Cordwainer Smith is the pseudonym under which Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger wrote science fiction between 1950 and his death in 1966. All but a handful of Smith's thirty-two published stories and the novel Norstrilia are part of his visionary Instrumentality of Mankind series, which he began writing when he was a teenager but did not see professional publication until the appearance of "Scanners Live in Vain." The Instrumentality stories provide a fragmentary history spanning some fifteen thousand years of human history and galactic colonization and have been widely praised for their imaginative depictions of alien civilizations and sympathetic renderings of individuals adjusting to the rigors of a civilization in which interstellar war, immortality, faster-than-light space travel, suspended animation, and telepathic combat are the norm. Smith's science fiction works have been collected in the definitive The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith and Norstrilia. Smith also wrote several pseudonymous mainstream novels and a spy thriller, Atomsk, as well as a psychology text, Psychological Warfare.