The Game of Rat and Dragon

One of the most famous works by a fantasy author little known to Russian-speaking readers. Cordwainer Smith was a scientist, a diplomat, a traveler, a polyglot, an expert in brainwashing, and worked for intelligence services. He was unlike any other science-fiction writer and could have become a legend of the genre—if not for his premature death. All of Smith’s fantastic legacy fit into two volumes, and, according to some Western critics, the future story he imagined leaves far behind similar stories by all other science-fiction writers—be it Robert Heinlein, Paul Anderson, or Olaf Stapledon.

During Smith’s lifetime, he was underestimated: his first science-fiction collection, “You’ll Never Be the Same,” was published only in 1963. He never attended conventions, though he happily hosted, for example, Frederik Pohl and Algis Budrys. Cordwainer Smith even impressed Stanisław Lem, who devoted many pages in “Science Fiction and Futuroloxy” to U.S. intelligence colonel’s stories.

Lem thought that C. Smith was a “pseudonym of a respectable sixty-year-old scientist”: on the covers of Smith’s books, it was written that he was “a scientist working for the government.”