Short Fiction
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This book offers a visionary and deeply human exploration of technology's toll on the soul, blending poetic prose with gripping action and moral complexity.
Edition details
Book Summary
In a future where space travel inflicts unbearable pain and alien threats lurk in the void, surgically altered Scanners and telepathic cat partners sacrifice their humanity to protect civilization. Cordwainer Smith's stories explore the dehumanizing cost of progress, the resilience of love, and the rebellion of individuals against oppressive systems.
The collection follows two main arcs. In 'Scanners Live in Vain,' Scanner Martel, a man surgically numbed to endure the 'Great Pain' of space, uses a forbidden 'cranching' process to regain sensation. When a scientist, Adam Stone, discovers a way to eliminate the Pain, the Scanner Confraternity orders his death to preserve their power. Martel rebels, betraying his order to save Stone's work and choosing human progress over institutional dogma. In 'The Game of Rat and Dragon,' pinlighter Underhill and his telepathic cat partner Lady May battle alien 'dragons' that attack human minds during interstellar travel. The stories highlight the intense bond between humans and animals, the psychological toll of constant combat, and the resentment faced by those who protect humanity. Across both arcs, themes of sacrifice, alienation, and the cost of technological advancement are central, as characters grapple with their identities as living machines and their fragile connections to love and humanity.
Reading guide
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Character guides, themes, chapter companions — plus Character Web, narrative arc, and theme heatmap teasers that unlock fully beside the text in BetterReads.
Narrative arc
Story tension across the book.
- Setup
- Escalation
- Breaking point
- Aftermath
- Closing
Underhill’s emotional peak occurs in the silent, affectionate exchange with the Lady May, where their bond tra…
Martel III
Martel is a Scanner of the Instrumentality, a man cut apart for the Up-and-Out and fitted with a chestbox that lets him rule his own terror — until he doesn't. He comes to Adam Stone under a false name, invoking his wife Luci, and asks to be held at Wirepoint while he tells the truth about the worlds' life and death. His divided body, half haberman, half husband, is the wound the story keeps pressing on.
Underhill
Underhill is one of the four Partners aboard the Fighting Room, a low, brutish type whose telepathy never refined his character — only made him serviceable. His tenderness with the Lady May, sealed into her projectile with padded claws, sits oddly against his scarred ears and dull mind. Their wordless affection across species is the story's warmest thing, and the thing most likely to be spent.
Adam Stone
Adam Stone looks like a jolly guide from the Pleasure Gallery, not a man who stood at the edge of the Up-and-Out without haberman protection. He keeps himself lawfully armed, greets a self-declared Scanner with calm and a question — whose life and death? — and answers cryptically that he has loaded the ships with life. His composure under a stranger's confession is the hinge the early plot turns on.
Luci
Luci is the domestic warmth Martel limps home to, feeding him old-book smells and music wires while he tries to relearn being a body. Her gaiety is a little forced, and she knows more than she says about what he has become. When the lamb-chop scent trips every alarm in his chestbox, her innocent dinner game becomes the first test of whether a Scanner can survive being human.
Vomact
Vomact belongs to the layered world of Scanner captains, kith, and titled houses that frame the Fighting Room's mission. The name carries the weight of lineage and authority — the kind of standing that decides who commands a ship and who is merely sent. Even at the edges of the action, the Vomact thread reminds the reader that this war is fought inside an old, ceremonious society.
Father Moontree
Father Moontree is the ritual and command presence aboard the Fighting Room, phoning the captain to clear for planoform and intoning the order to move. His telepathic crew catches his meaning long before his heavy human speech arrives, so his voice becomes a measure of how fast the real fight is. He is the calm, ceremonial center of a crew whose cats and children think faster than he can talk.
Humanity vs. Mechanization
The book explores the dehumanizing effects of technology, as Scanners are surgically altered into living machines, losing their senses and emotions, and must use 'cranching' to temporarily regain their humanity.
Sacrifice and Duty
Characters like the Scanners and pinlighters endure immense physical and psychological pain—such as the 'Great Pain' of space—to protect humanity, highlighting the tension between personal suffering and collective responsibility.
Alienation and Identity
Scanners are alienated from their own bodies and from normal human relationships, struggling with their identity as 'habermans' (living dead) who are neither fully human nor fully machine.
Love and Connection
Despite their physical and emotional numbness, characters like Martel and Luci seek deep human connection, with love serving as a fragile anchor against the isolation imposed by their roles.
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