The Rediscovery of Cordwainer Smith
THE REDISCOVERYOF CORDWAINERSMITH 161 Carol McGuirk The Rediscoveryof CordwainerSmith [TMheart of storytellingis comingto an end... Wasit notnoticeable at theend of the[First World]war that men returned silent-not richer,but poorer in communicableexperience? A generationthat had gone to schoolon a horse-drawnstreetcar now stoodunder the opensky in a countrysidein whichnodiing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath theseclouds, in a fieldof forceof destructivetorrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile, humanbody.-Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller" Thunder,and a washlike water.There went his world,his wife, his time,himself ... He floatedfree in anachron.-CordwainerSmith, "Himself in Anachron" Walter Benjaminsuggests that the straightforwardtelling of tales was discouragedby twentieth-centuryexperience itself: modemwarfare fractured personalexperience and consequentlynarrative. I will arguehere that one contextfor the mysterioussilences of CordwainerSmith's science fiction is the socialdisruption he livedthrough but barely survived-his era's global wars and politicalupheavals, with theiruntold and in fact incalculablecost in human suffering: Neveragain gunfire, filth, blood,sun-streaked water-gleaming acres.... Never againcities burning, and people burning in them.... Neveragain Asia, thought Carola....Some day America too willburn; wounded people, hungry, will crawl throughthe ruins looking for food.But that will be beyondmy time. There's one morelife's-worth of goodnessbefore the ThirdWorld War. (Carola 3-4) Directly addressedin Ria (1947) and Carola(1948), psychologicalnovels publishedunder the nameFelix C. Forrest,the experiences of PaulLinebarger in Germanyand Asia from the 1920s throughWorld War II only indirectly enterthe sciencefiction of his alter-ego,"Cordwainer Smith."' But no heroof his, any more thanthe saddenedsurvivors in Benjamin'sessay, lives through cataclysmto bringback a simplestory.
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