Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (1913–1966) was a highly original US writer who used the byline “Cordwainer Smith” for his science fiction. Born in Milwaukee, Linebarger grew up in Japan, China, France, and Germany. His father, Paul Myron Wentworth Linebarger, helped finance the Chinese revolution of 1911 and served as legal adviser to Sun Yat-sen (who became Paul’s godfather). Sun gave the younger Linebarger the Chinese name Lin Bah Loh, or “Forest of Incandescent Bliss.” He would later become a confidant of Chiang Kai-shek, founder of Taiwan, and also at various times served as a soldier, diplomat, and operative in China and the Far East generally. He earned his PhD in political science from Johns Hopkins and authored Psychological Warfare, which is still regarded as the authoritative book in its field. Linebarger wrote a science fiction novel, Norstrilia, and, under other pen names (including “Felix C. Forrest,” a play on his Chinese name), three mainstream novels: Ria, Carola, and Atomsk. Ria and Carola have been compared to the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and featured female protagonists.
Linebarger is primarily known today for his science fiction short stories. He published his first story, “Scanners Live in Vain” (Fantasy Book), in 1950, but it wasn’t until the mid-1950s that he published more, due in part to the encouragement of Frederik Pohl. Most of his major science fiction was written between 1955 and 1966. However, Linebarger had been writing science fiction since he was a child, including a bad imitation of Edgar Rice Burroughs entitled “The Books of Futurity” and other material that he based on Chinese folklore. His story “War No. 81-Q” was published in his high school cadet corps magazine when he was fifteen. Many other stories, written in the 1930s and 1940s, exist only in a red-leather-bound volume owned by Linebarger’s daughter and were never submitted for publication. Two fantasies, “Alauda Dalma” and “The Archer and the Deep,” were sent to Unknown in the 1940s and to Judith Merril in 1961 but were rejected. It was in 1945, consigned to a desk job at the Pentagon, that Linebarger wrote “Scanners Live in Vain.”
“The Game of Rat and Dragon” was first published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1955. Two major themes dominate in this story: space travel and telepathy. Humans partner with telepathic cats in order to achieve warp speed while human telepaths protect others from the dragons of deep space. This story is considered one of the earliest stories set in the Instrumentality Universe. The Instrumentality of Mankind, which features in most of the author’s best stories, rules over humanity across a vast number of planets in the far future and tries to resurrect ancient cultures so as to benefit the “Rediscovery of Man.”
As John J. Pierce wrote in his highly recommended introduction to The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith (1993), “It is impossible to fit Smith’s work into any of the neat categories that appeal to most readers or critics. It isn’t hard science fiction, it isn’t military science fiction, it isn’t sociological science fiction, it isn’t satire, it isn’t surrealism, it isn’t postmodernism. For those who have fallen in love with it over the years, however, it is some of the most powerful science fiction ever written.”
Smith was influenced by Alfred Jarry and Jorge Luis Borges, both included in this volume.