HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CORDWAINER SMITH!!!

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Less than two hours before the day melts into the past, I've learned that this is Paul Linebarger's birthday. Linebarger was a military expert on psychological warfare. During World War Two, he was sent to China to coordinate military intelligence operations there and became a close confidant of Chiang Kai-shek. A CIA official called him "perhaps the leading practitioner of 'black' and 'gray' propaganda in the Western world."  Linebarger was posthumously inducted as a Distinguished Member of the Psychological Operations Regiment by the US Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School

But that was just his day job.

In his real life, he was a science fiction writer. And not just anhy science fiction writer, but an inimitable one. He wrote under the name of Cordwainer Smith. And his tales of the Instrumentality of Mankind were... strange, wonderful, gemlike, and inimitable

Not that we didn't try. You could fill a very fat anthology with pastiche stories that failed to capture the essence of Cordwainer Smith's fiction. For a very long time, every ambitious writer there was tried. (Including me. Smith wrote a story called "The Clown of Deadlady Town," and early in my career, I wrote "The Dead Lady of Clown Town. A story that has rightfully never been reprinted. So I am not setting myself above anybody here.)

Our failures were like flowers laid before his grave.

And what, you may well ask, were his stories like? Stange, wonderful, etc., etc. I couldn't do them justice at anything less than book length. 

If you know, you know. If you don't, it may take a little effort to find his stories. But i recommend you do. They're worth it. I recommend you do. Unless the prices are ridiculous. "Fifty fucks for a sixties paperback? Are you nuts?"   In which case, be patient. Hold the fort. You'll find his work eventually.

And you'll love it.

And, okay, yes . . .

Linebarger may possibly have been as nutty as a fruitcake. In 1954, a psychologist dedicated a chapter of The Fifty-Minute Hour to a science fiction writer who believed he was an alien getting instruction from the Dog Star. Which lacks the hard-headedness of his Cold Warrior status and the subtlety of his science fiction. But maybe so.

Whatever the truth may be, his fiction remains one of the wellsprings of science fiction.