Pleasurable Corrigible Malfunction

 At the Fantastic Pulps Show on the weekend I bought a paperback of The Planet Buyer which I guessed to be Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia under a different release title. Unfortunately I was only half right -- it's the first of a two-book edition of Norstrilia, and ends just as Rod, C'mell et al arrive on Old Old Earth. Now I need to track down the rest so I can find out what happens next. Smith's world-building is extravagant, deeply weird, beautiful, funny, horrific and seemingly effortless -- he doesn't want you to ask how much work went into his distant-future universe so he keeps you off-balance with invisible replicas of the Temple of Diana of the Ephesians, monkeys who are also trained surgeons, and a computer who dabbles in economic warfare. The last detail was when it occurred to me that even though his stories are nothing like what one usually associates with the genre, Cordwainer Smith might just qualify as military SF. For asymmetrical conflicts and passive resistance.