The third was a shorter story entitled Three to a Given Star or In Praise of Folly.
This novella was the fourth to be published of those in Quest of the Three Worlds. It was also published in the February, 1965 edition of popular pulp magazine Galaxy. The second story in Quest of the Three Worlds, On the Storm Planet continues with Casher O'Neill as the protagonist.
Smith's extensive planning and mapping of the Instrumentality can be seen in how this story intertwines with others. They share many elements, such as half-human, half-animal underpeople and the quest for equality, but the outcome of this later story is far less pleasant. The Dead Lady of Clown Town, though written 2 years later, is set before The Ballad of Lost C'mell in the Instrumentality's history. It is, like the majority of Smith's works, set in the Instrumentality. The first story in the collection Quest of the Three Worlds, this tells the story of Casher O'Neill who visits the planet of Pontoppidan to help them decide what to do with a horse. Think Blue, Count Two, tells the story of a human piloting an interstellar vessel with the help of a laminated mouse brain computer. This novella is an excellent example of the hard science incorporated into many of Smith's stories. It is set in his future world of the Instrumentality, depicts strong human-animal connections, immediately immerses the reader in new vocabulary and culture, and leaves the reader with the sense of strangeness that marks truly great science fiction. Sometimes titled She Got The Which of the What She Did, this story is arguably Smith's most famous because of its complete representation of him as an author. Smith's second wife says the plot was partially based on his first wife's attraction to someone else, but it was also inspired by The Storm, a painting by Pierre-Auguste Cot. " It tells the story of a government making the sudden change out of a sheltered society and into one with significantly less governmental control. This story was one of Smith's most popular and was said by Ursula Le Guin to be, " as important to me as reading Pasternak for the first time. It also uses the common sf technique of jumping directly into a story, foregoing any background information, and expecting the reader to pick up on the invented vocabulary or culture.
Smith's second published story, The Game of Rat and Dragon is a great example of his motif of unusually close animal-human relationships. One scanner, while in a temporary state of neural normalcy called cranching, commits an unheard of act which completely changes the Instrumentality's use of scanners.
The first short story published under the name Cordwainer Smith, Scanners Live in Vain tells the story of people who have voluntarily disconnected their brain from all senses besides sight.
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