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Cordwainer Smith (b. Paul. M. A. Linebarger, July 11, 1913 – August 6, 1966 Milwaukee, Wisconsin) is an American author. Linebarger lived a life nearly as remarkable as his series about the far future now generally referred to as the "Instrumentality of Mankind". Linebarger's father was a retired judge, one of the principal financiers of the Chinese republican revolution and remained an advisor to the Chinese leader Sun Yat-sen (who was, in turn, the younger Linebarger's godfather).

Raised mainly in Europe and Asia, Linebarger was fluent in four languages and read others. He completed a Ph.D. in political science at Johns Hopkins University when he was 23. Despite being blind in one eye, he served as an officer with the U.S. Army in East Asia during World War II. His work in military intelligence during the war led him to produce a training manual on psychological warfare (1948) that essentially founded the modern academic study of that discipline. After leaving the military, he held teaching positions at American University and Johns Hopkins' Washington-based School for Advanced International Studies. He wrote numerous scholarly books and articles on East Asia and the Soviet Union which are notable for their lucidity, beginning with the publication of his doctoral dissertation, The Political Doctrines of Sun Yat-sen (1937).

Linebarger dabbled with fiction as a teenager, and his first story was published in a high school publication when he was 15. After World War II he began to sell his fiction: He wrote two political thrillers under the pseudonym Felix C. Forrest (a pun based on his name in Mandarin), Ria (1947) and Carola (1948). Under the pen name Carmichael Smith he published what we now would call a techno-thriller, Atomsk (1949), warning of Soviet nuclear intentions. Thereafter he published fiction only as Cordwainer Smith.

Linebarger's first short story in the series about the Instrumentality, "Scanners Live in Vain," was completed in 1945 and eventually published in 1950 in an obscure, semi-professional magazine, Fantasy Book, after being rejected by all the major science fiction periodicals of the day. It is set several hundred years in the future, after human beings have discovered that long-term space travel requires the creation of a guild of cyborgs to cope with the physical pain experienced (from unknown causes) in extrasolar flight. Its story line is gripping, but the elliptical nature of its writing tends to magnify a certain clumsiness in exposition. Nevertheless, the story was dramatically different from anything else published in the 1940's, and to a certain extent, Linebarger's work prefigures the avant-garde New Wave SF of the late 1960's and '70's.

Frederik Pohl' subsequently anthologized "Scanners Live in Vain," and played a role in encouraging Linebarger to submit new stories to H.L Gold, the editor of Galaxy Magazine. This led to the publication in Galaxy of the second tale in the series, "The Game of Rat and Dragon" (in 1955), after which Linebarger quickly established himself as an absolutely original voice. Subsequently, Linebarger sold most of his work to Galaxy and its sister publications.

Smith's series charts out some 15,000 years of future history. In an opening phase lasting several thousand years, war ravages the Earth and leads to the creation of fortress cities and the establishment of colonies in near-by solar systems. At the end of this period, the Lords of the Instrumentality establish themselves as a de facto ruling body throughout known space, ushering in a period in which human beings, and the genetically modified animals or underpeople (intellectually the equivalent of "true men") that have been created to carry out most physical labor, are kept in a regulated state of mental conformity. This period comes to a close with the rediscovery of mankind, a period in which the Instrumentality deliberately seeks to restore creativity and individuality, despite the risks associated with them. Linebarger hinted at some further great development after this era, apparently involving a form of spiritual reconciliation between true men and underpeople, but did not live to write about it.

Linebarger tells most of the stories as though they were the legends about the events they describe, recounted long after they occurred. Consequently, the boundary between what seems actually to be going on, and what is legendary, often becomes vague. This produces a sense of vast time and occasionally a dream-like state in the reader. Almost all of the stories are told in a distant manner, with characters cast in bas-relief rather than rounded personalities. This is a technique drawn from medieval Chinese literature, especially from The Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong, the great novel concerning the effort to restore the Han empire, written in the 14th century A.D.

In his introduction for his 1965 collection Space Lords, Lineberger notes that his 1962 story "Ballad of the Lost C'mell" (1962) "was rather loosely inspired by some of the magical and conspiratorial scenes" in Luo. But in fact, Luo's influence on Linebarger is much broader. The great question of The Three Kingdoms is how one restores civilization, and with the appropriate changes being made, this is the central question Lineberger poses as well. Given the nature of the technological development he foresaw for the next 15,000 years, Linebarger stressed that restoring civilization would inevitably mean returning human beings to an unprogrammed way of life once human beings developed the means to enforce conformity to idealized social norms.

Around 1960, Linebarger went through a religious conversion, and thereafter the Christian subtext of his stories becomes overt. "Ballad of the Lost C'mell" is the first clearly Christian parable in the series. In it the underpeople -- rather than fomenting a political revolution against their masters -- rediscover "the old high religion," and a Christ-like figure arises in the form of a genetically modified eagle to lead them. In several of the later stories there are hints that true men and underpeople would achieve some new spiritual relationship, but hints are all that remain.

Linebarger drew extensively on world literature and poetry in his work. Unfortunately, he was no great poet, although he had the ability to create meme-like names and phrases that are quite memorable, such as "Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons" (1961; perhaps the first story to forecast data-mining) and E-telekeli, the name of the Eagle-derived underperson in "Ballad of the Lost C'mell," among others. Nevertheless, the strength of his reputation is clearly based on his ability to draw extensively from non-Western cultures, as well as on the elliptical way in which he told stories of the far future as though they were legends of the distance past being recounted in an even farther future, and above all, on the originality of his vision of the evolution of mankind.

Recommended reading: The NESFA Press has issued a one-volume edition of the complete Cordwainer Smith short stories, The Rediscovery of Man (Framingham, Mass., 1993), as well as the one novel in the "Instrumentality" series, Norstrilia (1994). NESFA has also issued Anthony Lewis' Concordance to Cordwainer Smith (third revised edition, 2000). The best modern translation of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is by Moss Roberts. Pantheon Books issued a readable one-volume version of this translation in 1976 (which is old enough that it uses the now outdated orthography "Lo Kuan-chung" for Luo's name); the complete text runs to four volumes.

External Links

• Cordwainer Smith at ISFDB.org

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