The most complex and lyrical of all future histories. Lush, strange, unique, a treasure – Stephen Baxter. 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 – Ursula Le Guin. It starts with Rod McBan. We know his family was distinguished. We know the poor kid was born to troubles. He was due to inherit the Station of Doom. And then he gets around. He crosses all sorts of people. C’Mell, the most beautiful of the girlygirls of Earth. The wild old man of Adminaby. The trained spiders of Earthport. The Lord Jestocost, whose name is a page in history. Ruth, in pursuit. C’Mell in flight. The Lord Jestocost laughing. Colourful and allusive, boisterous and subtle, Norstrilia is the only SF novel from one of the genre’s most remarkable and original voices and offers an exuberant, eccentric and wildly imaginative vision of the universe – a vision like no other. Cordwainer Smith is timeless – Terry Pratchett.