The Rediscovery of Man by Cordwainer Smith
No one writes like this dude, and I mean that as literally as I can, there's just something sort of other-worldly about CS's prose style, Smith wrote like a man translating a mythology that does not exist from a language nobody speaks, and these stories, gathered here across his whole strange career, give the impression that they are realistic or historical fictions written from the future, told like far-future fables or legends, and really defy easy description.
The setting is the Instrumentality of Mankind, a benevolent and slightly sinister government that rules humankind for thousands of years with an iron fist vision of perfection and harmony, minding a humanity sunk in a tired, sterile happiness, too safe and too painless, and the great arc is the Rediscovery of Man, when the Instrumentality deliberately allows danger, uncertainty, mortality back in, deciding they must return to mankind the spice that was brought to life by danger, fear, crime, and wrong choices.
Underneath it all the underpeople, genetically-modified animals who are essentially slaves that serve real humans, always fighting but never really getting their freedoms, reaching slowly for dignity.
The quality is wildly uneven, and like a lot of short story collections there's good, bad & mediocre. The first third of this book is full of absolutely brilliant stories and then somewhere along the line they stopped being good and started being repetitive and a little weird, and the weird was not in a good way, because by the late stories Smith get very strange and Christian, he became a Christian partway through his career and the Jesus stuff bleeds in, D'joan the dog woman ostensibly in a role of Joan of Arc, becomes a Christlike figure, the phrase the God nailed high turning up more than once, it seems pretty awkward, and I did not find it pleasant.
And the cats?? Smith loved cats past the point of comfort, in "The Game of Rat and Dragon" with its feline partners fighting the Dragons out in planoformed space I thought the love for cats was sweet and rather endearing and sad, one of the more bizarre, original, amusing, and touching stories here, but a few stories later it tips into serious cat love and something genuinely creepy, the guy obviously REALLY LIKED CATS.
He also withholds, constantly, leaving out pertinent information that the reader needed to understand what was going on, whole tales turn on things he simply never gives you, I may try and find a reader's guide somewhere, I wanted one by page sixty.
But once my ear adjusted it was almost incomprehensible in places and yet weirdly compelling, and I love it: this is SF as legend, as poetry, it's not so much about the plot as it is the poetry, he's just a good writer, too, he's a poet, and the prose is the most musical I ever encountered, the deep future remembering itself in songs.
Smith was a psychological warfare expert with an unbelievable life, a man with a colourful history, and it comes through in his writing, he literally wrote the book on psychological warfare and it is still regarded as the most authoritative text in the field, there is a private strangeness here you cannot fake, they are authentically strange, not forced or contrived.
Read it when you are tired of chrome and physics and want no long-winded explanations of how some fictional/speculative star drive works but instead writing about emotional/cultural/spiritual issues in the far-ahead human future, when you want to get your mind well and truly bent, wonder that feels ancient and a little broken, strangely beautiful and tipping the edge of mind blowing.
There is only one of him, a one-of-a-kind writer with plenty of fans with his own little corner of the sci-fi pantheon to himself, the best author you have never heard of, and I have never read anything quite like them.