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Cordwainer Smith
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 Cordwainer Smith was the pseudonym of Paul Linebarger, a mysterious and colorful figure who was
an expert on psychological warfare (he wrote a standard text) and spent his career in the Intelligence community.
He went to college with L. Ron Hubbard, the famous pulp science fiction writer who later
invented Scientology, and they published in the same literary magazine. There was apparently some real
competitiveness in Linebarger, for he wrote an entire book manuscript (never published) in the late 1940s on the science
of mental health. In typical hard sf fashion, both Linebarger and Hubbard were trying to raise psychology to
the status of a "real" science.
Nearly all of Smith's science fiction takes place in a consistent future history, "The Instrumentality
of Mankind," comprising many stories and one novel,
Norstrilia (1975). The series chronicles events in the
millennia-long struggle between the human Instrumentality and the Underpeople, intelligent animals
biologically transformed into humanlike forms. A devout High Anglican, Smith built complex levels of
religious allegory into his series.
As is evident from the foregoing, he was not characteristically an hard sf writer, but he did
occasionally explore hard sf territory, although always in an highly ornamented style at the furthest remove from the
traditional unornamented prose of scientific reportage normally identified with the "hard stuff."
"No, No, Not Rogov!" is his only sf story set in contemporary times. It is in the mode of
invention fiction, but is set in the Soviet Union during the 1940s and beyond. It explores the work of science
under totalitarian political conditions, a subject that Linebarger knew well. The setting reflects the
ambiguous attitude toward the linkage of the military and scientific establishments that has characterized
post-atomic bomb sf. The political/psychological portraits may be assumed to be accurate. It is also a link between
the present and his visionary future of the Instrumentality.
The portrayal of experimental science is a chilling parallel to Tiptree's "The Psychologist Who
Wouldn't Do Awful Things to Rats." And the portrait of the scientist as a partly-willing political prisoner is an ironic
contrast to Kornbluth's "Gomez." It is a work that explodes into something visionary and transcendent
and shows Cordwainer Smith's distinctive and unusual voice in sf.
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The Ascent of Wonder copyright © 1994 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. | ||
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Cramer: On Science & Science Fiction || Hartwell: Hard Science Fiction
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Interactive Intoduction to THE ASCENT OF WONDER copyright © 1995-1997 by Kathryn Cramer.