Cordwainer Smith - The complete Instrumentality of Mankind.pdf

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THE REDISCOVERY OF MAN
The Complete Instrumentality of Mankind Stories of Cordwainer Smith
* marks major stories
Introductions and commentaries by J.J. Pierce
file 1
Introductions 2
No, No, Not Rogov! 15
War No. 81-Q 29
Mark Elf 37
The Queen of the Afternoon 47
*Scanners Live In Vain 67
file 2
*The Lady Who Sailed the Soul 2
When the People Fell 20
Think Blue, Count Two 29
The Colonel Came Back From the Nothing-At-All 51
*The Game of Rat and Dragon 58
The Burning of the Brain
70
From Gustible's Planet 77
Himself In Anachron
82
*The Crime and Glory of Commander Suzdal 88
Golden the Ship Was -- Oh! Oh! Oh! 100
file 3
*The Dead Lady of Clown Town 2
*Under Old Earth
file 4
Drunkboat 2
*Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons 25
*Alpha Ralpha Boulevard 42
*The Ballad of Lost C'mell 64
*A Planet Called Shayol 79
file 5
Quest of the Three Worlds (Casher O'Neill series)
Introduction 2
On the Gem Planet 5
On the Storm Planet
On the Planet
Three To a Given Star
Down To a Sunless Sea
1st Introduction (from The Best of Cordwainer Smith)
Cordwainer Smith: The Shaper of Myths
In an obscure and short-lived magazine called Fantasy Book, there
appeared in 1950 a story called "Scanners Live in Vain."
No one had ever heard of the author, Cordwainer Smith. And it
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appeared for a time that he would never be heard from again in the world of
science fiction.
But "Scanners Live in Vain" was a story that refused to die, and its
republication in two anthologies encouraged the elusive Smith to begin
submitting to other SF markets.
Today, be is recognized as one of the most creative SF writers of
modern times. But, paradoxically, be is one of the least known or
understood. Until shortly before his death, his very identity was a closely
guarded secret.
Not that Dr. Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (1913-66) was ashamed of
science fiction. He was proud of the field, and had even boasted once to the
Baltiiiiore Sitn that SF had attracted more Ph.D's than any other branch of
fiction.
But he was a sensitive, emotional writer.-- and reluctant to become
involved with his readers -- to be forced to "explain" himself in a way that
might destroy the spontaneity of his work.
Beyond that, he prohably enjoyed being a man of mystery, as elusive
as some of the allusions in his stories. Smith was a mythmaker in science
fiction, and perhaps it takes a somewhat mythical figure to create true
myths.
A new acquaintance unsure of the number of syllables, in Dr.
Linebarger's name would be answered by a significant gesture to the three
Chinese characters on his tie. Only later would he learn the characters
stood for Lin Bah Loh, or "Forest of Incandescent Bliss" -- the name given
him as godson to Sun Yat Sen, founder of the Chinese Republic.
Dr. Linebarger's life was certainly severel cuts above the ordinary.
At the age of seventeen, he negotiated a silver loan for China on behalf of
his father -- Sun's legal advisor and one of the financiers of the
Revolution of 1911. He later bccime a colonel in U.S. Army Intelligence,
despite partial blindness and general ill health -- he once shocked guests
it a dinner party by downing a "cocktail" of hydrochloric acid to aid his
digestion.
Although born in Milwaukee -- his father winted to be sure that as a
natural-born citizen his son would be eligible for the presidency --
Linebarger spent his forniative years in Japan, China, France and Germany.
By the time he grew up, he knew six languages and had become intimate with
several cultures, both Oriental and Occidental.
He was only twenty-three when he earned his Ph.D. in political
science at Johns Hopkins University, where he was later Professor of Asiatic
politics for many years. Shortly thereafter, he graduated from editing his
father's books to publishing his own highly regarded works on Far Eastern
affairs.
When World War II broke out, he used his position on the Operations
Planning and Intelligence Board to draft a set of qualifications for in
intelligence operative in China that only he could meect -- so off he went
to Chungking as an Army lieutenant. By war's end, he was a major.
Dr. Linebarger turned his wartime experiences into Psychological
Warfare, still regarded as the most authoritative text in the field. As a
colonel, he was advisor to the Brisish forces in Malaya and to the U.S.
Eighth Army in Korea. But this self-styled "visitor to small wars" passed up
Vietnam, feeling American involvement there was a mistake.
Travels around the world took him to Greece, Egypt and many other
countries; and his expertise was sufficiently valued that he became a
leading member of the Foreign Policy Association and an advisor to President
Kennedy.
But even in childhood, his thoughts had turned to fiction --
including science fiction. Like many budding SF writers, he discovered the
genre at an early age. Since he was living in Germany at the time, he added
to the familiar classics of Verne, Wells, Doyle and others such works as
Alfred Doblin's Giganten to his list of favorites.
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He was only fifteen when his first SF story, "War No. 81-Q," was
published. But unfortunately, no one seems to remember where. According to
his widow, Genevieve, the story was bylined Anthony Bearden -- a pseudonym
later used for poetry published in little magazines. Two examples of this
poetry appear in Norstrilia, also published by Ballantine.
During the 1930s, Dr. Linebarger began keeping a secret notebook --
part personal diary, part story ideas. Then in 1937, he began writing
serious stories, mostly set in ancient or modern China, or in contemporary
locales elsewhere. None were ever published, but their range -- some use the
same Chinese narrative techniques that later turn up in SF works like "The
Dead Lady of Clown Town" -- is remarkable.
While back in China, he took on the name Felix C. Forrest -- a pun
on his Chinese name -- for two psychological novels mailed home in
installments and published after the war. Ria and Carola were remarkable
novels for their feminine viewpoint and for the subtle interplay of cultural
influences behind the interplay of character. Under the name of Carmichael
Smith, Dr. Linebarger wrote Atomsk, a spy thriller set in the Soviet Union.
But his career in science fiction came about almost by accident. He
may have submitted some stories to Amazing while still in China during the
war; but if so, nothing ever came of them. It was during idle hours at the
Pentagon after his return that he turned an idea that had been bothering him
into "Scanners Live in Vain."
The story was almost written in vain, for it was rejected by every
major publication in the field. Fantasy Book, to which it was submitted five
years later as a last resort, did not even pay for it. Although he had
written another Cordwaiiier Smith story, "Himself in Anachron" (recently
adapted by his widow for Harlan Ellison's .anthology Last Dangerous Visions)
in 1946, he may well have despaired of any recognition in the genre.
But there were readers who took notice. Never mind that Fantasy Book
had never before published a worthwhile story, never mind that the author
was a total unknown. "Scanners Live in Vain" got to them.
"Martel was angry. He did not even adjust his blood away from
anger..."
It was more than just the bizarre situation that attracted attention
-- it was the way it was treated. From the opening lines, readers became
part of Martel's universe -- a universe as real as our own, for all its
strangeness. They were intrigued, and no doubt mystified.
What was this Instrumentality of Mankind, which even the Scanners
held in awe? What were the Beasts and the manshonyaggers and the Unforgiven?
One could sense their importance to the hero, but beyond that -- only
wonder. Smith clearly knew more about this universe than he let on -- more,
in fact, than he ever would let on. His universe had been forming in his
mind at least since the time he wrote his first published story in 1928, and
it took further shape in his secret notebook during the 1930s and 1940s.
Already in "War No. 81-Q," his widow recalls, he had made reference
to the Instrumentality -- that all-powerful elite hierarchy that was to
become central to the Cordwainer Smith stories twenty years and more latcr.
Even the word may have had far more significance than it would ippeir at
first.
Linebarger had been raised in a High Church Episcopalian family --
his grandfather was a minister -- and was devoutly religious. The word
"Instrumentality" has a distinct religious connotation, for in Roman
Catholic and Episcopalian theology the priest performing the sacraments is
the "instrumentality" of God Himself.
At the time he wrote "War No. 81-Q," young Linebarger was also
having a fling with Communism -- a tendency his father eventually cured by
sending him on a trip to the Soviet Union for his eighteenth birthday. But
he remained struck by the sense of vocation and conviction of historical
destiny to which Communism appealed.
In Cordwainer Smith's epic of the future, the Instrumentality of
Mankind has the hallmarks of both a political elite and a priesthood. Its
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hegemony is that, not of the galactic empire so typical of less imaginative
SF, but of something far more subtle and pervasive -- at once political and
spiritual. Its lords see themselves not as mere governors or bureaucrats or
politicians, but as in struments of human destiny itself.
Linebarger's sense of religion infused his work in other ways, and
not merely in references to the Old Strong Religion and the Holy Insurgency
of Norstrilia and other late works.
There is, for example, the emphasis on quasi-religious ritual --
compare, for instance, the Code of the Scanners to the Saying of the Law in
H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau. Furthermore, there is the strong sense
of vocation expressed by the Scanners, sailors, pinlighters, Go-captains and
the lords themselves -- something very spiritual, even if not expressed in
religious terms.
But Linebarger was no mere Christian apologist who used SF as a
vehicle for Orthodox religious messages like those of, say, C.S. Lewis. He
was also a social and psychological thinker, whose experience with diverse
cultures gave him peculiar and seemingly contradictory ideas about human
nature and morality.
He could, for example, admire the samurai values of fantasy, courage
and honor, and he showed his appreciation of Oriental art and literature in
the furnishing of his home -- and his fiction. Yet he was so horrified by
the tradition-bound fatalism and indifference to human life he found in the
Orient that he became obsessed with the sanctity of life on any terms, as
something too precious to sacrifice to iny concept of honor or morality --
Oriental or Occidental.
While in Korea, Linebarger masterminded the surrendor of thousands
of Chinese troops who considered it shameful to give up their arms. He
drafted leaflets explaining how the soldiers could surrender by shouting the
Chinese words for "love," "duty" "humanity" and "virue" -- words that
happened, when pronounced in that order, to sound like "I surrender" in
English. He considered this act to be the single most worthwhile thing he
had done in his life.
Linebarger's attitude is reflected in the apparently casual manner
in which matters such as brainwashing are treated in his SF. For the Hunter
and Elaine at the end of "The Dead Lady of Clown Town," that is a more
humane, if less "honorable" fate than death. Throughout the Smith canon,
life is usually placed before honor, no matter how much the Oriental codes
of honor and formality may permeate the hybrid culture of the future.
Yet Linebarger felt there was a meaning to life beyond mere living.
"The God he had faith in had to do with the soul of man and with the
unfolding of history and of the destiny of all living creatures," his
Australian friend Arthur Burns once remarked; and it is this exploration of
human -- and more than human destiny that gives Smith's work its unity.
Behind the invented cultures, behind the intricacies of plot and the
joy or suffering of characters, there is Smith the philosopher, striving in
a manner akin to that of Teilhard de Chardin (although there is no evidence
of any direct influence) to reconcile science and religion, to create a
synthesis of Christianity and evolution that will shed light on the nature
of man and the meaning of history.
The stories in this volume, collected in their proper order for the
first time, form part of a vast historical cycle taking place over some
fifteen thousand years. They are based on material from Linebarger's
original notebook ind a second notebook -- unfortunately lost -- that he
began keeping in the 1950s as new problems began to concern him.
Mankind is still baunted by the Ancient Wars and the Dark Age that
followed as this volume opens with "Scanners Live in Vain." Other stories,
one unpublished, hint at millennia of historical stasis, during which the
true men sought inhuman perfection behind the eicctronic pales of their
cities, while leaving the Wild to survivors of the Ancient World -- the
Beasts, manshonyaggers and Unforgiven.
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Into this future came the VomAcht sisters, daughters of a German
scientist who placed them in satellites in suspended animation at the close
of World War II. Rcturning to Earth in the latter days of the Dark Age, they
bring the "gift of vitality" -- a concept that seems to have meant to Smith
what the "life force" meant to Bergson and Shaw -- back to mankind. Founders
of the Vomact family, they represent a force in human nature that can be
either good or evil, but is perhaps ultimately beyond either, and a
necessary means for the working out of human destiny through evolution.
The dual nature of the Vomacts and the force they represent is
symbolized in the origin of their name: "Acht" is a German word with a
double meaning: "proscribed" or "forbidden" and "care" or "attention." And
the Vomacts alternate as outlaws and benefactors, throughout the Smith epic.
But the gift of vitality sets a new cycle of history in motion --
the heroic age of the Scanners, pinlighters and Go-captains. What stands out
in these early stories is the starkness of the emotional impact -- the
impact of strange new experiences and relationships, whether of the
telepathic symbiosis of men and partners in "The Game of Rat and Dragon" or
the woman become a functioning part of her spacecraft in "The Lady Who
Sailed the Soul."
Some of Linebarger's own experiences went into his work. Captain Wow
was the name of one of his cats at his Washington home when he wrote "The
Game of Rat and Dragon" at a single sitting one day in 1954. Cat Melanie was
later to inspire C'mell, heroine of the underpeople, who were created by men
from mere inimals. Then, too, Linebarger's frequent stays in hospitals,
dependent on medical technology, give him a feel for the linkage of man and
machine.
But in "The Burning of the Brain," we already begin to see signs of
the Pleasure Revolution, a trend which Linebarger detested in his own time
and which he saw putting an end to the heroic age in his imagined future.
Near immortality -- thanks to the santaclara drug, or stroon, grown in
Norstrilia -- makes life less desperate, but also less meaningful.
Real experience gives way to synthetic experience; in "Golden the
Ship Was, Oh, 0h, Oh" (as in "The Lady Who Sailed The Soul," which was also
coauthored by Genevieve Linebarger), the hero seeks pleasure directly from
an electric current -- and only an epoch-making crisis affords him a chance
to see that there is a better way.
Under the ruthless benevolence of the Instrumentality, a bland
utopia takes shape. Men are freed of the fear of death, the burden of labor,
the risks of the unknown -- but deprived of hope and freedom. The
underpeople, created to do the labor of mankind, are more human than their
creators. The gift of vitality, seemingly, has been lost, and history come
to a stop.
In these stories, it is the underpeople -- and the more enlightened
lords of the Instrumentility who heed them -- who hold the salvation of
humanity in their hands. In "The Dead Lady of Clown Town," the despised,
animal-derived workers and robots must teach humans the meaning of humanity
in order to free mankind from its seeming euphoria.
Lord Jestocost is inspired by the martyrdom of the dog-woman D'joan;
and Santuna is transformed by the experiences in "Under Old Earth" into the
Lady Alice More. Together, they become the architects of the Rediscovery of
man -- bringing back freedom, risk, uncertainty and even evil.
Parallelling these events are glimpses of other parts of the
universe of the Instrumentality. In "Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons," we
learn why Old North Australia is the most heavily defended planet in the
galaxy; but Viola Sidcrea is just as strange. And where else in science
fiction is there a world like "A Planet Nanied Shayol," where a daring
conception in biological engineering is wedded to a classic vision of Hell?
Oriental narrative techniques especially in "Te Dead Lady of Clown
Town" and "The Ballad of Lost C'mell" are prominent in the later stories. So
is the sense of myth, whereby the just-mentioned stories are supposedly
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