find him slightly disturbing. A few of these stories drag, many of them are scintillating page-turners. At their core, they are myths, fantasy, or fairy tales, transposed to varying degrees into a science fiction setting. Occasionally I was put off by his Christian evangelising. It seemed to get worse as Smith became more devout later in his career. Earlier stories had a more nuanced approach to religion. He sexualises his child characters on a couple of occasions, and I couldn't immediately discern any excuse for it, but these were isolated incidents. On the plus side, he has more women characters than probably 10 of his contemporaries combined.

The idea of a closet science fiction nerd leading a double life working for the State Department and Johns Hopkins University adds to the fascination of Cordwainer Smith, whose real name was Paul Linebarger. He'd be a great subject for a biopic. One of his best creations, the underpeople, can be seen as a version of the wild and beautiful parade of minorities fighting for their rights before and after these stories were written. Smith even creates a sort of acid freak musical rebel in the form of Sun-boy, although you get the feeling he's more Charles Manson than Jimi Hendrix. I wanted him to be the latter. Smith mostly writes with nuance. It's hard to say who is a villain and who is a hero most of the time, and the descriptions of the bongo-slapping nuclear-enhanced hipster of the underworld are super cool, even if they were written by a military man who was in another galaxy compared to the beatniks and hippies rising up all around him.

For all his background in warfare and governance; for all his drift into traditional religion - Cordwainer Smith always seems to be seeking for a better way humanity can quest after. Ultimately love and hope are at the heart of his stories. In real life he was part of the establishment, but in his fictional universe he is a rebel, even a revolutionary at the same time.

A strange future history of life on earth and beyond, explicitly presented as a collection of myths. One of them is titled "Aesop", tempting you to think of it as a fable. But that's a deception. There is no simple moral to these stories. Although it's a short book, there's a lot to digest, and I will probably need a bit of time to order my thoughts about it.

A consistent line running through the tales is the way technological progress ends up being a dead end. First it's the demise of the city. Then there's the emergence of a promising new philosophy, Juwainism. It promotes empathy, but the goal of humanity is to harness it to accelerate development and progress. That goal fails, and when Juwainism finally takes hold, it has the opposite effect.

After humans have deserted the earth, or forsaken their own cursed humanity, a super-evolved society of ants takes over the role of development and industry, persisting to the very end with a city of their own, an ambition which proves itself to be another inevitable journey to decay and extinction.

In between, there's compassion, loyalty, love, and even vegetarianism. A clear inspiration is the relationship between dogs and people. What would happen if that partnership evolved as canine intelligence arose to stand alongside its human partners? (Simak seems to prefer dogs to people, I feel certain that would be part of his biography in real life).

When the great works of all the species to have conquered the earth have come toppling down, there is memory, in the form of the ancient robot Jenkins, who has lived through it all and seen everything.

After reading SImak's "Way Station", I'm aware of the way nuclear holocaust shadowed his thinking. He avoids making war and conflict the driving force of his stories. The malign impetus of a doomed humanity is there in other ways, but he also finds hope and beauty at the core of existence.

I only take a star off because the book fails dismally in female representation. I am inclined to re-read the work of Cordwainer Smith, who also explored the way some of our best traits are expressed in the way we interact with our animal cousins.

The premise is that a single human has been chosen as the manager of a galactic teleportation station. He is the only person on earth who is in contact with the broader community of interstellar life. On the outside, he lives a peaceful existence walking through the countryside and chatting with his best friend the postman, but secretly he is in daily contact with strange creatures from all over the galaxy.

The book was written at the height of the cold war, and Simak portrays an earth society on a seemingly inevitable course to nuclear annihilation. The protagonist, Enoch Wallace, discovers that the galactic community of which he is the sole human participant is also on the brink of a destructive crisis.

Simak portrays a universe where god exists as a sort of higher lifeform, and is somehow made accessible by technology. The nature of that technology, in keeping with the old SF adage, is indistinguishable from magic. My strident atheism is mollified by the broader knowledge that this idea was codified by Arthur C Clarke, a non-believer of the highest order. In "Way Station", the access to the deity could also be seen as metaphorical. Either way, I don't think this book is describing a universe where we would find god if we ventured out to the stars, but if you are that way inclined you might interpret it that way.

I greatly enjoyed this book which was published the year after I was born. I get such a warm feeling of nostalgia from discovering the ideas of mid-century science fiction. It was a fertile time and I think its more concise forms of storytelling are preferable in a lot of ways to the longer form styles in vogue today. Simak also portrays simple but lasting virtues: friendship and tenderness are precious; peace is something to strive for; violence and death are bad things, even if you are forced to resort to them for the greater good.

Also, get rid of your guns, you insane Americans.

I look forward to reading Simak's other famous work "City".