Norstrilia, by Cordwainer Smith

  Norstrilia, a contraction of North Australia, is a planet of immortal Australian farmers who export a drug that extends life and expands consciousness. They live simple lives - on purpose - as to not be corrupted by the decadent ways of the large universe around. This drug has made them insanely rich and powerful, but they refuse to leave a life of luxury, while the human world is split into those who would want their wealth for themselves and the Instrumentality, a sort of aall powerful human organization whose only purpose is to preserve the essence of humanity through any means, like for example by introducing diseases or threats or risks so people don't devolve into passive comfortable idiots.

  Cordwainer Smith has multiple strange but brilliant ideas in the book. The Instrumentality itself is something that clearly needs exploring, even if this book does not do that. There are the underhumans, animals surgically uplifted to consciousness in order to serve man and who have almost no rights. A society living in a logical extension of the American 1950 capitalism, where anyone seems to be free to do anything, but in fact they are caught in a power game with dangerous rules.

  In all of that comes a Norstrilian boy who, with the help of an ancient AI, manipulates the market and becomes the richest man in the universe, buying Old Earth in the process. This reveals the web of power in the human world and takes us on a wild journey to Earth and back.

  Typical of the era, becoming the richest person ever removes any agency from the boy. From the beginning to the end of the book, he is passively "helped" along a path not of his choosing. The fact that he might have chosen said path if he knew anything about the world is irrelevant. The fact that he feels it's a good path more akin to Stockholm syndrome. The world is huge, amorphous, predatory. Without that "help" he wouldn't have survived anyway. His body is changed to an underperson's, his mind is changed by forced therapy - for his own good, his thoughts are read and analysed, his decisions are made for him. If it weren't also for the drug addled naivete of the 1950s sci-fi, this would and should have been a horror story.

  All in all a very intriguing book that seems to combine interesting ideas, but ultimately not doing much with them. A combination of Dune, if the Fremen were Aussies, and Stranger in a Strange Land, which was also a hard to enjoy book with great drug addled ideas in it.