[3] Like other stories of Cordwainer Smith, "Drunkboat" is part of a future history, in a universe policed by the Instrumentality of Mankind.

Their slogan is quoted in chapter 7 of "Drunkboat": "Watch, but do not govern; stop war but do not wage it; protect, but do not control; and first, survive!"

Lord Crudelta, wanting to experiment with sending a person through space-three (usually written as space3), selects Artyr Rambo; he is in a hospital on Earth Four, anxious to find his lover Elizabeth.

Space3 has given Rambo special powers: aware of Elizabeth's presence in the building, he tears his way through a wall, and his uttered word "No", when he cannot see her, has an effect on technology in the area.

He tells the Investigating Lord that he induced rage in Rambo by saying that Elizabeth was at the edge of death, so that he would want to come faster to Earth than anyone had done, to make him travel through space3.

I was the drunkboat myself", and he expresses the experience with striking imagery (taken from Arthur Rimbaud's poem "Le Bateau ivre").

Ursula K. Le Guin called "Drunkboat" a "wild jungle of language" and a "tour de force" which was nonetheless "overwritten", noting that it is "full of awfully bad verse" (noting particularly the millennia-old nonsense verses which Lord Crudelta "laboriously" explains).