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Introduction by John J. Pierce
Editor's Introduction
No, No, Not Rogov!
War No. 81-Q (rewritten version)
Mark Elf
The Queen of the Afternoon
Scanners Live in Vain
The Lady Who Sailed The Soul
When the People Fell
Think Blue, Count Two
The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All
The Game of Rat and Dragon
The Burning of the Brain
From Gustible's Planet
Himself in Anachron
The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal
Golden the Ship Was—Oh! Oh! Oh!
The Dead Lady of Clown Town
Under Old Earth
Drunkboat
Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons
Alpha Ralpha Boulevard
The Ballad of Lost C'mell
A Planet Named Shayol
On the Gem Planet
On the Storm Planet
On the Sand Planet
Three to a Given Star
Down to a Sunless Sea
War No. 81-Q (original version)
Western Science Is So Wonderful
Nancy
The Fife of Bodidharma
Angerhelm
The Good Friends
It's trite to say, of course, but there has never been another science fiction writer like Cordwainer Smith.
Smith was never a very prolific SF writer, as evidenced by the fact that nearly all of his short fiction can be encompassed in a single omnibus volume like this. He was never a very popular writer, as evidenced by the fact that most of his work has usually been out of print. Nor has he been a favorite of the critics, as evidenced by the fact that few citations to his SF can be found in journals like Science Fiction Studies.
It is impossible to fit Smith's work into any of the neat categories that appeal to most readers or critics. It isn't hard science fiction, it isn't military science fiction, it isn't sociological science fiction, it isn't satire, it isn't surrealism, it isn't post-modernism. For those who have fallen in love with it over the years, however, it is some of the most powerful science fiction ever written. It is the kind of fiction that, as C. S. Lewis once wrote, becomes part of the reader's personal iconography.
You may have already read the story of Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (1913-66), the man behind Cordwainer Smith, who grew up in China, Japan, Germany, and France, and became a soldier, diplomat, and respected authority on Far Eastern affairs. He was the son of Paul Myron Wentworth Linebarger, a retired American judge who helped finance the Chinese revolution of 1911 and became the legal advisor to Sun Yat-sen. It was Sun himself who gave young Paul his Chinese name Lin Bah Loh, or "Forest of Incandescent Bliss." (His father had been dubbed Lin Bah Kuh, or "Forest of 1,000 Victories.") In time, the younger Linebarger became the confidant of Chiang Kai-shek, and, like his father, wrote about China. Still later, he was in demand at the Department of Asiatic Politics at Johns Hopkins University, where he shared his own expertise with members of the diplomatic corps. And that isn't counting his years as an operative in China during World War II, or as a "visitor to small wars" thereafter, from which he became perhaps the world's leading authority on psychological warfare.
He wrote the book on psychological warfare—under his own name, as with all his non-fiction. But he was very shy about his fiction. He wrote two novels, Ria and Carola, both unusual due to their female protagonists and international settings, under the name Felix C. Forrest, a play on his Chinese name. But when people found out who "Forrest" was, he couldn't write any more. He tried a spy thriller, Atomsk, as Carmichael Smith, but was found out again. He even submitted a manuscript for another novel under his wife's name, but nobody was fooled. Although Linebarger wrote at least partial drafts of several other novels, he was never able to interest publishers, and it appears he never really tried that hard. He might have had a distinguished, if minor, career as a novelist—it is an odd coincidence that Herma Briffault, widow of Robert Briffault, to whose novels of European politics Frederik Pohl would later compare Ria and Carola, had in fact read Carola in manuscript; only she compared it to the work of Jean Paul Sartre!
Yet it isn't only a matter of happenstance, of opportunities elsewhere denied, that Paul M. A. Linebarger became a science fiction writer. In fact, he was writing SF before he wrote anything else. From his early teens, he turned out an incredible volume of juvenile SF, under titles like "The Books of Futurity"—some bad imitations of Edgar Rice Burroughs, others clumsily satirical or incorporating Chinese legends or folklore. One of these efforts contained, as an imaginary "review," the genesis of "The Fife of Bodidharma," published over 20 years later in its final form. At the age of 15, he even had an SF story published—"War No. 81-Q," which appeared in The Adjutant, the official organ of his high school cadet corps in Washington, DC, in June 1928. Because he used the name of his cousin, Jack Bearden, for the hero, Bearden decided to get back with a story of his own, "The Notorious C39"; but Bearden's story actually made it into Amazing Stories. More than 30 years later, Linebarger rewrote "War No. 81-Q" for his first collection of Cordwainer Smith SF stories, You Will Never Be the Same, but it didn't make the cut.
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Linebarger continued to write short fiction—some SF, some fantasy, some contemporary or Chinese historical. The manuscripts, including those of the earliest Cordwainer Smith stories, were eventually bound in a red-leather volume now in the hands of a daughter living in Oregon. Most of these stories were apparently never submitted for publication, but Linebarger did send two of the fantasies— "Alauda Dalma" and "The Archer and the Deep"—to Unknown in 1942. (If you don't recognize the titles, it is because Unknown turned them down: the latter didn't fare any better with Judith Merril in 1961.) Then in 1945, recently returned from China and facing idle hours in some sort of desk job at the Pentagon, he wrote another of the manuscripts included in the bound volume, the one that was to put him on the literary map— "Scanners Live in Vain."
You doubtless know that it was "Scanners" which introduced the Instrumentality of Mankind, although only as a shadowy background to the bizarre tale of the cyborged space pilots who are dead though they live, and would rather kill than live with a new discovery that has made their sacrifice and its attendant rituals obsolete. Yet however shadowy, that background—with its references to the Beasts and the manshonyaggers and the Unforgiven, and the implications of some terrible dark age from which humanity has only just emerged—suggests a long period of gestation for the story and, possibly, the existence of earlier stories with the same background. Only there is no evidence of any such thing; to the contrary, at least some of the background appears to date back to a note Linebarger wrote to himself January 7, 1945, for a projected story, "The Weapons," set in a "future or imaginary world" in which humanity must always be on guard against old weapons, "perpetual and automatic," surviving from some old and forgotten war. In that note, we can see the genesis of the manshonyaggers, the German killing machines (from menschenjäger, or hunter of men) first referred to in "Scanners Live in Vain."
Can Paul Linebarger have thought up an entire future history in the time it took to write "Scanners Live in Vain"? It is probably a lot more complicated than that; it may well be that a number of ideas that had been floating around in his head for years, without ever being set down on paper, suddenly gelled when he had the inspiration for the story. It didn't take long for the universe of "Scanners Live in Vain" to take shape, however, for the story had been written within a few months of that note for "The Weapons." On July 18, 1945, it was submitted to John W. Campbell, Jr. at Astounding Science Fiction—who rejected it as "too extreme." That proved to be the first of several rejections, until "Scanners Live in Vain" finally found a home at Fantasy Book in 1950. The only related story that Linebarger wrote before then was "Himself in Anachron," dated 1946. Never published in a magazine, it was later slated (like the revised "War No. 81-Q") for inclusion in You Will Never Be the Same, under the title "My Love Is Lost in the Null of Nought" or "She Lost Her Love in the Null of Nought," but Linebarger wasn't able to deliver a revised manuscript in time. Although he may have written such a revision at a later date, none can be found in his literary papers, and the present version was adapted by his widow Genevieve from the 1946 draft.
The career of Cordwainer Smith might have been stillborn, with only one published and one unpublished story to show for it. Fortunately, Smith soon had a few champions, most notably Frederik Pohl, who didn't have the foggiest idea who the author was but knew a stellar performance when he saw one. By including "Scanners Live in Vain" in an anthology, Pohl rescued it from the obscurity of Fantasy Book, and that led a few years later to Linebarger's submission of "The Game of Rat and Dragon" to Galaxy: the rest, as they say, is history. A great deal may not be told until the hoped-for publication of a biography of Linebarger by Alan C. Elms, who has done exhaustive interviews with his friends and family as well as researching all his papers. Among other things, Elms has the low-down on how it happened that the young Linebarger knew L. Ron Hubbard. (It wasn't a mere fluke that one of Linebarger's own unpublished works was Pathematics, his revisionist take on Hubbard's Dianetics.)
It is important to understand some crucial facts about his life that have previously been overlooked: for example, although he was a devout Episcopalian late in life, he was only a nominal Methodist (his father's church) at the time he wrote "Scanners Live in Vain." He originally joined the Episcopal Church as a compromise with his second wife, who was raised as a Catholic. Only about 1960 did he become a believer in any deep sense, and only then did the religious imagery and Christian message become strong in his SF works. The change in spiritual orientation that marks his later work is thus a genuine change, not merely a change of emphasis. There are also all kinds of details about the life of Paul M. A. Linebarger, his family and friends, that bear on his work—as we shall see when Elms' researches bear fruit.
The strictly literary history, however, is fascinating in itself. In spite of such major gaps as the loss of Linebarger's main notebook for the Instrumentality saga in 1965, and the apparent disappearance of the dictabelts on which his widow recalled that he had recorded notes for or even drafts of stories never committed to paper, it is possible to reconstruct a lot of this literary history from Linebarger's literary papers, now at the University of Kansas (although some, including more juvenilia, and such oddities as an early poem titled "An Ode to My Buick," mistakenly ended up at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, the repository for papers relating to his military, diplomatic, and scholarly career). Among these literary papers are any number of variant (mostly partial) manuscripts for stories already familiar to us, false starts for stories never completed, notebooks with ideas for stories never written, and miscellaneous correspondence.
The story of the Instrumentality saga has been told before: the Ancient Wars, the Dark Age, the renaissance of humanity in the time of the scanners, the romantic age of exploration by sailship, the discoveries of planoforming and stroon that bind together the myriad worlds and usher in a bland Utopia of ease and plenty, the twin revolutions of the underpeople's Holy Insurgency and the Instrumentality's Rediscovery of Man. The stories in this volume tell it all better than any summary can. Smith had it all worked out, of course; he even offered to supply a chronology for You Will Never Be the Same, which would undoubtedly have been far superior to the one I supplied for The Best of Cordwainer Smith for Del Rey Books. But the saga was never conceived as a seamless whole, however much Linebarger worked to develop the overall framework that would embrace both his original conception and his later one.
His working method seemed to be to develop several strands of thought and weave them together, or perhaps let them weave themselves together. This is first evident in the genesis of "Scanners," in which ideas of a future dark age, automatic weapons, the Vomact family, the scanners themselves, and even the Instrumentality suddenly come together. Subsequent stories developed that background. Both "Mark Elf and the original two-chapter fragment of "The Queen of the Afternoon" backtracked to the end of the Dark Age (the latter made no mention of the underpeople in that version, nor did it hint at any Christian themes). "The Game of Rat and Dragon" took the saga forward to the heroic age of planoforming, and the vision of the far future in "No, No, Not Rogov!" hinted at a secular apotheosis for human history. Both "When the People Fell" and "The Burning of the Brain" are snapshots of different periods in the same history, as well as compelling stories in themselves.
In 1958, Linebarger began writing a novel called Star-Craving Mad, which was his first attempt at what eventually became Norstrilia. But the initial version of the story is far different from that we know today. There is no Rediscovery of Man, nor any Holy Insurgency. Lord Jestocost and "Arthur McBan CLI" both figure here, but in different guises: Jestocost is simply a cruel but shrewd tyrant, whose name ("cruelty" in Russian) has none of the ironic meaning we now associate with it; while McBan is a man of action who comes to the aid of the underpeople only for the love of C'mell. And the rebellion of the underpeople is nothing more than an uprising of the oppressed, like the French Revolution to which it is compared. The E'telekeli appears, but as a future Jacobite rather than a spiritual sage. Linebarger was developing an ironic theme, but it had to do with true men having inadvertently created a race of supermen in the form of the underpeople.
Linebarger apparently wasn't satisfied with the way the story was going, for it was abandoned after a few chapters. Several other false starts over the next year failed to get Star-Craving Mad moving again, and a severe illness which Genevieve Linebarger later remembered as the genesis of Norstrilia may have actually been the genesis of a spiritual rebirth that changed the entire thrust of the Instrumentality saga. As in the case of "Scanners Live in Vain," however, Paul Linebarger was evidently thinking along several lines at once before they all came together.
Even in the original draft of Star-Craving Mad there is one hint of the Rediscovery of Man, but it remains only a hint. C'mell's father C'mackintosh is not an athlete, but a "licensed robber" at a "savage park" in Mississippi: such parks are a means for humanity to "keep the peace within its own troubled and complex soul," but they are apparently a longstanding institution, not a revolutionary development. In an early false start for "The Ballad of Lost C'mell," Lord Redlady has unleashed ancient diseases on Earth, but not as part of a spiritual revolution: the idea to discourage invasions by developing immunities among Earthmen to pathogens that can then be used as weapons against outsiders. In another false start, for a story called "Strange Men and Doomed Ladies," Lord Jestocost proposes to end the policy of euthanasia for "spoiled" people such as the crippled, the sickly, the stupid, and even the overly-brilliant: "Let them be, and let us see." But this seems to be an isolated idea, unrelated to any grand plan.
The false start for "The Ballad of Lost C'mell" ("Where Is the Which of the What She Did") also opens with a prologue that recounts the entire history of Earth. Our times are the Second Ancient Days; they came before the First Ancient Days, but were discovered later. The First Ancient Days came either before or after the Long Nothing (a summary of the chronology contradicts the narrative). Civilization was restored by the Dwellers, who brought the cities back into shape around the ruins left by the Daimoni, including Earthport Gulosan. It was during the time of the Dwellers that humanity discovered Space3 and overcame the rule of the perfect men. But that was all long before the time of C'mell. The Originals, invaders from space, overcame the Dwellers, but were later overthrown by an alliance of true men and underpeople. Then came the Bright, who "did things with music and dance, with picture and word, which had never been done before." They also built the peace square at An-fang, and (another contradiction) had something to do with the "fall of the perfect men and the temporary rule of Lord Redlady." Then came a time of troubles, the High Cruel Years, followed by another invasion by the Pure ("men of earth who had been gone too long"), who still rule Earth at the time of the story.
Although the Dwellers may be the true men of "Mark Elf," and the rule of the Bright may have something to do with the Bright Empire mentioned in Norstrilia, nothing in the canon of stories we know seems to relate to the Originals or the High Cruel Years or the Pure. Linebarger was apparently reshaping his vision of the far future almost to the moment he wrote "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard," in which it all crystallized. (The "Where Is the Which of the What She Did" fragment has the narrator recalling that "the most blessed of computers burned out on Alpha Ralpha Boulevard," but assigns this to the long-past age of the Dwellers.) During the same period, Linebarger was reshaping "The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All," a then-unpublished story about the discovery of planoforming, into the story of Artyr Rambo's mystical experience in Space3. The story went through several partial drafts (one titled "Archipelagoes of Stars"), which used different approaches capturing the poetic experience of Arthur Rimbaud. One version quotes Rimbaud's Le Bateau Ivre itself, as a prophecy of Space3, and asks, "How knew it he, all the fine points of it? ... He an ancient was!" Another draft opens, "They put him into a box, a box. They shot him to the end of time . . . Then, when it was all over, people discovered that another man, also a singer, had written it all down in the Most Ancient World." The final version, of course, is far more subtle; it was typical of Linebarger to make his stories less straightforward and more allusive in such details.
Although most of the background for the Instrumentality saga was contained in a notebook that Linebarger accidentally left in a restaurant in Rhodes in 1965, another notebook begun during the last year of his life contains ideas for several stories that were never written. Because they are notes to himself, they can be as cryptic as the lyrics of a David Lynch song. But some are clear enough, as far as they go, including those for "The Robot, the Rat, and the Copt," which was originally conceived as a single story but later was a cycle of four stories, like the Casher O'Neill series. We know from references in published stories that the Robot, the Rat, and the Copt were to bring back a Christian revelation from Space3, but the notes don't add much to that, except to confirm that this new dimension is where Christ "had really been and always was experienced." The rat was to have been named R'obert, however, and there was to have been a Coptic planet. (A list of Coptic names—including Shenuda or "God Lives"—appear in an entirely different notebook, a ring binder titled "New Science Fiction by Cordwainer Smith," which also includes most of the false starts and first drafts already referred to.)
Some of the ideas seem relatively trivial: a forlorn suitor has the crushed head of his true love, killed in an accident, regrown on Shayol, and reimplanted with her personality; a Go-Captain who has a mysterious (but unspecified) experience in space is treated as a madman on his conservative homeworld. Another story was to have been set on a remote, prosperous world where one-parents gamble on the futures of their newly-issued children; this would evidently have shed more light on the sequential system of child-raising by one-parents, two-parents, and three-parents alluded to in "Under Old Earth." Another note is simply a name: the Lord Sto Dva, presumably a successor to the Lord Sto Odin of "Under Old Earth."
But the most intriguing note is undoubtedly one for a story called "How the Dream Lords Died." Set in A.D. 6111, it would have involved the use of 12,000 slave brains by the Dream Lords in an attempt to explore other times telepathically, like the Eighteenth Men of the distant future in Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men. The Dream Lords were clearly among the "others in the earth" after the fall of the Ancient World, alluded to in Norstrilia, and this note is the only reference to any story to have been set during that time—well before "Mark Elf." Coupled with the titling of "The Queen of the Afternoon" (set, like "Mark Elf," at the very end of the new dark ages), it suggests that a new cycle of stories, "The Lords of the Afternoon," may have been related to the dark ages. Shortly before his death, Linebarger told his friend Arthur Burns he was planning a story cycle of that name; Burns conjectured that it would take place in the period of "Under Old Earth," and most timelines have shown the series taking place in that period.
The year given for "How the Dream Lords Died," naturally knocks the time-line used in The Best of Cordwainer Smith and The Instrumentality of Mankind into a cocked hat. The dark ages must have lasted much longer than listed there, and the rest of the future history thus must have been compressed into a much shorter time. We will probably never know much more about Linebarger's intentions; even his wife doesn't seem to have been privy to them. In "The Saga of the Third Sister," a (deservedly) unpublished sequel to "The Queen of the Afternoon," she involved Karla vom Acht in the quest of the Robot, the Rat, and the Copt, even though that story was obviously intended to have come millennia later. In working on Paul's unfinished manuscript for "The Queen of the Afternoon" itself, she insisted on anachronistic references to underpeople, and softened the characterizations of Juli vom Acht and the true men. Incidentally, it isn't clear from Paul's original material whether Juli's arrival on Earth was actually to have come after Carlotta's, rather than before.
But enough of the history behind the history. You already know the story of the Instrumentality is more than history: it is poetry, and romance, and myth, and unlike any other SF series or future history. It is almost impossible to imagine anyone except Linebarger writing stories set in the universe of Cordwainer Smith, as others have written stories about Isaac Asimov's robots or Larry Niven's kzinti. It would probably be close to blasphemy, in the realm of the arts, for anyone else to even try. Like the rarest vintage wine, the work of Cordwainer Smith cannot be duplicated. We must be grateful that we can still savor the true vintage of these pages.
This volume contains all the short science fiction written by Cord-wainer Smith (Dr. Paul Linebarger). It contains all the stories included in The Best of Cordwainer Smith, The Instrumentality of Mankind, and Quest of the Three Worlds. The latter book, while marketed as a novel, is actually a collection of four short works. This collection also includes the story "Down to a Sunless Sea," published by The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction under the name "Cordwainer Smith," but actually written by Genevieve Linebarger, Paul's wife. She was the coauthor with Paul on several other stories, most notably "The Lady Who Sailed The Soul."
The current volume contains two previously unpublished short pieces. "Himself in Anachron" was completed by Genevieve Linebarger after Paul's death, and is also scheduled for publication in The Last Dangerous Visions. "War No. 81-Q," is a complete rewrite of a story Linebarger wrote while in high school. (The original version was published in The Instrumentality of Mankind and is also included here.)
In many cases, there were a number of differences between the original magazine version of the story and the versions published later in various collections of Smith's work. Sometimes, whole sentences or paragraphs were added to the book version. In general, we used the book versions, since these seemed to be the more complete. For the four stories in Quest of the Three Worlds, we also used the versions that appeared in the "novel."
In one case, "Scanners Live in Vain," we had the original manuscript. We discovered that Fantasy Book, which published the story, dropped several lines and made a number of other minor changes; subsequent publications followed the Fantasy Book version. The text contained here is the first publication of that story with the complete text of the original.
In addition to the short fiction contained here, Smith produced one SF novel: Norstrilia. Norstrilia was originally published as two short novels, "The Boy Who Bought Old Earth" and "The Store of Heart's Desire," which were then reprinted in two volumes, The Planet Buyer and The Underpeople, respectively. Only later were they combined into one volume as Norstrilia. However, unlike the stories that make up Quest of the Three Worlds, these two stories were never intended as shorter works: they are truly a novel split in two, while Quest of the Three Worlds is really four independent stories (which share the same central character), cobbled together to form a novel. Norstrilia, therefore, is not included in this collection.
One final note on contents: most of Smith's science fiction is set in a common future, that of the Instrumentality of Mankind. This book is arranged in two sections. In the first section, the Instrumentality stories are arranged in internal chronological order (as best as can be determined from the stories). The second section contains the non-Instrumentality stories, arranged in order of original publication.
James A. Mann
Northboro, MA
April 1993
This book was put together through the efforts of many volunteers. Frank and Lisa Richards scanned in most of the book. Tony Lewis made the contractual arrangements for the stories and the cover. Greg Thokar arranged for printing, provided some stylistic guidance, and gave a thorough consistency check to the final book. Mark Olson helped typeset a number of the stories, proofed parts of the book, and provided general support. George Flynn copyedited almost the entire book, comparing many stories to both book and magazine versions. Priscilla Olson also proofed and copy edited large pieces of the book. Aron Insinga, Tim Szczesuil, Ann Crimmins, and Gay Ellen Dennett proofed several stories. Tom Whitmore provided the original manuscript of "Scanners Live in Vain" and the cover letter reprinted on page 64. Laurie Mann helped enter proof corrections, typed some of the material that could not be scanned, and provided general moral support. Thanks to you all.
This book was produced on a Gateway 2000 PC, using Microsoft Word for Windows. Page layout was done using Aldus PageMaker 4.2 and printed on an HP LaserJet 4M.
The book is set in Times New Roman on 60# acid-free paper. It was printed by Braun-Brumfield, Inc.
NESFA Press has also produced the Concordance to Cordwainer Smith by Anthony R. Lewis. For information about this and other NESFA Press books, please write for our catalog.