From the Stacks: The Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith
By Geoffrey Reiter
A formative moment in my life was in middle school when I stumbled across David Pringle’s The Ultimate Guide to Science Fiction at a Mr. Paperback store while visiting my grandparents in Waterville, Maine. Published in 1991, the book includes capsule summaries and reviews of some 3,000 novels, collections, and anthologies in the genre, rating them from 0 to 4 stars. In hindsight, it’s not quite as “ultimate” as its title claims; the introduction notes several categories that are largely ignored, and Pringle’s biases toward recent Anglophone literature are often unsubtle.
Still, it was an incredible resource for a newly genre-obsessed adolescent like myself. I heavily annotated my personal copy (something I seldom do) and brought it with me to bookstores as I shopped, especially my local haunt, Annie’s Used Book Stop, where affable old Mr. Kemerer would let me skulk about the shelves parent-free for hours. It was at Annie’s that I first stumbled on a little paperback collection, The Best of Cordwainer Smith, which I purchased for something like $2.00—because it merited a four-star review in Pringle’s book.
Smith was a revelation to me. The twelve stories or novellas in the collection were idiosyncratic, unlike any other fiction I had read. They were far future science fiction but often told through the voice of a farther-future mythographer. The narrators were constructing a picture of distant future events as though they were scholar poets looking back at a distant past. Even more traditional first-person narratives were told by people who saw themselves as caught up in the midst of great events in history.
Smith was a pen name for Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, a Professor of Asiatic Studies at Johns Hopkins who had been the godson of Sun Yat-sen when Linebarger’s father was an ambassador there. Smith’s plots often derive from well-known narratives in Western civilization, yet they just as often take beats from East Asian literature. Here were stories with titles like “The Game of Rat and Dragon,” “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard,” “The Dead Lady of Clown Town,” or “Golden the Ship Was—Oh! Oh! Oh!”; with characters named Helen America, Go-Captain Magno Taliano, the Lady Alice More, and the Lord Jestocost (to say nothing of C’Mell).
My edition included a brief introduction by J. J. Pierce with a full chronology of Smith’s future history, including works not collected in the book. This whetted my appetite: The Best of Cordwainer Smith had only a dozen stories, yet Smith’s future history included almost a dozen more tales, along with a novel composed of a four-story sequence and a standalone novel, Norstrilia. But what was a Smith aficionado in the 1990s to do? Linebarger’s writing career was occupied the 1950s and ’60s; he died in 1966. His books were out of print; only by sheer happenstance had I chanced upon the book that I had. Month after month, year after year, I ran to the science fiction section of every used bookstore I could drag my parents to in the vain hopes of finding any more Smith.
I don’t recall exactly how it was that my quest was finally achieved. Somehow in my Senior year of high school—around six years after first purchasing the initial book—I stumbled on a catalog for NESFA Press from the New England Science Fiction Association. And what should be listed in it but The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith, along with a subsequent volume of Norstrilia. As soon as I could, I mailed NESFA a check (or maybe even cash, as one did in those days), and weeks later, at long last, my treasure came in the mail. I didn’t have the money to buy both, so I started with The Rediscovery of Man; Norstrilia came a little later (perhaps by mail as well, though Amazon may have been on my radar by then).
I can still recall sitting down to savor the new stories. Not all were earth-shattering in one sense; my first book had, of course, been The Best of Cordwainer Smith. But I began reading the opening lines of “On the Gem Planet”—“Consider the horse. He climbed up through the crevasses of a cliff of gems; the force which drove him was the love of man”—and I knew I was coming home.
It saddens me sometimes to think that my kids or my students may never have quite that experience. The beautiful boon of book accessibility in the internet age means that such quests are far less frequent—and fewer teenagers today probably even have that kind of yearning for a lost book. But I can now always come back to the science fiction of Cordwainer Smith, savoring the prose like the company of an old friend, made all the sweeter for the effort it took me to read him.
Geoffrey Reiter is Professor and Coordinator of Literature at Lancaster Bible College and associate editor at Christ and Pop Culture. He is the author of several academic articles on genre fiction and philosophy and has also written for Christianity Today online. An author of fantasy and weird horror, his poetry and fiction have appeared in The Mythic Circle, Star*Line, Spectral Realms, and Penumbra. His collection of weird horror, The Lime Kiln and Other Enchanted Spaces, has been published by Hippocampus Press.
