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Question on Cordwainer Smith titles
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mgkurilla
Posted 2021-04-24 9:00 AM (#23049)
Subject: Question on Cordwainer Smith titles



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Cordwainer Smith's The Planet Buyer is a Hugo nominee listed with a publication date of 1964 from Pyramid books. In the WWE listing there's mention in the synopsis that The Planet Buyer and The Underpeople were combined into the novel Nostrilia.

The Amazon link has two entries, the Pyramid release with the publication date of Oct '64 (but no digital version), but also a Galaxy Magazine listing (this is available online) with a publication date of April '64 with the title: The Boy Who Bought Old Earth.

My question is are these the same (Pyramid length - 156 pages versus Galaxy length - 99 pages, though different layouts and formats)?

Additionally, how different are either of these versions from the later Nostrilia?

Any info greatly appreciated.
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Administrator
Posted 2021-04-24 1:20 PM (#23051 - in reply to #23049)
Subject: RE: Question on Cordwainer Smith titles



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mgkurilla - 2021-04-24 9:00 AM Cordwainer Smith's The Planet Buyer is a Hugo nominee listed with a publication date of 1964 from Pyramid books. In the WWE listing there's mention in the synopsis that The Planet Buyer and The Underpeople were combined into the novel Nostrilia. The Amazon link has two entries, the Pyramid release with the publication date of Oct '64 (but no digital version), but also a Galaxy Magazine listing (this is available online) with a publication date of April '64 with the title: The Boy Who Bought Old Earth. My question is are these the same (Pyramid length - 156 pages versus Galaxy length - 99 pages, though different layouts and formats)? Additionally, how different are either of these versions from the later Nostrilia? Any info greatly appreciated.

The publication history of this book/series is a bit of a mess.

- The Boy Who Bought Old Earth was first published in Galaxy as a novella in April of 1964

- The Store of Heart's Desire, another novella, was published in If in May of 1964 -- Galaxy and If are both published by Galaxy Publishing Corp.

- The Boy was expanded into The Planet Buyer and published by Pyramid in October of 1964

- The Store was expanded into The Underpeople and published by Pyramid in September of 1968

- The Planet Buyer and The Underpeople were combined and expanded into Norstrilla which was published in 1975 by Ballantine

ISFDB has this note for Norstrilla:

"This is the first publication of the complete novel as Smith wrote it. The publishers in the 60's felt that it was too long to publish as a single novel, so Smith broke it in two, adding a small amount of material at the end of "The Planet Buyer" and at the beginning of "The Underpeople" so they could stand separately. The 1994 NESFA Press edition includes this added material in an appendix."

So Buyer is definitely longer than Boy. Norstrilla is likely shorter with Smith putting it back together the way it was written before the split into 2 novellas. There would be no need for the added material that made the separate stories stand by themselves.

Back in the day novels were much shorter than today's behemoths so the split is not much of a surprise. Many of the award-winning books in the early days of the novel awards would be considered novellas by today's standards. It was also a common practice for pulp stories to be expanded into novels if they met with success in the pulps. The same goes for combining shorter works into book length "fix-ups". I wonder how much of this kind of slicing and dicing goes on in publishing today?

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mgkurilla
Posted 2021-04-24 4:08 PM (#23052 - in reply to #23051)
Subject: RE: Question on Cordwainer Smith titles



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Much appreciated for the detailed description.

If I've understood correctly then reading Nostrilia essentially covers the full but separate versions of the Planet Buyer and The Underpeople.

Very helpful as it's quite a pain to hunt down digital versions of semi-older material (the really old stuff is easier) even with sites like Library Genesis.
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