Cordwainer Smith

Cordwainer Smith — pronounced CORDwainer Smith — was the pseudonym used by American author Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (July 11, 1913–August 6, 1966) for his science fiction works. Linebarger was also a noted East Asia scholar and expert in psychological warfare.

Linebarger also employed the literary pseudonyms "Carmichael Smith" (for his political thriller Atomsk), "Anthony Bearden" (for his poetry) and "Felix C. Forrest" (for the novels Ria and Carola).

Biography

Linebarger was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His father was Paul M. W. Linebarger, a lawyer and political activist with close ties to the leaders of the Chinese revolution of 1911. As a result of those ties, Linebarger's godfather was Sun Yat-sen, considered the father of Chinese nationalism. When he later pursued his father's interest in China, Linebarger became a close confidant of Chiang Kai-shek. As a child, Linebarger was blinded in his left eye; the vision in his remaining eye was impaired by infection. His father moved his family to France and then Germany while Sun Yat-sen was struggling against contentious warlords in China. As a result of these experiences, Linebarger was familiar with six languages by adulthood. At the age of 23, he received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University.

From 1937 to 1946, Linebarger held a faculty appointment at Duke University, where he began producing highly regarded works on Far Eastern affairs. While retaining his professorship at Duke after the beginning of World War II, he began serving as a second lieutenant of the U.S. Army, where he was involved in the creation of the Office of War Information and of the Operation Planning and Intelligence Board. He also helped organize the Army's first psychological warfare section. In 1943 he was deployed to China to coordinate U.S.-China military intelligence operations. By the end of the war, he had risen to the rank of major.

In 1936, Linebarger married Margaret Snow, and they had a daughter in 1942. They had a second child, another daughter, in 1947, and divorced in 1949. In 1950, Linebarger married for the second time, to Genevieve Collins; they remained married until his death of a heart attack in 1966.

In 1947, Linebarger moved to the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, where he served as Professor of Asiatic Studies. He used his experiences in the war to write the book Psychological Warfare (1948), which is regarded by many in the field as a classic text. He eventually rose to the rank of colonel in the reserves. He was recalled to advise the British forces in the Malayan Emergency and the U.S. Eighth Army in the Korean War. While he was known to call himself a "visitor to small wars", he refrained from becoming involved in Vietnam, but is known to have done undocumented work for the Central Intelligence Agency. He traveled extensively and became a member of the Foreign Policy Association, and was called upon to advise then–U.S. President John F. Kennedy.

Linebarger expressed a wish to retire to Australia, which he had visited in his travels, but died at age 53. Col. Linebarger is buried in Arlington National Cemetery, Section 35, Grave Number 4712. His widow, Genevieve Collins Linebarger, was interred with him on 16 November 1981.

Science fiction writing

A notable characteristic of Linebarger's science fiction is that most of his stories are set in the same universe, with a unified chronology; some anthologies of Linebarger's fiction include a chart, with each of his stories inserted into the appropriate slot in the timeline.

Linebarger's stories are unusual, even, arguably, by the standards of science fiction, sometimes being written in narrative styles closer to traditional Chinese stories than to most English-language fiction. The total volume of his science fiction output is relatively small, due to his time-consuming profession and his early death: Smith's writings consist of only one novel, originally published in two volumes in edited form as The Planet Buyer, also known as The Boy Who Bought Old Earth (1964), and The Underpeople (1968), later restored to its original form as Norstrilia (1975); and around 30 short stories (all of them gathered in The Rediscovery of Man and previously in incomplete collections). All these writings suggest a rich universe developing over long periods of time, but leave much to be guessed by the reader.

Linebarger's cultural links to China are partially expressed in the pseudonym "Felix C. Forrest", which he used in addition to "Cordwainer Smith": Sun Yat-Sen suggested to Linebarger, his godson, that he adopt the Chinese name "Lin Ba-lo" (林白楽), which may be roughly translated as "Forest of Incandescent Bliss". In his later years, Linebarger proudly wore a tie with the Chinese characters for this name embroidered on it.

As an expert in psychological warfare, Linebarger was very interested in the then newly-developing fields of psychology and psychiatry, and inserted many of their concepts into his fiction. His fiction also often has religious overtones or motifs, in particular in characters who have no control of their actions. In Christianity In the Science Fiction of "Cordwainer Smith" James P. Jordan argued for the importance of Anglicanism to Linebarger's works back to 1949. However, Linebarger's daughter has indicated that he did not become an Anglican until 1950 and was not strongly interested in religion until later still ^*. In the introduction to the collection Rediscovery of Man it is indicated that from around 1960 he became more devout and expressed this in his writing. Linebarger's works are sometimes included in analyses of Christianity in fiction, along with the works of authors such as C. S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien.

The bulk of Cordwainer Smith's stories are set in an era starting some 14,000 years in the future. The Instrumentality of Mankind rules Earth and goes on to control other planets later inhabited by humanity. The Instrumentality attempts to revive old cultures and languages in a process known as the Rediscovery of Man. This rediscovery can be seen either as the initial period when humankind emerges from a mundane utopia and the nonhuman underpeople gain freedom from slavery, or as a continuing process begun by the Instrumentality, encompassing the whole cycle, where mankind is constantly at risk of falling back to its bad old ways.

Smith's stories describe a long future history of Earth, from a postapocalyptic landscape with walled cities defended by agents of the Instrumentality to a state of utopia in which freedom can be found only deep below the surface, in long-forgotten and buried anthropogenic strata. These features may place Smith's works within the Dying Earth subgenre of Science Fiction, but it can be argued that they are ultimately more optimistic and distinctive.

Smith's most important short story is perhaps his first-published, "Scanners Live in Vain", which led many of its earliest readers to assume that "Cordwainer Smith" was a new pen name for one of the established giants of the genre. It was selected as one of the best SF short stories of the pre-Nebula Award period by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and appeared in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume One, 1929-1964.

Linebarger's stories feature strange and vivid creations, such as:

Planet Norstrilia, a semi-arid planet where an immortality drug is harvested from gigantic virus-infected sheep, each weighing more than 100 tons
The punishment world of Shayol (cf. Sheol), where criminals are punished by the regrowth and harvesting of their organs for transplanting in the manner of Prometheus's punishment
Planoforming spacecraft, which are crewed by humans telepathically linked with cats and which defend themselves against the attacks of unknown malevolent entities in space with the flash of small atomic weapons (these entities are perceived by the humans as dragons, and by the cats as gigantic rats)
The Underpeople, animals modified genetically into human form to fulfill servile roles, and treated as property. Several stories feature clandestine efforts to liberate the underpeople and grant them equal rights. They are seen everywhere throughout regions controlled by the Instrumentality.
Habermans and their supervisors, Scanners, whose sensory nerves have been cut to block the "pain of space", and who perceive only by vision and various life-support implants. Other modes of perception can be temporarily restored to scanners by "cranching".

Was Linebarger "Kirk Allen"?

Lee Weinstein and Alan Elms have proposed that Linebarger was a prototype for "Kirk Allen", the fantasy prone scientist in psychologist Robert M. Lindner's best-selling short story collection, The Fifty-Minute Hour (1956), about offbeat psychoanalytic cases. It is not proven, however, that Linebarger was ever a patient of Lindner's or that he suffered from a disorder similar to Kirk Allen's. Indeed, even if one accepted the extensive circumstantial evidence compiled by Weinstein and Elms as proof that Linebarger was in some manner an inspiration for "The Jet-Propelled Couch" (the story in question), it would still remain possible that Kirk Allen is a composite of Linebarger and an unknown patient treated either by Lindner or by a colleague of Lindner's. Hence, the Kirk Allen story cannot at this point be accepted as a source of biographical information and insight regarding Linebarger's life and personality.Lee Weinstein, "In Search of Kirk Allen", New York Review of Science Fiction, April 2001. See also 'Cordwainer Smith Scholarly Corner by Alan C. Elms

Published non-fiction works

1937, The Political Doctrines of Sun-Yat-Sen: An Exposition of the San Min Chu I, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press
1938, Government in Republican China (with Fritz Morstein Marx), London: McGraw-Hill, ISBN 0883550814
1941, The China of Chiang K'ai-shek: A Political Study, Boston: World Peace Foundation, ISBN 0837167795
1948, Psychological Warfare, Washington: Infantry Journal Press
1951, Foreign milieux (HBM 200/1), Dept. of Defense, Research and Development Board
1951, Immediate improvement of theater-level psychological warfare in the Far East, Operations Research Office, Johns Hopkins University
1954, Far Eastern Government and Politics: China and Japan (with Djang Chu and Ardath W. Burks), Van Nostrand
1956, "Draft statement of a ten-year China and Indochina policy, 1956-1966", Foreign Policy Research Institute, University of Pennsylvania
1965, Essays on military psychological operations, Special Operations Research Office, American University

Notes

External links

The Remarkable Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith Maintained by his daughter Rosana.
Personal data on Paul Linebarger
Arlington National Cemetery: Linebarger
Unofficial Cordwainer Smith Biography Page