Commander Suzdal is a captain of "The Navy and the Instrumentality" sent on a "one man" mission of exploration (in actuality he is accompanied by several generations of "Turtle-People").
Despite saving the ship and successfully concealing Earth's location from the Arachosians, Suzdal is stripped of rank, name, life and finally death, finding himself sentenced to the prison planet Shayol for his misuse of the time device.
Thomas Clareson has described "Commander Suzdal" as "more parable than story",[1] while Eliot Borenstein considers it "an oblique cautionary tale about men's attempts to manage without women.
"[2] Rich Horton, writing for Black Gate, calls the story "odd", "decidedly weird" and "disquieting", comparing the Arachosians disfavorably to the all-male society in Lois McMaster Bujold's Ethan of Athos, but conceding that it has "some of the incantatory power Smith always strove for".
[3] Paul Kincaid, at the SF Site, described it as a story about the human "capacity to become monsters when we follow someone who is 'brilliant, remorseless, implacable'," and compared the Arachosians' broadcast lure to Tokyo Rose.