Table of Contents
Copyright
Foreword
PIECES OF THE PUZZLE
THE CORDWAINERIAN UNIVERSE
Chronology
SOME CLUES
A COMPLEX MAN
FIGURES OF RUPTURE
FIGURES OF LIBERATION
“THE SITUATION”AND ITS LIMITS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Writer
Copyright
Translated by Kevin Krell
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2011
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Foreword
To Daniel and David
It is a well-known fact that readers these days are increasingly few and far between. As a result, finding one willing to endure a prologue is that much more difficult. Yet the author cannot forego the opportunity to do so.
This book is about a writer that opted for science fiction and ended up transcending it.
I do not consider myself a science fiction expert, despite having been among the first to specialize in the genre. I always intended for my work to be philosophical in nature, even if the eclecticism that dispensed with the de rigueur capital letters of academia might not have sat well with professional thinkers.
If science fiction did not offer prestige, “Cordwainer Smith” was not exactly a recommendable subject for a doctoral dissertation. The study of a North American writer was always viewed with suspicion in Argentina, especially when no subsidies were involved. It also would have raised eyebrows in the United States, insofar as it violated unwritten rules of the international division of labor.
The life of Cordwainer Smith was filled with the paradoxes, though after Roland Barthes it is said that the writer disappeared or simply became a producer of content. Insisting on finding a relationship between the life and work of a writer, in other words, was considered an outmoded endeavor.
Ignoring all wise counsel, I engaged in criticism, psychology, history and politics with the audacity of a multidisciplinary reader. My only intention was to contribute, on the basis of scant material, to the understanding of a creative life.
It was many years before the work I began in 1970 took the form of a book, which was published in 1983 and entitled El Señor de la Tarde: Conjeturas en torno de Cordwainer Smith.
In my first work, written while Cordwainer Smith was still alive, I already had devoted several paragraphs to him. Ten years after his death, I memorialized him in an article. Ten years later, I paid homage to him again in El Pendulo, which had presented his work for the first time in Spanish. At the outset of the new century, I was admitted into the virtual fraternity devoted to his memory, The Instrumentality of Mankind. Now, forty years later, I offer this new edition.
Cordwainer Smith continues to fascinate me. All that remains now is to thank the following people for their assistance: Marcial Souto, for his friendship, suggestions, invaluable information and encouragement of such a crazy undertaking. Alan C. Elms, Bernard Goorden, and all my Argentine friends who came to my aid: Father Agustín Bergman (MHF), Basilio Dubkó, Hermes Gosso and Elvio E. Gandolfo, to name a few. Deserving of special mention are Carlos Gardini, who translated the work of Cordwainer Smith into Spanish and assumed the burden of revising the text to prevent further rewritings from ruining it, and Daniel Arias for his valuable advice.
Pablo Capanna
PIECES OF THE PUZZLE
PIECES OF THE PUZZLE
Everyone is a Lear, an Othello,
a Desdemona, a Prospero, a Caliban—
more wonderful than a Moon rocket, more complicated than an
H-bomb, more complicated than a tropical hurricane.
It is the job of the writer to seize the wonders and
let the reader see Mankind within himself.
Cordwainer Smith, You Will Never Be the Same
If this were a spy novel, an unauthorized biography, a self-help book or one of those fascinating New Age revelations, it would begin by saying that it is about a real person, a unique human being, in other words, who, believe or not, did some very unusual things and imagined others even stranger.
As an introduction, an overview of some of the circumstances of his brief but intense life shall suffice:
• At the age of sixteen, he represented the nationalist government of China at the White House and at twenty-one, had already earned a doctorate.
• He organized the first intelligence service of the United States, the precursor to what would become the CIA.
• While World War Two was still raging, he was in a guerilla camp in Yenan discussing politics and strategy with Mao Zedong, Chou-En Lai and other Chinese Communist leaders.
• Everything points to his being moderately insane when he claimed to have made “astral voyages” through the galaxy. He ended up confusing his psychoanalyst and nearly dragged him into his madness.
• He was a schoolmate of Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, the future founder of the controversial Church of Scientology. Before anyone had heard of Hubbard, he was his first critic, predicting he would become a dubious leader.
• Years before Ian Fleming created James Bond, he had invented a super-spy that had nothing to envy the legendary British agent.
• He was an advisor to two American presidents: Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. He wrote speeches for Nelson Rockefeller, Robert Taft and Richard Nixon.
• Shielded behind a pseudonym, he published science fiction stories in magazines frowned upon by sophisticated critics, encrypting them with political codes. If readers knew how to decipher them, they would have recognized such figures as Nasser and King Faruk, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and even Marilyn Monroe.
• In one of the texts, he acrostically concealed his doubts about Kennedy’s assassination.
• In 1955, when no one was even capable of conceiving of an URSS without Stalin, he spoke of a post-Soviet Russia in which religion and spirituality had made a comeback.
• In the seventies, he envisaged a future in which a cultural interest in recreating the clothes, habits, music and art of the past would emerge: a nostalgic imposture with an air of post-modernism.
• In 1961, when computers were enormous closets filled with valves and the idea of cybercrimes had not occurred to anyone yet, he warned that “poor communications deter theft; good communications promote theft; perfect communications stop theft.”
• In a 1964 novel, he invented a youth who engaged in intricate virtual business via his computer and ended up controlling Earth. Today we would call him a “hacker”.
• Not long after the start of
the Vietnam War, he created a character named Rambo who, similar to the other Rambo later popularized in the movies, was driven mad by rage and went about thwarting military officials.
• Decades before NASA coined the term “cyborg”, he imagined the symbiosis between men and machines.
• Long before deciphering the genetic code was possible and genetically modified creatures, chimeras or parahumans were not the subject of anyone’s conversation, he had penned the epic struggle of a community of anthropomorphized animals called “underpeople”.
• In a story he wrote sixty years ago, a cyborg communicated by writing text messages on a small screen (“Pls, drlng, whrs crnching wire?”) in code that would not surprise teenagers today.
We are not talking about Nostradamus or Indiana Jones but a flesh-and-blood individual who lived between 1913 and 1966. Wherever he is today, perhaps he is smiling at our interest in works he had so much fun creating.
For one of those mysterious reasons that determine success or failure, not a single editor promoted Cordwainer Smith outside of science fiction, the cultural niche in which he had ensconced himself.
More than four decades after his death, when so many authors have fallen by the wayside, his work is as powerful as ever. At the end of the last century, a Locus survey (1997) situated his novel Norstrilia among the one hundred best of all time, with more votes than Wells and Stapledon. The SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) continued recommending his books, and readers continued voting for them.
Science fiction contributed significantly to the imagination of the 20th century, even if few intellectuals care to admit it. While it has gained a degree of cultural recognition, it continues to be stigmatized. The respect it inspires, however, appears to reflect the magnitude of the publishing business it nurtures and the inordinate amount of representations it has found in movies. Whenever a writer with roots in science fiction creates an echo among a larger audience, the cultural press is lenient toward him. Often it proclaims the discovery of a “great writer” that had been unjustly exiled (no one knows by whom) to the outskirts of literature. In this manner Lovecraft was rehabilitated from esotericism, Bradbury assimilated into the literary canon and Asimov made into an avatar of Leonardo.
The other approach to the genre is the one common among academics ever since they realized that “marginal literature” could serve as virgin soil for cultivating research projects. Yet their critical mobilization cannot overcome the stigma; in fact, it contributes to reinforcing it. Genre literature continues to be treated implicitly as “sub-literature”, one that barely even raises anthropological interest. Within the framework of multiculturalism, “popular” writers are deserving of nearly as much respect as minority ones.
Things become even more complicated when we consider the fact that the man who signed his books “Cordwainer Smith” was not the typical publishing industry galley slave who wrote to make a living, such as, say, Phillip K. Dick. He was a celebrated writer, a culturally refined man who chose science fiction because it seemed most akin to his sensibilities. This circumstance is rather awkward for literary taxonomists.
Cordwainer Smith was neither an easy writer nor one for the masses. He was not even very popular within his own genre. His readers were unaware of his literary models, which included Dante, The Odyssey, the Chinese novel, Persian poetry, The Arabian Nights, Rimbaud, Tennyson and G. B. Shaw, not that they would they have cared. His fame, preserved by small circles of loyal readers, reached its height ten years after his death, when he gained the status of “cult” author on university campuses.
Nevertheless, even a cursory look at his work reveals one of the few authors with an original style that the genre has ever produced. He created a mundus alter et idem, a subtle allegory of his times but was never concerned with making it transparent.
In the seventies, science fiction was in crisis, and for some the end was near: the Sputniks and Apollo spacecrafts seemed to robbing it of its primary attraction.
The stories of Cordwainer Smith appeared in the most important sci-fi magazines, such as Galaxy, Amazing SF, If and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
His work touched on all the classic science fiction motifs, though with rather unique results. The perceptive reader gets the sense that the source of his inspiration is elsewhere, that genre themes were merely a pretext.
At the time, critics had invested their hopes in J.G. Ballard and the exciting British avant-garde.1 The genre appeared to be changing, liberating itself from sterile conventions. It sought to move closer to major literary trends and began to awaken interest in the world of commercial cinema. For the first time, some critically celebrated writers admitted to having dabbled in this “lesser” literature.
Cordwainer Smith received the crucial endorsement of Theodore Sturgeon, one of the major figures of the genre. In 1965, when barely anyone knew the identity of the person behind the pseudonym, Sturgeon, writing in the National Review, praised his “exalted”, “at times anguished”, but “deadly humorous” style. “The next great name in science fiction,” he announced, “is Smith”, predicting that “[i]f literary historians of the future make Cordwainer Smith into another Tolkien, it will be none too surprising.”
Written around this time, the famous saga Dune, by Frank Herbert, came close to plagiarizing his ideas.2 Dune is a desert world, like the Norstrilia of Cordwainer Smith, where sick worms invent an immortality drug named “spice”. In Smith’s stories sheep become sick, and the drug is called “stroon”. In Norstrilia there are “Freemen” while in Dune “Fremen”. In both worlds, flight in ornithopters is preferred to airplanes.
While Herbert was a commercial, critical and cult success, Smith’s influence has proved more lasting. His less than spectacular presence enables us to understand some of the changes the genre underwent during these years; especially if we consider the extent of his influence on writers such as Robert Silverberg and Harlan Ellison, after having already inspired Frederik Pohl, Algis Budrys and Terry Dowling. Harlan Ellison once paid tribute to him by adopting the pseudonym “Cordwainer Bird”. Ursula K. Le Guin confessed on one occasion that she had decided to become a science fiction writer after reading him. It is not difficult to hear Cordwainerian echoes in such works as Nightwings by Silverberg and Trilogy of the Towers by Samuel Delany, as well as in the work of outspoken admirer Roger Zelazny, Brian M. Stableford and Richard A. Lupoff. Cordwainerian imagery nurtures such books as “Slow Music” (1980) by James Tiptree, Jr. and The Void Captain’s Tale (1983) by Norman Spinrad. This influence is still apparent in the work of Dan Simmons, Orson Scott Card and even in the cyberpunks, who acknowledge him as a master.
However, as John J. Pierce pointed out, the majority of writers imitated his shortcomings rather than his virtues. By this I mean images removed from a unique context and transformed into cinematographic fragments or winks at the reader. Almost always they lack the epic spirit, ethical dimension and playful touch that are the source of their magic3.
From the very beginning it was known that “Cordwainer Smith” was a pseudonym. Fans suspected Theodore Sturgeon, A. E. Van Vogt or Robert Heinlein. They even thought it might be the writers’ agents, Forrest J. Ackerman and Harry Altshuler.
On a lesser scale, it seemed to be another version of the “mystery of Bruno Traven”.4 In this case, the secret was kept for ten years, something not easily accomplished in the small world of science fiction, which is as frivolous as it is well informed. Frederik Pohl was certain that if “Smith” had lived a bit longer, he would have ended up making appearances at fan conventions.
When only a few writers were aware of his true identity, Cordwainer Smith made his identity known in a telephone call to Pohl. Pohl introduced him to Judith Merril, the most brilliant critic at the time, and a well-known writer, the Lithuanian Algis Budrys. Pohl, Merril and “Smith” met several times in Budrys�
��s house.
In her column in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Judith Merril wrote that “the man known as Cordwainer Smith” was the greatest exponent of a new current that used science fiction to transmit philosophical ideas. Cordwainer Smith and Kurt Vonnegut were the only authors that did not seem like anybody else. Both had always been within the genre without belonging to it completely.
The only interview that “Cordwainer Smith” granted in his life appeared in a small town newspaper. It offered some clues to his identity –there is no shortage of false information either– and included a photograph in which the outline of a blurry face was barely distinguishable. The caption simply read “Mr. Smith”.5
In spite of all the secrecy, an English critic wrote: “Smith’s real name is the best kept secret in SF, and rumor has it that he holds a top job in the White House. If so, he must be the most imaginative politician in the States.”6
Just after his death, Frederik Pohl revealed that “Cordwainer Smith” was Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, a university professor and expert in Far Eastern affairs. Under other pseudonyms and with a certain amount of success, he had published three novels, though a single instance of contact with readers had been enough for him to opt for anonymity7. Ten years later, Pohl would still find himself in the company of diplomats that were ignorant of Linebarger’s literary production but remembered him as the most brilliant and “fun” professor they had ever known.8
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