Space travel, human and animal partnerships, and unequal societies.
Cordwainer Smith was the pen name of Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (1913–1966), an American science fiction writer and political scientist. A specialist in Chinese politics, he served in military intelligence during the Second World War and wrote the textbook Psychological Warfare. “Scanners Live in Vain,” published in 1950, was his first story under the Cordwainer Smith name. Most of his science fiction belongs to the future history associated with the Instrumentality of Mankind.
His stories examine the demands of space travel and the unequal treatment of humans and other intelligent beings. “Scanners Live in Vain” follows space workers who have given up most of their senses to do their jobs. In “The Game of Rat and Dragon,” human telepaths work with cats to protect spacecraft. Smith often tells future events as old legends, with narrators who address the reader directly and refer to other events in his imagined history.
From a quick encounter to a longer story.
In a future where nations rent battlefields and fight by remote control, an untested pilot is handed three warships at once.
Telepath Underhill and his feline Partner, Lady May, must destroy an alien predator in the milliseconds between jumps through interstellar space.
A space Scanner temporarily regains his senses and learns that his own guild plans to kill the man who could make their sacrifice obsolete.
