Once, a good many years ago, I had a story in a magazine called Fantasy Book. Actually, it was only about half a story (it was a collaboration with Isaac Asimov called "Little Man on the Subway", and for that matter Fantasy Book was only about half a magazine. It didn't last very long or reach a very big audience. It might not even have reached me if I hadn't been a contributor—half a contributor. But, by gosh, it had some good stories. And the best of them all was a piece called "Scanners Live in Vain" by an author called Cordwainer Smith.
"Cordwainer Smith," forsooth! The instant question that burned in my mind was who lay behind that disguise. Henry Kuttner had played hide-and-seek games with pennames in those days. So had Robert A. Heinlein, and "Scanners Live in Vain" seemed inventive enough, and good enough, to do credit to either of them. But it wasn't in the style, or any of the styles, that I had associated with them. Besides, they denied it. Theodore Sturgeon? A. E. van Vogt? No, neither of them. Then who?
It really did not seem probable that this was someone wholly new. Apart from the coyness of the by-line, there was too great a wealth of color and innovation and conceptually stimulating thought in "Scanners" for me to believe for one second that it was the creation of any but a top master in science fiction. It was not only good. It was expert. Even excellent writers are not usually that excellent the first time around.
Not long afterward I signed a contract to edit a science-fiction anthology for Doubleday's paperback subsidiary, to be entitled Beyond the End of Time. That pleased me a lot, not least because it meant I had a chance to display "Scanners Live in Vain" to an audience a hundred times larger than Fantasy Book had commanded. And there was a valuable fringe benefit. Somebody would have to sign the publishing agreement for the story. And then I would have him!
Only I didn't. The permission came back signed by Forrest J. Ackerman, as Cordwainer Smith's literary agent. For a brief, crazed period I suspected Forry of having written the story himself, but he assured me he hadn't. And there it rested. For the better part of a decade. Until the time came when I was doing some editorial work for Galaxy and my phone rang. The man on the other end said, "Mr. Pohl? I'm Paul Linebarger."
I said, "Yes?" in a tone that he easily translated to mean, And who the hell is Paul Linebarger? He quickly added: "I write under the name of Cordwainer Smith."
So who is Paul Linebarger, then?
Well, let me tell you a story. I was once traveling around Eastern Europe on behalf of the U.S. State Department, talking about science fiction to audiences of Poles and Macedonians and Soviet Georgians. Among others. American science fiction is kindly received in almost all parts of the world, that one included. I was received with cordial hospitality. By the Eastern Europeans, anyway; and often, but not always, by the American diplomats charged with keeping me busy and out of trouble. The least welcome I was ever made to feel was at an embassy dinner, at a post where the American ambassador was a stuffed shirt of the school, had never read any science fiction, never intended to ready any, and was visibly displeased with the malign turn of fate that compelled him to make dinner-table conversation with a person who made his living by writing the stuff. He didn't thaw until we got to the brandy, and Cordwainer Smith's name came up. I mentioned his real name. The ambassador almost dropped his snifter. "Doctor Paul Linebarger? The professor from Johns Hopkins?" the very one, I agreed. "But he was my teacher!" said the ambassador. And for what was left of the evening he could not have been more charming.
Professor Linebarger did not teach foreign affairs only to the ambassador; he taught any number of others. He didn't only teach events. He played a part in shaping them. Bilingual in Chinese (he grew up there) and fluent in half a dozen other languages, he was on call to the State Department to lecture, explain, discuss, or negotiate. Even in English. He once gave me his explanation of that. "It's because," he said, "I can speak a . . . lot . . . more . . . slowly . . . and . . . distinctly . . . than . . . most . . . people." And so he could. And I'm sure that was helpful with many persons who owned rusty or incomplete English. But I don't for once second believe that was the reason. What the State Department treasured was what we all treasure: not the habit of speech, but the mind that shaped it, wise, quick, and comprehending.
Traveler, teacher, writer, diplomat, scholar, Paul Linebarger led a fascinating life. It was as colorful as his novels.
If you have not happened to read a lot of science fiction, the next question that might come to your mind is: "So who is Cordwainer Smith, then?" So let me tell you something about what he wrote, and why to so many of us he was, and is, something special.
Start with this. All of science fiction is special. Not every person likes any of it. Hardly any one likes all of it. It comes in a wide variety of shapes and flavors. Some are bland and familiar, like vanilla. Some are strange and at first glance hardly assimilable, like a Tinguely sculpture happening. That is one of the things that attracts me to science fiction: its mind stretching employment of incongruities. When this trait is pushed as far as it can go, it is a precarious tightrope-dance, daring balanced against disaster; the imagination of the writer and the tolerance of the reader stand stretched right up to the point of catastrophic collapse. One tiny millimeter more, and it would all fall apart. What was mind-bending and fresh would become simply absurd. A. E. van Vogt walked that narrow path marvelously, so did Jack Vance; Samuel R. Delany and Vernor Vinge do it now; but no one, ever, has done it with more daredevil success than Cordwainer Smith. The outrageousness of his concepts, characters, and even words
Congohelium and stroon. Cat-people and laminated-mouse-brain roots. Mile-high abandoned freeways, and dead people who move and act and think and feel. Smith made wonderlands. And he made us believe they could be real.
Part of it was his finely tuned ear for the sound and sense of words. He had a prose style that changed and grew over the few years of his short career, and proved over and over that the right word was the unexpected word. The Smith word-selection is so privately his own, that it can be detected even in the titles of his stories—though perhaps not as straightforwardly as one might imagine. Once James Blish looked up delightedly from the latest issue of Galaxy and said, "What I remember best about Cordwainer Smith is those marvelously individual titles." Which titles in particular? I asked, and Jim said, "Why all of them. 'The Dead Lady of Clown town,' 'The Ballad of Lost C'Mell," and "Think Blue, Count Two,'" for three. That was funny, and I told him so, because not one of those had been Smith's original title. I had put them on the stories when I published them. But Jim wasn't wrong, because I hadn't made any of them up. They had simply come out of Smith's own text.
Paul Linebarger was not at all a recluse. In fact the opposite. He was gregarious and conversational, traveled immensely, spent a great deal of his time in classes and meetings. But he did not want to meet many science-fiction people. It was not that he did not like them. It was almost a superstition. Once before he had begun a career as a writer. He had published two novels—Carola and Ria, neither of them science fiction; what they remind me of most are Robert Briffault's novels of European politics, Europa and Europa in Limbo. He had had every intention of continuing, but he couldn't. The novels had been published under the pseudonym of Felix C. Forrest. They had attracted enough attention to make a number of people wonder who "Felix C. Forrest" was, and a few of them had found out. Unfortunately. What was unfortunate was that when Paul found himself in face-to-face contact with "Forrest"'s audience, he could no longer write for them. Would the same thing happen with science fiction under the same circumstances? He didn't know. But he did not want to risk it.
So Paul Linebarger kept his pseudonym private. He stayed away from gatherings where science-fiction readers and writers were present. When the World Science Fiction Convention was in Washington in 1963, not more than a mile or two from his home, I urged him to drop in and test the water. I would not tell a soul who he was. If he chose, he could turn around and leave. If not . . . well, then not.
Paul weighed the thought and then, reluctantly, decided against the risk. But, he said, there were a couple of individuals whom he would like to meet if they wouldn't mind coming to his house. And so it happened. And of course it was a marvelous afternoon. It had to be. Paul was a fine host, and Genevieve—once his student, then his wife—a splendid hostess. Under the scarlet and gold birth scroll calligraphed by Paul's godfather, Sun Yat-sen, drinking "pukka pegs" (ginger ale and brandy highball, which, Paul said, were what had kept the British army alive in India), in that discovering company the vibrations were optimal.
And it did not trouble his writing at all, then or thereafter. He kept on writing, if anything better than ever. He enjoyed his guests—particularly, he said, Judith Merril and Algis Budrys—enough so that he felt easier about meeting others in the field. Little by little he did. Some in person, some only by mail, most by phone, and I think that the time was not far off when Paul Linebarger would have made an appearance at a science-fiction convention. Maybe a lot of them. But time ran out. He died of a stroke in 1966, at the bitterly unfair age of fifty-three.
Every important work of fiction is written partly in code. What we read in a sentence is not always what the author had in mind when he wrote it, and there are times—oh, many times—when the author's meaning may be unclear even to him. This is not always a flaw. It is sometimes a necessity. When a human mind, boxed inside its skull, perceiving the universe only through deceitful senses and communicating with it only in imprecise words, reaches for complex meanings and patterns of understanding, explicit statement is hard to achieve. The higher the reach, the harder the task. Cordwainer Smith's reach sometimes went clear out of sight.
Paul taught me how to decrypt some of his messages, but only the easy ones. Somewhere in the files of the manuscript collection at Syracuse University there is, or ought to be, an annotated copy of some of his manuscripts with decoding instructions. The particular stories were a parable of Middle-Eastern politics. He had taken the trouble to note in the margins for me which story characters from the remote future represented what current Egyptian and Lebanese political figures.
That is a game many writers play. It is sometimes fun, but I don't happen to consider it a whole lot of fun. What I wish I could decode in the work of Cordwainer Smith is far more complicated. His concerns went beyond current life and contemporary politics, and maybe beyond human experience entirely. Religion. Metaphysics. Ultimate meaning. The search for truth. When you set out to catch ultimate truth in a net of words, you need a lot of patience and a lot of skill. The quarry is elusive. Worse than that. You need a lot of faith, too, and a lot of stubbornness, because what you are seeking may not exist at all. Does religion refer to anything "real?" Is there such a thing in the universe as "meaning?"
The Cordwainer Smith stories are science fiction, all right. But they are, at least the best of them are, science fiction of the special sort that C. S. Lewis called "eschatological fiction." They aren't about the future of human beings like us. They are about what comes after human beings like us. They don't answer questions. They ask them and command us to ask them too.
Cordwainer Smith's whole science-fiction writing career essentially took place in less than a decade. But how many writers in a full lifetime can match it?
—Frederik Pohl