#paul linebarger

[bookmaven]

ATOMSK by Carmichael Smith [aka Paul Linebarger; aka Cordwainer Smith] (New York: Newell, Sloan, Pearce,1949)

Drawing on Paul Linebarger's own expertise in the field of psychological warfare, the book is a study of the personality of a U.S. operative (Major Michael Dugan) who has little in common with James Bond except his extreme resourcefulness under cover and in danger.

It is considered b some to be the first Cold War secret agent novel.

[archivist-dragonfly]

Book 167

The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith

Cordwainer Smith

The New England Science Fiction Association 1993

Cordwainer Smith (real name: Dr. Paul Linebarger) is my favorite science fiction author, and, aside from a few vintage mass markets, I think this is the only SF book remaining in my collection. Woefully under appreciated and not particularly prolific, Smith’s distant future stories of the Instrumentality of Mankind represent most of his SF output. Often mimicking the rhythms and tone of Eastern classics, Smith’s writing holds all the power and timelessness of myth.

[direslothmegalonyx]

His SF ranges from "mindblowing" to "ugh, that's dated"

But since nobody's mentioned his nonfiction on Propaganda --the job he did during World War 2-- under his mundane name, I'll add a link to the Gutenberg.

It is still, alas, extremely timely

Have you ever read anything by cordwainer smith? Highly recommend

I have not!

[spaceintruderdetector]

Psychological warfare and propaganda have been used extensively in warfare since the earliest times. This book explores the functions, limitations, types, and history of psychological warfare through 1953. It was written by Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, a US Army officer, a noted East Asia scholar, and an expert in psychological warfare, also known by the pseudonym Cordwainer Smith as a science fiction author. Linebarger had extensive experience with the practice and implementation of psychological warfare techniques in the field through his work with the Office of War Information.

Psychological Warfare By Paul M. A. Linebarger : VRILwave : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

audio book

Psychological Warfare : Paul M. A. Linebarger : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

[spockderangementsyndrome]

After fighting with Star Trek staff and going through multiple re-writes, Harlan Ellison wanted to disavow The City on the Edge of Forever and have it credited to his pen name "Cordwainer Bird." Here's what I found on that pseudonym:

The "Cordwainer Bird" moniker is a tribute to fellow SF writer Paul M. A. Linebarger, better known by his pen name, Cordwainer Smith. The origin of the word "cordwainer" is shoemaker (from working with cordovan leather for shoes). The term used by Linebarger was meant to imply the industriousness of the pulp author. Ellison said, in interviews and in his writing, that his version of the pseudonym was meant to mean "a shoemaker for birds.” Since he used the pseudonym mainly for works he wanted to distance himself from, it may be understood to mean that ‘this work is for the birds’ or that it is of as much use as shoes to a bird. 

--Paul Schindler, P.S. A Column on Things

[mitchipedia]

The Sci-Fi Writer Who Invented Conspiracy Theory

Analee Newitz: Paul Linebarger was a US Army intelligence officer who pioneered psyops and wrote science fiction under the pseudonym “Cordwainer Smith.” His stories read today like Qanon conspiracy theories. [theatlantic.com]

Linebarger, who died of a heart attack in 1966 at age 53, could not have predicted that tropes from his sci-fi stories about mind control and techno-authoritarianism would shape 21st-century American political rhetoric. But the persistence of his ideas is far from accidental, because Linebarger wasn’t just a writer and soldier. He was an anti-communist intelligence operative who helped define U.S. psychological operations, or psyops, during World War II and the Cold War. His essential insight was that the most effective psychological warfare is storytelling. Linebarger saw psyops as an emotionally intense, persuasive form of fiction–and, to him, no genre engaged people’s imagination better than science fiction.

Newitz’s latest book is Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind.

[mariacallous]

When the Kansas City Chiefs romp to a Super Bowl victory on February 11, tight end Travis Kelce will bring his superstar girlfriend onto the field, drop to one knee, and propose. Their engagement will unleash a media maelstrom and create the conditions for Taylor Swift’s hugely significant endorsement of embattled president Joe Biden.

That is, according to a network of prominent conspiracy theorists, the plan hatched inside the Pentagon to keep the president in power.

The far-right broadcasters behind this very specific prediction have offered no proof for it, nor do they have the most sterling track record. Jack Posobiec, a longtime booster of white supremacist and neo-Nazi figures and a key figure in the outlandish Pizzagate theory, tweeted in December that Swift and her “vaccine shill boyfriend” were being weaponized by the Democrats to ensure Biden’s victory.

Posobiec had a very specific way of describing it: “The Taylor Swift girlboss psyop has been fully activated.”

Swift may not have actually waded into the 2024 election cycle, beyond a generic appeal to register to vote, but the fury around her supposed deep-state-backed influence operation has the Trump campaign plotting “holy war” against the “Blank Space” singer.

The allegation that Swift is a “psyop” is ludicrous, and it showcases a complete lack of understanding of what psychological operations actually are and how they work.

If there is a psyop going on, it’s being run by those crying wolf.

A Short History of the Psyop

Fixation on psychological warfare dates back at least to Sun Tzu: “The opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.”

But the field really came into its own in the 20th century, when the great powers turned to modern psychology to understand and defeat their adversaries through propaganda and trickery.

As Paul Linebarger explained in his seminal 1948 book on psychological warfare, there are two main types of psychological operations: white propaganda, which is honest and direct, and black propaganda, which “purports to emanate from a source other than the true one.” Linebarger, who died in 1966, served in the Office of War Information during the Second World War and helped establish the US Army’s psychological warfare section.

“The Army focused on the white and gray,” Jared Tracy, the deputy command historian at the US Army Special Operations History Office, tells WIRED. Initially, the military’s psychological operations focused on how best to deliver information—”leaflet warfare” and “loudspeaker propaganda,” he says. But the military soon found creative new ways to speak to the enemy. That included the tactical, meant to gain a specific and immediate benefit on the battlefield; and the strategic, which has a longer-term, more general aim.

Black propaganda can be effective, but it is notoriously hard to do right, Linebarger writes, as it “needs to be written so as to fit in with what the enemy is reading, listening to, or talking about in his home country.”

During the Vietnam War, Trịnh Thị Ngọ—known commonly as Hanoi Hannah—delivered regular broadcasts aimed at American GIs. Her shows, written by the North Vietnamese Army, mixed popular Western music with clunky and clumsy propaganda about the futility of the war. While Hanoi Hannah’s shows may have contributed to low morale, it is unlikely she prompted any more than a handful of desertions or defections. The US later scaled up this technique through Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which broadcast news and culture behind the Iron Curtain, with some covert help from the CIA—millions listened to the jazz programs and news broadcasts, but the broadcasts utterly failed at spurring open rebellion.

Public perception of psychological operations soured in a big way in the mid-1970s, when details of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program were first released, detailing a plot—more based in science fiction than science—to brainwash subjects using psychoactive drugs. Further revelations that the US had supplied Nicaraguan death squads with psychological warfare guides would not help that public relations problem.

A lot of the paranoia about psychological operations stems from “misapprehensions of what it is, what it is capable of,” says Tracy, who wrote one of the definitive books on the subject.

While there may be grandiose ambitions of changing “hearts and minds,” Tracy says, the actual effect of this work is more modest: “Really, what you’re looking to do is affect peoples’ decisions of what to do and what not to do.”

In 1994, reports emerged of one particularly musical innovation from the Pentagon: During the Gulf War, the US military would boost morale by cranking up Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” when responding to Iraqi SCUD missile attacks, for example.

These techniques would later be adapted by the CIA to torture inmates captured in the War on Terror, a program now widely regarded as a complete failure.

What Makes a Good Psyop?

“Which is more effective: Tokyo Rose, in lovely, clear English, but … very much falsehood-based; or Voice of America and Radio Free Europe?” asks Christopher Paul, USMC chair for information at the Naval Postgraduate School and a senior social scientist at RAND Corporation. He answers his own question: “You can also be effective and persuasive with the truth.”

In recent decades, the Pentagon has even tried to rebrand these operations with a more mundane, but more accurate, name—Military Information Support Operations, or MISO. The name hasn’t caught on.

Paul has spent years studying the effectiveness of psychological and information operations, particularly nefarious and covert propaganda efforts. Fears over how these techniques could be used against Americans are long-standing, he notes, and are exactly why this work is forbidden domestically.

“The Department of Defense has an influence capability,” Paul says. “But by statute, law, habit, authorization, and permission: It is only ever pointed at selected foreign audiences.” Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, for example, are expressly prohibited from broadcasting to domestic audiences in the US.

Tracy and Paul agree that psychological operations work when they are targeted, clear, and—ideally—honest.

Paul points to the Russian effort to sway the 2016 presidential election. “Did it change electoral outcomes? No, not as far as we can tell, Did it cause or prevent conflicts? No, not as far as we can tell,” Paul says.

It was equally ineffective when the Pentagon tried it.

In 2022, social media companies identified a fear-reaching campaign, run by the Pentagon, to use dummy social media accounts to spread propaganda targeted at Tehran, Beijing, and Moscow. The effort prompted a backlash and led to a full-scale review of these operations. (That, seemingly, hasn’t prevented the Pentagon from exploring the possible use of deepfakes.)

But when researchers at the Stanford Internet Observatory and social media monitoring firm Graphika looked at the campaign, they found this astroturf social media campaign was wildly ineffective.

“The vast majority of posts and tweets we reviewed received no more than a handful of likes or retweets,” the researchers found. Fewer than one in five of the dummy social media accounts had managed to amass more than 1,000 followers, with most of the content receiving no interaction at all. “Tellingly, the two most-followed assets in the data provided by Twitter were overt accounts that publicly declared a connection to the US military.”

The Pop-Op

The US government has certainly tried to use popular music for its own ends. And it wasn’t always forthright about its efforts—as Linebarger noted: “The conviction of the propagandist that he is not a propagandist can be a real asset.”

In the early Cold War, the Congress on Cultural Freedom—a CIA front group—bankrolled American musicians’ tours, including jazz legends Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong, in hopes of countering Communist influence and promoting American values.

“Those who already have established credibility can be a real asset [in psychological operations],” Tracy says. “If your purposes align.”

But Gillespie and Armstrong made clear that the CIA couldn’t even control its own people: Frustrated with Jim Crow laws back in the US, Gillespie refused to attend briefings with US officials. Armstrong quit one of his tours in disgust. “The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell,” Armstrong said in 1957.

In 2020, journalist Patrick Radden Keefe investigated the possibility that the CIA had a hand in writing “Wind of Change,” an enormously popular song by a West German band called the Scorpions that became an anthem for independence movements in the USSR. (The Scorpions deny the theory.)

So there is ample history of the US government leveraging, or at least trying to leverage, celebrities and cultural icons to amplify its message. But Tracy laughs off the idea that there is a shadowy psychological operations unit inside the Pentagon managing musicians from obscurity to stardom for nefarious ends—and rigging the NFL playoffs while they’re at it.

“That’s not a thing,” he says. Organizationally, practically, logistically, the theory falls apart at every turn. Someone in the Democratic Party may well approach Swift for an endorsement, and they don’t need the Pentagon’s help.

One Good Psyop Deserves Another

The real psyop may have been staring us in the face all along.

For years, Trump’s supporters have levied the accusation of psyop at anything that contradicts their worldview. Q, the pseudonymous leader of QAnon, cryptically asked their followers in 2017: “What is brainwashing? What is a psyop?” Former White House adviser Steve Bannon has told listeners of his War Room podcast that by listening “you will never succumb to psychological warfare.” Kurt Olsen, a lawyer who helped Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election, has said that efforts to deny that the 2020 election was stolen are “all a psyop.”

Mike Benz, a former Trump official who has a history of posting racist conspiracy theories under a pseudonym, helped popularize the Swift theory. He alleges psyops are everywhere, from the Covid-19 vaccine effort to anti-disinformation programs to climate change education campaigns. He has become a go-to voice for some Republican politicians, including Representative Jim Jordan.

In that respect, Benz has stumbled onto one of the most effective psyop tactics: Discredit everything.

Linebarger, in his book, offers a prime example of this strategy: “The dropping of a few hundred tons of well counterfeited currency would tend to foul up any fiscal system.” This kind of black propaganda doesn’t seek to convince anyone of anything, but merely hopes to foment distrust of everything.

Paul says Moscow is particularly good at this kind of work. “Russian propaganda can be characterized as a war on information, this kind of nihilistic campaign to make everyone skeptical of everything.”

While influencers like Posobiec have a habit of sharing Russian disinformation, there’s no reason to think they’re being directly managed by the Kremlin. More likely, they’ve simply picked up on the same tactics.

So while Swift may well be an excellent psyop if America ever goes to war with Gen Z, it is more likely that the real psychological operation was the distrust we fomented along the way.

[profmorbius]

Posted a review of Psychological Warfare by Paul M.A. Linebarger on my blog. Read it here.

tl;dr – Interesting

[garudabluffs]

[34:41] Lastly, Brooke interviews Annalee Newitz about their latest book, Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. They discuss how stories have long been spun as a means of controlling people — from the 18th century to today’s culture wars. 

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. The thing both real news and so-called fake news have in common is that they're shared mostly in the form of stories. Since stories create narratives that can shape our entire worldview, in the war over truth and lies, stories are weapons. That's why Annalee Newitz new history of the use of narrative to win or to intimidate hearts and minds here and abroad is called Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind.

It's a wide ranging account extending back some 2,500 years to the progenitor of PSYOPs, the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu who said, "One need not destroy one's enemy, one need only destroy his willingness to engage." Then the book takes us through the photo PSYOPs used by Benjamin Franklin during the Revolutionary War and our government's deployment of deception during the Indian Wars in the First World War, in the Second, right up to the culture wars of the present moment.

Newitz, a seasoned writer of both nonfiction and science fiction depicts the idea of PSYOPs with a broad brush as a kind of noxious world building and clearly identifies its first modern master, the man who professionalized the practice in the US military as one Paul Linebarger.

LISTEN Transcript https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/a-former-disinformation-reporter-is-running-the-onion-plus-birds-are-real?tab=transcript

[t3r3sa-p]

Pro-Hamas Protester Loay Abdelfattah Alnaji Arrested in Death of Jewish Man Paul Kessler - Charged with Involuntary Manslaughter | The Gateway Pundit | by Cullen Linebarger

[garythingsworld]

Pro-Hamas Protester Loay Abdelfattah Alnaji Arrested in Death of Jewish Man Paul Kessler - Charged with Involuntary Manslaughter | The Gateway Pundit | by Cullen Linebarger

[infactforgetthepark]

[Free eBook] The Best of Cordwainer Smith by Cordwainer Smith [Vintage Classic Science Fiction]

The Best of Cordwainer Smith by the late Cordwainer Smith, the sfnal writing pseudonym of scholar Paul Linebarger, edited by J. J. Pierce, is a collection of vintage science fiction stories, free for a limited time courtesy of publisher Phoenix Pick Press.

This is their featured Free Ebook of the Month offer for March and was originally published in 1975 by Ballantine Books as part of their Ballantine's Classic Library of Science Fiction line. A bonus freebie from February is also still offered, the fantasy Earth Magic by Alexei & Cory Panshin, as well as a tie-in discount to another Smith novel.

The collection contains a selection of Smith's short stories and novelettes from the 1950s and 1960s in his Instrumentality of Mankind future setting where humanity has colonized a number of other planets, plus two essays by editor Pierce about the author and the Instrumentality universe. Several stories have been much-translated, and one of the novelettes was nominated for the Retro Hugo Award which recognizes early sfnal work from before the awards' creation.

Offered DRM-free worldwide through the month of March and probably until April 3rd (the offer usually rotates on the first Tuesday of each month), available directly from the publisher.

Free for a limited time through March directly @ the publisher's special promo page (DRM-free ePub & Mobi bundle available worldwide in return for your valid email address; follow the instructions on the page to reset the suggested cart price to $0.00 during checkout)

There's also a discounted tie-in offer for $2.99 of a reprint of Cordwainer Smith's 1975 novel Norstrilia, a dystopian planetary adventure in the Instrumentality of Mankind universe, originally published by Ballantine Books (now a Penguin Random House imprint). This has previously been offered free and also in a number of other tie-in sales, so you might already have a copy.

Description Cordwainer Smith was one of the original visionaries to think of humanity in terms of thousands of years in the future, spread out across the universe. This brilliant collection, often cited as the first of its kind, explores fundamental questions about ourselves and our treatment of the universe (and other beings) around us and ultimately what it means to be human.

In “Scanners Live in Vain” we meet Martel, a human altered to be part machine—a scanner—to be able withstand the trauma space travel has on the body. Despite the stigma placed on him and his kind, he is able to regrasp his humanity to save another.

In “The Dead Lady of Clown Town” we get to know the underpeople—animals genetically altered to exist in human form, to better serve their human owners—and meet D’Joan, a dog-woman who will make readers question who is more human: the animals who simply want to be recognized as having the same right to life, or the people who created them to be inferior.

In “The Ballad of Lost C’mell” the notion of love being the most important equalizer there is—as first raised in “The Dead Lady of Clown Town”—is put into action when an underperson, C’mell, falls in love with Lord Jestocost. Who is to say her love for him is not as valid as any true-born human? She might be of cat descent, but she is all woman!

And in “A Planet Named Shayol” it is an underperson of bull descent, and beings so mutilated and deformed from their original human condition to be now considered demons of a hellish land, who retain and display the most humanity when Mankind commits the most inhumane action of all.

[rhetoricandlogic]

Oops, I Just Bought a Planet: Norstrilia by Cordwainer Smith

Alan Brown Wed Jun 8, 2022 11:00am

In this bi-weekly series reviewing classic science fiction and fantasy books, Alan Brown looks at the front lines and frontiers of the field; books about soldiers and spacers, scientists and engineers, explorers and adventurers. Stories full of what Shakespeare used to refer to as “alarums and excursions”: battles, chases, clashes, and the stuff of excitement.

One of the lesser-known gems of the science fiction world in the mid-20th century is the work of author Cordwainer Smith. He brought an international flavor to a science fiction field that, for all its creativity, was deeply rooted in the culture and conventions of the United States. His stories of the Instrumentality of Mankind were intriguing, giving the reader science fiction tales with the storytelling conventions of fantasy and legend. And in the centerpiece of this future history, the novel Norstrilia, he brought young and naïve Rod McBan to the mysterious and dangerous planet called Earth.

As I recollect, the copy of Norstrilia I used for this review is the copy I bought about a year after graduating from college, and according to the title page is the third Del Rey edition, printed in 1978. That date would put my purchase in the Alaskan town of Sitka, a tiny seacoast community accessible only by air or water. There was only one bookstore in the tiny town, right across the main street from the Russian Orthodox church with its onion-dome spires. Fortunately for me, the store had a good selection of paperback science fiction that turned over regularly.

The work of Cordwainer Smith was not new to me when I found Norstrilia, as I had read some of his work in my dad’s Galaxy magazines during my youth. I had always found his stories intriguing, if a bit strange compared to the more straightforward adventures I was used to reading in Analog.

About the Author

Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (1913-1966), who wrote science fiction under the name Cordwainer Smith, was an author and scholar who wrote influential works on psychological warfare and on East Asian politics. He was born in Wisconsin, and lived during his youth in the United States, Europe, Japan, and China, reportedly attending more than thirty schools. He spoke multiple languages, and attained a PhD at age 23. He began writing science fiction in college in the late 1920s, although his stories didn’t start appearing in the leading magazines until the late 1940s.

Commissioned as a lieutenant during WWII, Linebarger served in Army Intelligence in China and India, rising to the rank of major. He remained in the reserves, eventually attaining the rank of colonel. He was recalled to aid the British in a Malaysian guerrilla conflict, and recalled again during the Korean War. He was a professor at Johns Hopkins University, but is also reported to have been a behind-the-scenes advisor to the CIA and the US government.

Most of Linebarger’s science fiction work was set in a unique and evocative future history, the Instrumentality of Mankind. By using unusual terms and names without much explanation, he created the impression this universe was much larger than what appeared within the pages of the stories (I will have to dip into Linebarger’s other stories to find out what Mother Hinton’s Littul Kittons are, for example). This was a society that was anything but a utopia: so advanced that much of its science was akin to magic, with a hereditary ruling class, a brutal police state to enforce their will, space pilots called “scanners” whose brains were damaged by their work, and animals called the “underpeople” raised to human intelligence and near-human appearance, but treated as slaves. One of the programs of the Instrumentality was the Rediscovery of Man, which was intended to strengthen humanity and reduce stagnation by reintroducing disease and unrest to society. The human economy was dominated by stroon, a drug which extended life, and was only available from giant diseased sheep grown on the planet Norstrilia.

Linebarger’s body of science fiction work was not large, as he lived a busy life and died at the relatively young age of fifty-three. He wrote only a handful of novels, Norstrilia being the most widely known, and about three dozen short stories.

You can find some of Smith’s work on Project Gutenberg, including “The Game of Rat and Dragon,” one of his better-known stories, and some of his non-fictional works, including the seminal book Psychological Warfare.

Cordwainer Smith is not to be confused with Cordwainer Bird, a pseudonym sometimes used by science fiction author Harlan Ellison (the fact that a cordwainer is a kind of cobbler, and birds do not need shoes, amused Ellison). The use of this pseudonym was then made even more confusing when author Philip José Farmer began using the name for a fictional character in some of his own works.

The Lonely Protagonist

Rod McBan is a lonely protagonist, pulled out of his own world and culture with little to no notice, and thrust into a world he only dimly understands. And while reading Norstrilia, I realized that, while he is a lonely character, he is far from alone in the field of science fiction. The genre is full of characters who are orphaned, exiled, or just plain don’t fit in. When you consider that Linebarger spent his youth in many countries and dozens of schools, it is not surprising that he could skillfully depict someone who feels apart from his surroundings.

The frequency of lonely heroes in science fiction might be due to the prevalence of the familiar story structure known as the Hero’s Journey, which has appeared in literature throughout human history. One of the characteristics many mythical adventures share is the removal of the protagonist from the world they grew up in or are comfortable with. Looking through the books I have reviewed over the years for this column, I found that about a third of them feature a character that might fit the description of a lonely protagonist. Of course, being lonely does not mean that the characters are alone, as they encounter mentors, antagonists, guides, and love interests in the course of their journeys.

I’ve also noticed that many of the readers of science fiction share characteristics of loneliness with the fictional protagonists they follow. This type of character might be so popular because it speaks to the readers in a way they understand. Being a science fiction fan, especially when I was young, could be a lonely existence. For my own part, growing up in the 1950s through the 1970s, there were very few people I knew (other than my father and brothers) who were as enthusiastic about science fiction as I was. My intimate knowledge of Marvel comics, for example, was not something I mentioned to girls I wanted to date. In those days, choosing to be a science fiction fan was to choose something hard to share with others. And I’ve seen signs of this loneliness when I’ve met other fans.

That aspect of being a science fiction fan seems to be eroding in recent decades, as science fiction and comic book stories have come to dominate the entertainment business. You don’t have to wait to attend a science fiction club meeting or convention to find someone to discuss your favorite passions with—one of the positive aspects of social media is that it can bring together groups of people who enjoy the same things. I sometimes wonder if these changes in society might eventually have an impact on the literature of science fiction, and we might see fewer stories of isolated heroes and more stories about groups working in collaboration. Only time will tell…

Norstrilia

The book opens more like a fairy tale than a novel. While the story is science fiction, the form and narrative owe more to fantasy than the straightforward style of science fiction. Norstrilia begins by telling us, rather than showing us, what the story is about. This allows the author to introduce us to a great deal of backstory all at once, but because little of this information is explained, the reader is tossed into the literary equivalent of deep water, and must quickly learn to swim in this dense and sometimes inscrutable narrative.

We meet young Rod McBan, 151st of his name, who is on the cusp of inheriting the family ranch, the ominously named Station of Doom, where giant sickly sheep produce the precious drug called stroon. His inheritance is far from certain, however. Rod, unlike other Norstrilians, cannot spiek or hier telepathically (not reliably, anyhow). When he does hier, he can listen in to many people’s minds over wide distances. And when he spieks, he transmits powerful emotions, again over wide distances. In attempts to correct these deficiencies, he has had his childhood restarted a number of times, living those years over and over. Now, he must face what is called the Garden of Death, a trial that determines whether Norstrilians will be executed by drugs that kill them with happiness, or allowed to go on with their lives. His only friends are an old battle computer, hidden on the farm, which has educated him over the years, and his cousin Lavinia, one of the few people who is comfortable speaking to him with her voice in the old manner.

Rod’s trial board consists of three people, two local, and one surprisingly the Lord Redlady, a Commissioner of the Instrumentality. Redlady convinces the board that Rod’s different abilities are not a liability, but rather a gift. And he is allowed to live.

Rod’s survival angers an old childhood adversary, who is now a government official with the title of Onseck, a corruption of the ancient term Honorary Secretary. The Onseck has placed blocks on Rod’s inheritance of the Station of Doom. Rod visits his computer, which suggests that, working together, they could corner the market on stroon, making Rod richer and giving him more power over his destiny. They succeed beyond their wildest dreams, and after a long trading session, Rod finds himself not only the richest man in civilization, but also owner of the planet Earth.

Being incredibly rich turns out to bring problems of its own. The Onseck attempts to murder Rod with a genetically engineered bird, and there are rumors of kidnapping plots. The Lord Redlady appears to help, and convinces Rod to go to Earth. But to slip Rod past those who wish to harm him, they must ship him as cargo. So, in a sequence replete with body horror, an intelligent ape in Redlady’s service amputates Rod’s head, freeze-dries the rest of his body, and packs him up in a small box. When Rod is reconstructed, to protect him, he is molded into the form of an underperson descended from a cat, and married to the famously lovely courtesan, C’Mell. This reconstruction leads to additional dangers, as Rod retains a sense of privilege that could get him killed for violating the rigid laws that apply to underpeople. A servant from his ranch, Elanor, accompanies Rod to Earth, and agrees to have her body reformed into an image of his, throwing off the efforts of those seeking him. Lord Redlady, while he does everything in his power to ensure all Rod’s wishes for his trip to Earth are granted, also has his own agenda, as do the underpeople, whose leader, the mysterious E’telekeli, meets with Rod and gives him aid.

I won’t continue the recap further, as I don’t want to reveal spoilers (although I will say that Elanor finds she prefers life as a young man who resembles the richest man on Earth to being a female servant on Norstrilia…). Rod’s journey through the culture of Earth is absolutely fascinating, with many interesting asides. This culture is by no means a utopia, and is even ugly and cruel. But despite its dark and whimsical aspects, it also feels very real and plausible. Without being heavy-handed, the book deals with issues of free will, duty, diversity, racism, slavery, and the very nature of what makes a person. The journey tends to wander, but always in directions I found fascinating. And in the end, when Rod returns to Norstrilia, we are given a heartwarming ending that, in only a couple of lines, also becomes absolutely heartbreaking.

Final Thoughts

Cordwainer Smith is a writer who should not be forgotten. His work was rich and fascinating, and unlike the output of many other writers of his era, his tales have aged like a good whiskey. Norstrilia is available in a number of formats, and a few years ago, the NESFA Press put out The Rediscovery of Man, a collection of his short works.

And now, I look forward to hearing your thoughts on Smith’s work and his legacy. Are you as captivated by the Instrumentality of Man as I am?

[nem0c]

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm

[spaceintruderdetector]

If I told you about a SF universe that involves a violent, treacherous desert planet where the drug that makes possible star travel is harvested (making that planet the most important place in the universe) from the bodies of giant animals, the mutant guild that pilots the star ships... You are going to say Dune, right? But it is not, actually. The first parts of that series were published in the 50s in some major SF magazines, just as Dune was being written. What are the chances...?Plagiarism- the secret ingridient behind some of the biggest American SF sucess stories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentality_of_Mankind

[oldschoolsciencefiction]

Happy birthday to the late, great Cordwainer Smith, born on this day in 1913.

Cordwainer Smith was the nom de plume of sci fi author Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger. In addition to writing science fiction stories, Linebarger also organized the United States Army’s first psychological warfare division and became a close confidant of Chinese nationalist politician Chiang Kai-shek.

The East Asian scholar and author of the sci fi classic short story “Scanners Live in Vain” died in 1966 at the age of 53.