Book Review: The Planet Buyer by Cordwainer Smith

 

The Planet buyer by Cordwainer Smith

156 pages,Pyramid books

First published October, 1964
Literary awards: Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novel (1965)

Since this is my second Cordwainer Smith book in a row,  and I talked about who he was in the last review I will skip that. I want to save you some time, I know this was expanded in later editions to become a larger novel called Nostralian. I know OK. I also know a few people will respond to my posts of this review and tell me again. I have this edition, not that edition.  Also after reading the brilliant collection The Instrumentality of Mankind, I looked at this book on the shelf and I had to read THIS edition for a specific reason. The Planet Buyer was nominated in 1965 for the HUGO and lost the award. That is fine. Plenty of great novels are never nominated let alone lose the Hugo. The thing is 1965 is the year that the worst Hugo winner was given to the most notoriously shitty of all Hugo winners Fritz Lieber’s novel ‘The Wanderer.’

It also beat out Brunner’s The Whole Man (I suppose I have to read that now, which is fine as Brunner rules) Nonetheless, I am probably going to talk as much about Leiber’s novel as much as CS’s The Planet Buyer.

Why do you read old-school science fiction? Me I love how weird and out of time it is. Two human beings living in 2024 have a similar context for trying to imagine the future. Paul Linebarger moonlighting from his job as professor of Far East studies as Cordwainer Smith the science fiction writer wrote weird stuff. We know the man used his imagination to write weird political thoughtful science fiction since he was a teenager. This novel has everything A CS short story has so yeah, it is great.

 Unintentionally you see similar ideas to Dune (which was not a thing yet they were written around the same time) Rod McBan from planet Norstrilia, the source of immortality drug Stroon, buys Old Earth. Rod is lucky because his computer designed to lie to everyone except him helps him buy Earth for the rock bottom price of “Seven thousand million million megacredits.” That is two millions in a row that is how they do in Nostralia.

My favorite scene came 100 pages in when Lord Redlady confronts Rod about how he bought Earth and how they have to protect him.

“You’d kill me Lord Redlady?” said Rod. “I thought you were saving me?”
“Both,” said the doctor, standing up. “The commonwealth government has tried not to take your property away from you, though they have doubts about what you will do with Earth if you buy it. They are not going to let you stay on the planet and endanger it by being the richest kidnap victim who ever lived…”

Plenty of fun stuff like this in the novel. It is a treasure trove of weird ideas and funny moments like the court held in a moving van. But if there is a mission statement, it might be a character confronting the long lives of humans in this world. Would Rod become a hero buying Earth and helping spread Stroon?

 “And that is what the instrumentality is trying to do for mankind today. To make life dangerous enough and interesting enough to be real again. We have diseases, dangers, fights, chances, its been wonderful.”

Is The Planet Buyer a great science fiction novel? Yes, it is a great science fiction novel for readers who enjoy that totally foreign land that is a future conceived in the past. It is loaded with ideas, political and weird, thoughtful and fun. Is it a masterpiece? No.

Was it better than Fritz Leiber’s The Wanderer? For fuck’s sake it is.  Let's talk about that novel. When I recount the totally bizarro insanity of The Wanderer it sounds way better than the book I read. It has more plots than a cemetery, and with 15 story threads, you would think that at least a couple of the characters might be interesting. Nah, not really. The story is an interesting one. A planet suddenly appears in between the moon and Earth, this is a death star-like artificial planet filled with super-intelligent horny cat ladies who have anarchist politics and are on the run from galactic forces. They come to Earth because they have spent all their fuel living in hyperspace and our moon is just the raw materials they need. When they start crushing our moon up it sets off tidal forces and earthquakes.

It sounds weird and hilarious, and it is entertaining in the same way a Michael Bay movie can be. It is crazy that this book exists but winner of the Hugo? It might have been a lifetime achievement award but come. I’ll get back to you on the Whole Man but for now, I can safely say The Planet Buyer is a more deserving novel for the 1965 Hugo Award.