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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. In Smith'ssf, Benjamin'sfragile human being, tethered to a planetgrown ungovernablyviolent, is shown breakingfree of gravity, distance, time, embodiment.Spaceships become superfluous after the discovery of a miraculous new dimension("Space3"); "anachron" allows his hero to live backwardin time;near immortality is possiblewith "stroon."But breakthrough in Smithis alwaysaccompanied by thepossibility of breakdown.This is notescapism in the triumphantmode of spaceopera, for Smith'sheroes, free-falling through time andspace, repeatedly encounter a terrifyingisolation and danger.2 Smith's plots force charactersto rethinkthe very conditionsof their existence.The shiftingparadigms (ways of knowing)that test his heroesmay be politicalor social in nature,such as the Rediscoveryof Man in "Alpha RalphaBoulevard" (1961). But often the catalystfor changeis a scientific This content downloaded from 195.78.108.81 on Thu, 19 Jun 2014 13:24:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 162 SCIENCEFICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 28 (2001) discovery("anachron," "Space3," "stroon"), and in "TheDead Lady of Clown Town"(1964) it is a massreligious conversion. Smith assesses the impactof new ideason humanity,by whichterm he means"humane behavior" more than "humanbeings": cyborgs and "underpeople" (genetically-enhanced animals) are just as likely to be his heroes.And the cost of changeis usuallyhigh: a state- mandatedinitiative in "Whenthe PeopleFell" (1959) resultsin the deathof millionsof colonistsparachuted onto the surfaceof Venus.Even an innovation thatwill eventuallybring about great good, such as theacts of civildisobedience amongthe underpeoplethat follow their conversionin "The Dead Lady of ClownTown," may claimthe lives of numerousearly martyrs. Smith'ssf dramatizesthe power,for goodor ill, of innovation,a focusthat links his stories to the traditionsof popularsf. He is unusualonly in his emphasison psychology,the impactof changeon thehuman subject-again, a category that Smith does not restrict to members of homo sapiens. This focus on characternot only placeshim aheadof his own timebut has muchto teach the genretoday. Often misread by criticsas erratic,Smith in fact conductsan intensecritique of postwarUS culture,including the cultureof sciencefiction. He representsunreason as a testof heroes,a conditionto be overcome,thereby challengingenthusiasm and indoctrination,forces he saw as alignedwith Nazism, fascism, and Soviet and Chinesecommunism. Smith's characters becomeheroes precisely at the momentthat they shedtheir conditioning and beginto thinkfor themselves,despite being adriftin spaceand time, caught (likeTasco in "Himselfin Anachron"[1993] or Benjamin'sembattled soldier) in a vortexof all-but-incomprehensibleforces. One impliedcriticism of his own day maybe seen in his virtualexclusion of waras an agentof change.With two exceptions,his sf neverdramatizes war in progress,though he does emphasizeits long aftermath:the rigid social divisionsthat characterize his far futureare said to date from the "Ancient Wars" of the mid-twentiethcentury.3 Rejecting his own era's recurrent eruptionsof organizedconflict and popular sf's oftenunthinking recapitulations of thatpattern, Smith focuses not on warbut on conspiracy-covertpolitical and fimancialmachinations and religious dissent-as themain conduit for aggression in his far future.4Violence in Smith'ssf is not visceralbut epistemic: received ideas are shattered,and conspiratorsmaneuver by outwitting,not assaulting, theiradversaries. Smith also dramatizesviolence against the psyche, identity crises generatedas charactersencounter new "realities."One exampleis the perplexedhero of "AlphaRalpha Boulevard," discharged from a hospitalre- programmedto be "French."And if Smithminimizes the conductof waras an activityof heroes,he all buteliminates the most common preoccupation of Cold War sf: the conquestof aliens, imaginedOthers. Smith not only refusesto consideraliens a menacebut also refusesto concedethat Others exist: his far- futurecosmos has been entirelycolonized by the descendantsof Earthsettlers andunderpeople (the worker or peasant-classof intelligentbut oppressed earth- derivedanimals). This content downloaded from 195.78.108.81 on Thu, 19 Jun 2014 13:24:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THEREDISCOVERY OF CORDWAINERSMITH 163 In his refusal to privilege xenophobiaor violence-in keeping things personal, character-based-Smithis somewhatreminiscent of Theodore Sturgeon.But his macrocosm(his selectivelydisclosed backdrop of vast, ever- shiftingparadigms) was uniquein the 1950sand continues to be impressive today. Unlike some of his postwarpeers, he never settled down to one extrapolativespecialty, dramatizing instead the many possiblecatalysts for change.Curiously, despite a commandof manylanguages (both Western and Asianallusions and vocabulary greatly enhance his style),Smith never drew on linguisticsfor his widerextrapolative premises. But he rangesover almost every other field of knowledgethat inspiredpostwar American sf: the sciences (especiallypsychology and physics), the social sciences(especially political science, his own academicspecialty), philosophy (especially mid-twentieth centuryexistentialism), and theology (which allows him to considerindoctrina- tion anddogmatism as well as the mysteriesof faith). Still, choosingfrom diversefields to generatehis plots, he is unlikehis contemporariesin neverbetraying the slightest anxiety to provethat he hasdone his homework.Unlike Frank Herbert in Dune, for instance(whose complexity of imaginationis comparableto Smith's),he onlyhints at thebroader premises from which his storiesdraw. While he took pains to work out background details privately,5he evidentlyfelt no obligationto sharethose detailswith readers.Smith's reticence contrasts sharply with Herbert's elaborately nested counterplotsand laborious apparatus (four appendices, a glossaryof terms,and a mapfollow the storyin Dune [1965]).In Herbert'scosmos (notwithstanding the existenceof a culturecalling itself the "Fremen"),there is no suchthing as a free man. Everyoneis a pawn in a largergame. Herbert'sbroad canvas actuallyworks to diminishhis youthfulprotagonist, Paul Atreides,who is shownto be ignorantof the complexforces gatheringto destroyhis family. Readersof Duneare given much more information than the characters, and this producesirony: Herbert's universe is as fatalisticas the playsof Aeschylus, fromwhich he drawshis hero'ssurname (Atreus is thename of Agamemnon's father). Smith'sreaders are kepttoo off-balanceto assumean ironicstance: they driftin anachronright alongside Tasco. Smith may withhold background details because he does not want the backgroundto take over, overwhelming characterizationas plot expositiondoes in so muchsf of his era, includingthat of RobertA. Heinleinand Arthur C. Clarke-figuresas importantto sf (andas problematicto Smith)as TheodoreSturgeon and Frank Herbert. The efforts of Smith'scharacters to understandand respondheroically to the forces that threatento engulfthem generate sympathy, pulling readers into these stories. At the same time, the mysteriesof his master-plothave a centrifugalaction, pushingreaders outside into the darknessof cognitiveestrangement (Suvin, Metamorphoses4). It is no accidentthat he oftenuses the imageof a vortex. I will refer in this essay more often to Smith'sheroes than to his plots, preciselybecause while Smith'sportrayal of large-scalesocial and scientific This content downloaded from 195.78.108.81 on Thu, 19 Jun 2014 13:24:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 164 SCIENCEFICTION STUDIES,
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