Few science fiction writers present us with a bigger puzzle than Cordwainer Smith (1913-1966), an eccentric figure from the golden age of sci-fi who retains a small but devoted cult following today. Was Smith a brilliant thinker or mentally ill? Was he an artist or an ideologue? Was his body of work a unified vision or a disparate jumble? Above all, did he see himself as a writer of fictional stories or could it be that he believed that his fanciful narratives were, in some sense, true accounts based on his personal experiences?
The strangest piece of information about Cordwainer Smith—a pseudonym, one of many employed by Paul Linebarger—comes from a psychological case study published in 195 5 , which described the “psychosis” of a patient who experienced vivid visions of life in outer space, incidents that the individual believed were real, not imaginary. The preponderance of evidence suggests that our sci-fi author served as the basis for this case study, which was included by Dr. Robert Lindner in his book The Fifty-Minute Hour . Although final confirmation eludes us, the idea that Smith believed himself capable of out-of-body experience beyond the Earth may provide us with insights into the peculiarly intense nature of this writer’ s fictional works.
Indeed, many of the stories in The Rediscovery of Man —which collects virtually all of Smith’s shorter science fiction in a volume of almost 700 pages—are pushed ahead by events that happen inside people’s heads. In several stories, he develops the concept of characters who don’t exist in their own right, but are the projection of other characters' minds. In the tale “Nancy” he even holds nuptials between a spaceship captain and a woman who is merely an embodiment of his ideas about the opposite sex—and, yes, it is a very happy union…at least until the spaceship gets back home. In a series of novellas about Casher O’Neill, who plots a revolution on his home planet, the hero learns how to project different facets of his inner life as individual allies who can assist him in battle. In other cases, the mental leaps do not result in concrete manifestations—as in the many stories here in which telepathy and mind-reading play a key role—but the locus of action still remains in the mental sphere.
At this point, I should probably mention that Linebarger’s most influential work was not necessarily any he wrote under the name Cordwainer Smith, but may have been his study Psychological Warfare —a book that boasts its own cult following. Even a used paperback copy of this work can bring in hundreds of dollars on the web. And for good reason. Linebarger’s career involved him in behind-the-scenes Cold War operations; by one account, his efforts in Korea led to the surrender of thousands of enemy combatants—seasoned troops whose training and values made them unlikely to wave the white flag. In his book, Linebarger suggested that
famous short story, “Scanners Live in Vain,” Smith describes a guild of space pilots who are required to cut off much of their neural hardwiring—rendering them deaf-mutes—in order to withstand the “Great Pain of Space.” The story is strange and deeply unsettling on many levels, yet clearly demonstrates the extravagant inventiveness of Smith’s conceptual fictions. Even so, I am not surprised that, when Smith submitted it to John W. Campbell, Jr., who presided over the magazine Astounding Science Fiction , the editor replied that is was “too extreme” to publish.
But the imaginative excesses of the plots cannot hide the deep metaphysical constructs at the heart of Cordwainer Smith’s work. A recurring philosophical and moral issue constantly takes center stage here: namely, what it means to be a person. In Smith’s universe—a sociopolitical construct that he describes as the Instrumentality of Mankind —this concept of personhood cannot be taken for granted. The main characters are sometimes “real persons,” with similar DNA to you and me. But just as often, they are “underpersons”—a generic term for modified animals. Many of these have become almost indistinguishable from humans, and in some instances they demonstrate superior intellectual, moral and physical qualities to the human characters; yet they are denied the basic rights and respect accorded to people. In still other instances, we encounter humans who have been genetically altered to meet the exigencies of different planets…or robots of humanoid appearance…or mixtures of animal parts with mechanical and electronic technology.
This may sound like the bar scene in Star Wars , but in fact Smith is acutely sensitive to the ethical and sociological issues presented by a blurring of the concept of personhood. Time and time again in his stories, he focuses on the struggle of one or another group to achieve the perks and prerogatives that are denied them because of how society classifies their state of being. Sometimes these accounts reflect political issues of Smith’s time (and our own)—and one can interpret these tales in terms of civil rights movements, apartheid and other headline stories of the day. In other instances, he reaches for religious symbolism in describing these social movements, and many have noted the Christian overtones of some of his work—yet this is not the Christianity of the modern-day, but more the underground movement of the early Roman empire, hidden in catacombs and potentially subversive.
In a wildly inventive short novel from 1964, “The Dead Lady of Clown Town,” the catacomb metaphor is powerfully realized. Smith amplifies on his key philosophical themes, and here again the author stands out for his extreme effects. He takes more than sixty pages to tell the story of a revolution that “lasted six minutes and covered one hundred and twelve meters.” From one angle, Smith—who in his day-to-day life was an expert on Chinese affairs, and had Sun Yat-Sen as a godfather—seemed to be anticipating the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 in this story. Yet the symbolic resonance of this story, one of the finest science fiction works of the 20th century, goes beyond any purely political interpretation.
Unlike the vast majority of science fiction stories, “The Dead Lady of Clown Town” is not just filled with provocative concepts, but is daringly experimental in its appropriation of unconventional narrative techniques. Some of the action is told in a straightforward manner, yet key scenes might be relayed in the lyrics of a song, the description of a snippet of film, testimonies taken down years after the events, and other indirect ways. Here, as elsewhere in his oeuvre, Smith is especially fond of starting his stories at the end and working backward—he is even willing to slip in “spoiler” details in his opening pages, trusting in his ability to maintain suspense in other ways.
Needless to say, this focus on the metaphysical and psychological made Smith an atypical personality in the world of science fiction. In a surviving letter, from 1948, which accompanied his submission of “Scanners Live in Vain” to Fantasy Book , he felt compelled to apologize for the story: “This is more ‘literary’ fiction than pulp fiction but I have hopes that your magazine, being off-trail, might be interested in using it.” To sweeten his submission, Smith included a check for $3.00 for a subscription and a stamped, self-addressed envelope for response, before closing with a request that the magazine publish more works by A.E. van Vogt.
But the real issue here is not that Smith’s story is ‘literary.’ That is hardly the word that comes to mind upon reading his work. Rather his imaginative universe is so unconventional, and at times so austere—his fascination with the coldness and emptiness of remote space almost borders on an obsession—that it seems like a realization of some quasi- monastic worldview rather than a springboard for fiction of any kind. Other authors have dealt with the conquest of space, perhaps as well or better than Smith; but none has done a better job of conveying the psychic aspects of the renunciation of the home planet that is the flip of side of this same story. After you strip away the action and conflicts on the surface level of these tales, an ascetic tendency can be seen to run through this author’s entire oeuvre.
After reading through this lengthy collection of stories, you will be struck by the apparent unity of vision in Smith’s work. Even an early story, such as “Scanners” seems to anticipate elements that would appear in other stories written fifteen years later. By the same token, any reader trying to come to grips with Smith’s one full-length novel, Norstrilia —the only major sci-fi work of his not included in this volume—will hardly understand its nuances without having spent time with these shorter fictions. One can’t help wondering on the overall connections between these stories. Did Smith work out all of the details of his imaginary universe at the start of his writing career? Or, even stranger to consider, did he experience them in some out-of-body way?
On the other hand, very little repetition takes place in these stories. Very rarely does a key character from one story play a major role in another one—although minor characters do reappear with regularity. Even the recurring themes take on new dimensions as Smith’s work evolved from the 1940s to the 1960s. And the unity of Smith’s vision seemed to coexist comfortably with the abundance of creative ingredients, fresh new angles, and surprising shifts of scene, century and galaxy—each calling cards of his style. It is that very quality—the endless ingenuity of our author as he piles up strange element upon strange element—that stands out as the most salient trademark of this author. If in fact, he did feel as if he had lived these stories, at second- hand or even first-hand, then one can only marvel at the richness of such an interior life—and be thankful that these stories survive as testimony.
a country’s superiority versus hostile parties could be based on an ability to “out-trick them, out-talk them, and out-maneuver them.” Can we be surprised, then, that Smith’s sci-fi work espouses a similar belief that the most significant battlefront is often one drawn inside our psyches?
By the same token, Smith employs a range of writing techniques—sometimes arcane narrative structures or, at other points, peculiar plot devices— that similarly aim at restricting or eliminating the flow of empirical data that serves as the constitutive element for most works of fiction. In his most