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#15, August 2002

NORSTRILIA AND DUNE

A while ago, I received a letter from Harry Buerkett. Here's part:

Has anyone, to your knowledge, yet found the connection between the two works Norstrilia and Dune?

The life of Mohammed, perhaps (with which I am almost completely ignorant)?

That they were both written at or about the same time suggests a common precursor (or something in the air?).

Whenever someone touts Dune, I always refer them to the superior (forgive me, Frank Herbert) Norstrilia by Cordwainer Smith.

I encouraged Harry, and he sent me some more thoughts:

I've found yet another parallel: Both Lavinia and Chani bear twins (Ted & Rich at the end of NORSTRILIA (or THE UNDERPEOPLE; Leto II and Ghanima at the end of the "third half" of DUNE, DUNE MESSIAH).

The more I look, the more I find. I'm fairly well-versed in SF, and ornithopters are not common in the literature (authors preferring flying cars, jets, rockets, etc.), yet both your father and Frank Herbert use "ornithopters" in each novel.

I forwarded Harry's email to Alan C. Elms, and here is part of Alan's reply:

Thanks to Rosana for passing your question along to me and thank you for your enthusiastic assessment of "Norstrilia," with which I agree.

Your question is an interesting one, which I can't answer definitively because I never asked it of either Paul Linebarger or Frank Herbert. (I never met Linebarger; I could have asked Herbert at one convention or another, but didn't think to do so.)

I'm pretty sure neither book was a direct influence on the other, since they were both written over several years' time and were published at about the same time (or in the case of the second half of "Norstrilia," a couple of years later), and Linebarger and Herbert did not correspond with each other.

A "common precursor" also seems unlikely in any specific sense. Herbert may have had the life of Mohammed in mind, but Linebarger did not; as I've discussed in my introduction to the NESFA edition of "Norstrilia," that novel is based instead on the Chinese classic "A Journey to the West."

I would not be surprised, though, if Herbert had gained some inspiration for such aspects of "Dune" as the role of the drug "spice" by reading Linebarger's earlier stories, several of which alluded to the similar drug "stroon."

Both Herbert and Linebarger were very familiar with the whole of golden-age SF; both were very interested in psychological theory and psychotherapy; both had strong interests in religion, in international [translated into intergalactic] politics, and in basic philosophical questions about what makes an individual (of any physical form) human. So it's not surprising that they wrote novels with certain striking similarities at about the same time.

A VISIT TO ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY

George C. Willick writes

Went 'back east' a couple weeks ago, primarily on a military mission to see old friends, find lost buddies, and visit known graves.

While at Arlington cemetery, fighting the bureaucracy of fear and entrenchment, I wore a blister on the sole of my foot, walking (no vehicles allowed) Mrs. Lee's garden...and that took some doing as I walk every day. Climbed two chain links fences, however, which is something I don't do every day.

Anyway, I made it out to your dad's grave. I was particularly surprised by its location...a very pleasant spot where the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier echoes across the small valley. Very nice. I didn't stay long as I had many graves to find and had just come down from Section 3, the most difficult section in the cemetery, and was staggering about, so I sat and visited a while. Doing this at 65 is not as easy as it was when I was stationed at Andrews AFB.

Anyone going to Arlington should be warned that finding grave locations will be a problem. If you come from Alaska and have five names to find, they will only locate three graves...of my three, two were wrong...so best to know the locations before you go...as I did Paul Linebarger's. And DC in general is a driving nightmare (it always was, but worse now) with barricades, NO TURN signs, security(?) guards, and other irritants. However, if you want to go anywhere you please, just wear an orange traffic vest, wear a baseball cap backwards, and carry a weed-eater...no one will even look at you twice.

#13, June 2002

FAMILY ARCHIVES: SUN YAT SEN, MY MOTHER

Recently I went through a bunch of old family papers that emerged from somewhere when we last moved. Here are some finds:

I have a photocopy of a postcard that Dr. Sun Yat Sen sent my father soon after my father lost his vision in one eye, in an accident:

26/3/20 Dear Paul: I am very sorry to hear of the accident to your eye. You must show what a brave boy you are by keeping cheerful always. This will help you to recover quicker. Sun Yat Sen.

From my mother's 1938 journal, not too long after she and my father married:

DAMNATION NIGHT-a story suggested by Paul (he wants me to write it but I doubt I ever could).

The story is about a group of people banded together for the purpose of murder as a sport and pleasure. Motivation? Perhaps an obscurely recognized hunger for living, for vitality, for the feeling of lust and life and adventure, an adolescent kind of desire for "making something happen." Also, perhaps an enormous infinitely destructive boredom that makes existence a mockery of life? Also perhaps the value of danger as a "tonic"....

PAUL LINEBARGER MAKES A CAMEO APPEARANCE IN THE JUNE ASIMOV'S

As I've said before, I don't read a lot of science fiction, but luckily I was alerted by three different people (thank you all!) that the June Asimov's carries a story by Howard V. Hendrix called "Incandescent Bliss." The title immediately made me wonder what was up, since my father's name in Chinese translates as "Forest of Incandescent Bliss."

Well, I soon found out. If you want to read the whole story, send an email to asimovsATdellmagazines.com AFTER REPLACING THE AT WITH @, regarding the June 2002 issue. They will reply with the price, etc.

As the story opens, we are in a hotel in Hong Kong with Dr. Jaron L. Kwon... "Glancing through the piles of research mounded around him, Jaron realizes the obsessions that led him here have changed."

Soon it continues with this paragraph, the first of three with an unmistakable subject:

"Jaron doesn't care so much any more about whether it was or wasn't a heart attack in 1966 that killed the 'old China hand.' Or why the old hand willed The Documents--a fascinating mix of ciphers and explications in Hebrew, Chinese, Latin, Italian, and English--to CIA. Jaron doesn't care so much anymore that the old had was a professor of Asiatic studies, first at Duke and then at Johns Hopkins. Or that the cold-war spymaster claimed he never mastered the 'algorithm complex' so key to understanding the documents." [page 69]

FIRST THE RATS. THEN THE DRAGONS...

The header above was Jim Woodhill's pithy comment on a New York Times article of May 2. Once again, it seems that CS's wild imagination [or prescience] is manifesting

Providing a biological twist to robotics, scientists have fitted live rats with remote controls to guide them through mazes, past obstacles and even up trees by typing commands on a laptop computer up to half a mile away.

The approach, which takes advantage of an animal's innate ability to do things like climb over rocks, could ultimately be applied to inspecting a disaster area, said the scientists, who report their findings in today's issue of the journal Nature.

The article later goes on to explain,

The researchers do not commandeer the rats' brains and directly command the animals, zombie-like, where to go. Rather, they take advantage of well- worn techniques of training animals by providing rewards.

The difference is that in the rats, both the stimuli and the reward are piped directly into the brain, and both can be sent by radio signals from some distance away.

Three wires were implanted into the brain of each rat. A pulse of current along one wire stimulated a region of the brain that made the rat feel as if its left whiskers had been touched.

A second wire led to the sensing region of the right whiskers. The third was connected to the part of the brain's pleasure center, the medial forebrain bundle.

The researchers trained the rats to turn left or right when they felt a stimulus in the corresponding whiskers, rewarding them with a pulse of euphoria in the pleasure center.

A LONG FAN LETTER

I get an awful lot of spam at the CS site, and one morning recently as I was adding yet another batch of it to my email filter while muttering my father's line "God Damn Spam," I came upon this letter. It's long, but I enjoyed it so much that I immediately asked Stu if I could include it here. He said yes. Here 'tis...

Rosana:

I made my way to your dad´s universe through the usual Heinlein- Clarke-Asimov-what-else-is-out-here? method recommended by 4 out of 5 dentists for their patients who read SF. I was 9 or 10 and reading voraciously, a dictionary close at hand for those words outside my ken.

And I found a story by Cordwainer Smith. Being a discerning prodigy (self-anointed), I immediately had to read them all. Which wasn´t as easy as it sounds. At the time we lived in a suburb of Vancouver, BC, called Cloverdale, which, while famous for its rodeo, isn´t exactly known - or wasn´t then, at any rate - for its quantity and quality of bookstores.

So I looked.

And looked.

And looked.

And as I´m being taught ‘patience´ in this iteration, I looked some more.

At long last, some years thence, when a less obsessive-repulsive would have given up the ghost, what to my wondering eyes did appear?

The Best of Cordwainer Smith.

The title seemed redundant. Nonetheless, I reached out fast - fast like a cobra, fast like the wind. I doubt motion sensors would´ve picked me up, had they then been invented.

“Me! Me! Me! Mine! Mine! Mine!” I shrieked. To myself, recalling, chagrined, how my outbursts had, on several occasions previous, frightened the local yokels. (Picture me as Daffy Duck in ‘Ali Baba Bunny´ as directed by the lovely Chuck Jones.)

With flesh-and-blood money squeezed from my overworked, underpaid parents burning a figurative hole in my pocket, I scurried (now think Marvin Martian, his feet a blur) up to the drone manning the abacus. Okay… cash register. But not one of those fancy bar code scanning numbers, nor even one of its clunky, obsolete progenitors with their DOS-inspired alphanumeric displays. Rather something that would´ve been at home perhaps not in the Old West, nor even the Mae West, but certainly in the Middle-Aged West of story and song.

As for the drone, picture a mouth breathing troglodyte so deadly dull as to suck the IQ out of a room. Well, it was his younger, thicker brother, Hoover. Barely Upright. And he wasn´t having his best day.

He looked at the title without the slightest clue, as that was his best and only look. He´d´ve snorted derisively had he the capacity to work out derision from the superior position. Did his level, unknowing best to suck the joy out of my prized acquisition. Intuitively, I understood that it was rare as steak tartare for him to do his level best, unknowing or otherwise, so I allowed him his moment most uncommon and flew away home.

I´ve had that book 30-some years now. I have no idea how many times I´ve pored over those stories. Some of my favourites, like The Burning of the Brain and The Game of Rat and Dragon, more than 50, I´m sure. And I hunted down Norstrilia and Quest of the 3 Worlds and Space Lords and devoured them repeatedly, too.

The exotic names and places and people and races, the vaguely Oriental storytelling, those strange careers and epic tales - it was all thrilling. And remains so to this day.

I wish your dad was still alive and writing. His stories have given me countless hours of joy. I know he´s been gone some time now, but I offer you my condolences - I´m sure you miss him more than any of his rabid fans could ever do, even at their (read: ‘my´) most hyperbolic.

Golden his Writing Was - Oh! Oh! Oh!

Thanks very much.

A lifelong acolyte,

Stu MacDonald

#12, May 2002

CONTINUING THE MEXICAN THEME: 1964 LETTER FROM MY FATHER

Since I left my job as library director just over a month ago, I have been cleaning things up in my office, including some boxes of family papers -- almost all letters. I spent hours reading these things, and was struck once again by the tremendous zest my father had.

Since the last couple of issues have had articles about Mexico, I thought I'd begin quoting from my archives with this letter, from Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico, dated 3 August 1964. I had just graduated from Stanford and was about to begin a PhD program in Anthropology at Berkeley. (I only lasted a year before running off to Spain with my boyfriend, but that's a different story).

My father wrote,

In a way, I'm sorry that you've not been able to share these last three visits to Mexico with us. This is a culture fully as alien to the norteamericana as is, for example, the French.

Genevieve and I find that we got here more tired and more overworked than we had supposed, but even so, it is a baptism of strangeness which refreshes the soul and puts each of us, once again, in a different perspective for a little while.

I've thought, several times, while I've been here, how much more exactly I would be able to express some of my observations and assessments if I had had the advanced anthropological training which you are about to get: for example, Mexicans have great difficulty about expressing immediate thanks (even in situations where Latin Europeans would have no difficulty in being verbally effusive), but they are untroubled about the elaborate expression of thanks for anything a year or so past.

Again, promptness is either an alien quality, where the Mexican rejoices in his successful assimilation of the enormous civilization to the North in at least one of its aspects, or else promptness is an outrage to his personal dignity. A touch of tardiness seems to preserve human warmth and integrity in situations which would otherwise be clock-haunted nightmares of the worst kind.

I've found myself wondering whether both these cultural traits might not be cultural residue, left over from the envy, love, admiration, hatred, and grief which the creoles and Indians felt for so many centuries as their gallant, handsome, wonderful, hateful Spanish masters dominated every situation with torrents of beautiful expostulatory Castilian. It wouldn't take too many decades of that kind of social structure and interaction to make people feel like glaring at each other whenever they feel grateful. Or would it? You're the anthropologist of the family, not I.

My gallant, not-so-handsome, wonderful, hateful father could always overwhelm me with torrents of beautiful expostulatory English!

The KIRK ALLEN SAGA CONTINUES: Alan Elms writes, "I just heard a couple of days ago from David Hartwell that my piece on the Lindner-Linebarger connection is in print in the NYRSF."

This article, which Alan emailed me, inclines me more toward the theory that my father may well have been Kirk Allen.

This is the same periodical that in April 2001 included Lee Weinstein's "In Search of Kirk Allen." That issue of "The New York Review of Science Fiction" can be ordered for $3.50 postpaid from Dragon Press, P. O. Box 78, Pleasantville, NY 10570. I don't know what the current issue costs, but I did notice from their website that if you subscribe, old issues are only $2 each. More: http://www.nyrsf.com/

Part of a note from Dan O'Hara: My book, "Empire Burlesque: The Fate of Critical Culture in Global America," will be published in the fall by Duke University Press. Its last chapter is "Cat-Master and the Planet-Buyer," which reads a selection of the stories and the novel in light of contemporary and future developments, with respect to the changing conception of human nature.

www.flashpointmag.com/regress.htm includes this in a long poem:

"With his Diploma from the School of the Americas folded into his Copy of Paul Linebarger's Psychological Warfare hidden among 500 kilos of Tamale Powder"

#11, April 2002

WAS PAUL LINEBARGER ALSO KIRK ALLEN? Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger was Cordwainer Smith, Carmichael Smith, Felix C. Forrest, Anthony Bearden, and probably more.

But was he Kirk Allen?

In 1955, a book by Robert Lindner titled "The Fifty-Minute Hour and Other True Psychoanalytic Tales" was published. One of the tales is about a man called Kirk Allen in the book, who created such a real fantasy world that the therapist Lindner becomes deeply drawn into it himself. For decades, people have thought that my father might be Kirk Allen. After all, Lindner was practicing in Baltimore, and my father lived in Washington. My father's biographer Alan Elms and I have talked this over at various times.

I have been dubious that my father was the model for Kirk Allen chiefly because I don't remember him talking about Lindner, and he talked--incessantly, it seemed to me--about his therapists and therapy.

But memory is tricky, and *not* remembering something is even trickier. So I don't know.

The April 2001 issue of "The New York Review of Science Fiction" includes an article by Lee Weinstein titled, "In Search of Kirk Allen." You can order a copy for $3.50 postpaid from Dragon Press, P. O. Box 78, Pleasantville, NY 10570. I checked with David Hartwell and this issue is in stock.

Lee makes some interesting points. He did a lot of detailed research; you can really tell that this question fascinated him. He examined another one of Lindner's stories, figured out who the person actually was, and found out that Lindner fictionalized the stories far more than you might think. Still, there are a number of interesting parallels between Kirk Allen and Paul Linebarger.

A letter that my father's widow Genevieve Linebarger wrote in May 1974 to Ralph Benko comments, "I honestly don't know the answer. Paul was undergoing psychoanalysis at the time that story appeared and we laughed at the appositeness of the situation. The writer, however, was not acquainted with Paul, so his material, if Paul was indeed the subject of the story, would have had to be second-hand...the gossip of fellow psychoanalysts."

Meanwhile, stay tuned for news of Alan Elms' long-awaited article on the same topic, which may include some surprises.

WITH ROSANA IN MEXICO, 1952--2002

I wanted to get back to Mexico this year for a fifty-year anniversary. I've been back several times since the 1952 trip I reported on last month, most notably in 1979 when my husband Kelly and I spent three months driving a Ford camper-van to Guatemala and back, me gritting my teeth on some of the mountain roads. In Mexico City, Kelly and I found a German restaurant, Bellinghausen's, where I remembered going often with my family in 1952 and eating breaded veal cutlet. The waiters looked like they might have been there then, and there was something about the ladies' room that gave me a sense of deja vu.

As a child I had enjoyed learning some Spanish -- I remember being delighted in Acapulco with the concept that the word "tengo" meant "I have." There was something about one word in Spanish expressing the meanings of two words in English that I liked. I've never gotten very fluent in Spanish, but I do enjoy how friendly the Mexican people are when Kelly and I try our best. We both can say enough that the Mexicans realize that we understand more than the average tourist, and then away they go, and I'm lucky to catch half of it!

Anyway, last month we took a short trip, a week in northern Mexico, going to the ruins of Paquime at Casas Grandes and to a wonderful pottery village called Mata Ortiz. One thing I noticed during the trip was how much I have inherited my father's outgoing curiosity about other people and what they are doing. Actually, sometimes I can be quite shy if I don't feel that my mastery of the language is good enough to really communicate. But when that is going okay, I get very nosy in a friendly way, and I can practically feel my father inside my skull.

Another Paul-ism that I noticed in myself during the trip was my tendency to remark on and be amused by cultural incongruities or oddities. In the small city of Nuevo Casas Grandes, we saw many Mennonite women, always walking behind their menfolk. They wore dresses which were often very pretty, with dressy aprons over them, but I never saw one who looked happy. Kelly and I had a running contest (very Paul-like) to see who could spot a smiling Mennonite woman. We'll have to continue it next time we're there... we didn't see a one.

FROM CS: ON SPENDING MONEY

Alan Elms found an unpublished article of my father's titled "Any Fool Can Earn Money" in the University of Kansas archives. It appears to have been written in the early 1950s. Here's a bit of it:

Intelligence will make money. But can intelligence spend it?

I doubt it.

It takes taste to spend money effectively.

I don´t mean that a fool can´t throw money around; he certainly can. I mean, instead, the pleasant effort of spending money fastidiously, pleasantly, appreciatively, welcoming the departure of each dollar for the rewards which the dollar brings in... To spend judiciously and beautifully is an act which compels me to exert my whole character. I have to be me, to take the measure of myself. Even in the most trivial every-day things I have to stop short if I ask myself, Do I really want this? Will this give me pleasure? Or is this something which if bought would keep me from buying something else which would give me much more reward?

I suppose the reward is not in the spending but in the leisure, not in the possession but in the enjoyment, not in acquisition but in individualization. American spending is sadly hasty. People save money and waste their own lives saving time, because the things they buy are not especially and individually their own. They are mere things--adequate, useful, and no more.

#10, March 2002

WITH PAUL LINEBARGER IN MEXICO, FIFTY YEARS AGO

Kelly and I will be taking a short vacation into northern Mexico this month, celebrating 50 years since my first trip there with my father, and one night I began reminiscing about that trip.

We flew from Washington's National Airport to Miami one summer night in 1952, and I remember that we had a little sleeping compartment on the plane, much like a train. Then we flew to the Yucatan and later on to Mexico City. I was nine, my sister five.

I don't imagine too many people have had a tour guide like Paul M. A. Linebarger. With his encyclopedic knowledge and his skill as a raconteur, he brought Mexican history alive to us, complete with young virgins about my age being ceremonially sacrificed in the cenotes of Chichen Itza to the bloody sagas of the Spanish conquest. I didn't realize at the time that I was also absorbing his worldview of human history, the endless suffering, the glories, and the stunning beauties. He was a very attentive father, only occasionally leaving me and my sister with our stepmother Genevieve while he and Howard Hunt (later of Watergate fame) did a few things for the CIA.

One of my father's graduate students had driven our old Lincoln (named "Silverfish") down from D.C., and we took it from the capital to Taxco and Acapulco. I remember a bit of conversation on the drive down, as Daddy and Genevieve were explaining the Cold War to me. "If the Russians came, I would pretend to go along with them so they wouldn't kill me," I said to Genevieve as she put me to bed that night. "Paul wouldn't," she said emphatically. "He would do everything he could to fight them." (Only years later did I realize that doing everything he could might well include pretending to go along.)

In Acapulco we had bathing suits made to order from stunning hand-painted fabric and stayed indoors all one boring day when there was an election and people were shooting off their guns. Another evening, Genevieve became delirious, and my father left her in my care for hours while he went searching for suitable medical care. She nearly died from amoebic dysentery and typhoid, one right after the other but I forget in what order. She was flown to a hospital in Mexico City, and my father drove (to use a favorite expression of his) "like a bat out of hell" through the winding mountain roads to join her. Outside of Taxco, it was raining so hard that we could hardly see the road, but there was a local car going fast ahead of us and my father kept it in view, sometimes delegating me to stick my head out the window and report if we got too near the road's edge. We got pretty near.

After Genevieve was a little better, she flew back to the US alone, leaving my father to do a very long drive back with two fidgety little girls. The poverty of rural Mexico ground into me, and I remember not being satisfied with my father's world-weary explanations . "But it isn't fair," I remember insisting. He explained that fairness was not a guiding principle of history. I was not consoled (and I still am not).

I know that people will often talk much more freely about sex than about money, but I am just the opposite. I imagine that at least some of you will be interested to know a bit about how the website is doing financially. The figures for 2001, the first full year the site was up, indicate that we sold almost $4000 worth of items from it. My husband has become very familiar with global priority mail, as we have shipped all over the world. Since we buy the books from the publishers, our profit was well under half that amount. Still, not bad for a labor of love. Kelly and I have several websites, and overall our internet sales for 2001 were up 250% from 2000 despite the six weeks after 9/11 when we made practically no retail sales from any of our sites.

So I haven't figured out (yet) how to make a fortune from the web, but more and more the internet is becoming a significant source of this family's income. Ah, the perfect lead-in to mention Kelly's new website, which has been up a month and has already surpassed all my sites combined in the number of hits it's getting (harrumph). If you have any interest in the alternative, sustainable building movement and its ramifications, do go visit: http://www.greenhomebuilding.com

www.thealienonline.net/features/cs_appreciation_Feb02.asp?tid=3&scid Writer Jeff VanderMeer was afraid that re-reading CS, whom he had discovered as a boy, would destroy his childhood. But it didn't turn out that way.

#9, February 2002

CAROL MCGUIRK'S ARTICLE, "THE REDISCOVERY OF CORDWAINER SMITH"

It may surprise Carol McGuirk that her mind reminds me of my father's. As I read this insightful article, nearly 40 pages long, which appeared in SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES last summer, it seemed to me that I was watching two hawks flying -- sometimes together, sometimes making huge loops alone and then reconnecting. Time and again, she puts out provocative, intriguing ideas. For example, "In my reading, Alpha Ralpha Boulevard is his most memorable symbolic representation of science fiction itself." [p. 172] That never would have occurred to me, but she goes on to flesh out the idea in a paragraph or two. Like my father's stories, if you work harder to see what's going on, you are rewarded.

One sentence struck home poignantly. "Like Scheherazade in the tales of the Arabian nights, Smith plays a teasing game with death." I was in college and just out of school during the years that my father was literally playing a teasing game with death, and I didn't really understand how close to the edge he was coming until he was gone. She is talking about the stories here, and continues the sentence: "deferring his ending, intertwining his stories, and opening the door to future installments even as he spins his present tale. His refusal to wrap up extrapolation in a tidy cognitive package is no doubt an idiosyncrasy. But I see it also as a strength. At a time when the best sf (including his own) was written at short lengths, he was able by this means to evoke a deep ambiguity." [p. 164]

McGuirk's abstract of the article appears at  http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/abstracts/a84.htm#mcguirk

and ordering information is at

http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/masthead.htm#SUBS (Back issues are $5 postpaid in the U.S. And Canada.)

#8, January 2002

There's a new book out on Cordwainer Smith, written by Karen Hellekson.

This is the *only* book in print about him and/or his works that I know of in English. Pablo Capanna is working on an updated and enlarged version of his work in Spanish, and Alan C. Elms is working on a comprehensive biography but there's no set date on it yet.

Here's what the publisher, Mcfarland and Company, says about "The Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith"...

This critical work concentrates on the science fiction writings of Paul Linebarger, who wrote under the pseudonym Cordwainer Smith, as well as other pseudonyms he created to reflect his different writing styles. His writings give voice to concerns about humanity and personal struggle; his ideas about love, loss, alienation, and psychic pain continue to resonate today.

This work begins with a brief biographical sketch of Cordwainer Smith, linking elements of his past to his writing and focusing on his contributions to science fiction as well as his concern with humanity. Also discussed are Smith's published and unpublished novel- length non-science fiction, his revision process, the true man-underpeople dichotomy in his published and unpublished short fiction, and his only published novel-length science fiction work Norstrilia.

Karen L. Hellekson is a freelance copy editor. She resides in Jay, Maine.

I've been reading parts of it. As I have often said, I'm not as much a CS fan as someone who grew up surrounded by his mind -- so I am not really the best person to review it. I think that anyone who is fascinated by CS's writings and enjoys literary analysis might like to read it. It's fun to see discussion of so many CS-related themes in one place.

Here's a quote, to give you a taste:

"The Great Pain of Space is a recurring theme in Smith's science fiction, and one that merits investigation. In Smith's earlier science fiction stories, the Great Pain of Space is literal; people literally experience horrible pain and death simply from attempting to traverse space. In Smith's later works, the pain is sublimated and metaphorical. In 'Think Blue, Count Two,' something inside people is triggered by space that causes insanity, despair, and pain. Regardless of how this pain is articulated, however, it is connected with space and humanity's attempt to travel through it. I certainly agree that Smith, in his science fiction, was working through his own psychological problems."[Page 88]

The paperback book is 158 pages long: that's 104 pages of the text itself, followed by a glossary of CS terms, a bibliography, a list of manuscripts at the Spencer Research Library in Lawrence, Kansas, and an index. Its $28.50 price tag seems steep to me, but I suppose academic books tend to cost more than general interest ones, due to the smaller readerships. As a librarian myself, I can't help reminding you that your public or academic library may be able to get it for you on interlibrary loan.

I'm not stocking it directly myself but you can get it from the publisher [www.mcfarlandpub.com] or other places... see the article below about making your Amazon start page be the new one on the CS site.

Andy Sawyer, Science Fiction Librarian at the University of Liverpool, and Reviews Editor of "Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction" kindly sent me some comments that will appear in Foundation 84, out early this year. See The Science Fiction Foundation Collection webpage: http://www.liv.ac.uk/~asawyer/sffchome.html

Andy's comments on "The Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith:"

It draws together a body of existing research, and is especially interesting on the early "mainstream" fiction, which few fans have read. She quotes, for instance, an interesting quotation from Ria (1947) about "the fluent deep roar of a resounding brass instrument of some kind . . . something which sounded like the instrumentality of man". She identifies various themes of loss, love and alienation in his work. Although her analysis can be superficial at times (she rightly stresses the way he deals with the question of "what makes us human?" but the final "afterword" summarises Smith's work with at least seven uses of the phrase "the human condition" in four pages, which is probably six too many) she has produced an enjoyable book on a fine writer.

Although her glossary is useful, no serious scholar or fan of Smith should be without Anthony R. Lewis's Concordance, now in its third edition. It's only necessary to compare entries such as the one for "Judson, E. Z. C." in both. Hellekson's is fine as far as the reference within Smith's work goes, but it is Lewis who tells us that the "Ancient American poet, 1823-1866" was the writer of over 400 books, many as "Ned Buntline" who was Buffalo Bill Cody's promoter. (Although it is Hellekson who has an entry for Norstillia's "Absent Queen" without, however, explaining the reference as - at least so I have always taken it - an echo of Australian identification with a British "homeland".)

MOVING CLOSER TO THE UNDERPEOPLE? Here's an article forwarded to me by Jerry Ferrin, who found it at newsmax.com on December 3, 2001:

Japan OKs Mixed Human-Animal Clones

Japan is allowing combined human-animal embryos to be produced through cloning, Britain's Ananova news service has reported.

Officials hope the move will lead to transplant organs being harvested from specially bred animals. Opponents worry that scientists will now be able to produce mixed-species creatures.

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, chairman of Japan's council for science and technology policy, announced the decision allowing human cells to be implanted into fertilized animal eggs for medical purposes, Ananova reported Friday.

The Daily Yomiuri reported that human cloning would be illegal under the guidelines.

Jerry commented, "It's amazing to me how prescient your father's ideas were; I think he will, in the future, gain wide recognition for his ideas such as human/animal recombinant genetics."

CS AND ARCHAEOLOGY I had never given a thought to my father's effect on archaeology until I received this email from Dr. Alasdair Brooks, an archaeologist working in Australia [a.brooksATlatrobe.edu.au AFTER YOU REPLACE AT WITH @]. He wrote:

You might be interested in an academic paper that I've written about your father's work, and which will be published this following year.

The premise of the paper is that your father, while obviously primarily concerned with other themes, was very sensitive to many of the issues that are relevant to modern archaeological interpretation, particularly as concerns the near-mythic power of representations of the past. As such, much of his work can be used as an allegory within which these issues can be discussed.

Actual direct references to archaeology or archaeological sites in CS are rare. For archaeology itself, there are passing references in 'The Lady Who Sailed the Soul' and (more obliquely) 'On the Gem Planet'. Archaeological sites include the temple of Diana of the Ephesians (the Palace of the Governor of Night in _Norstrilia_) and Mount Vernon (Magno Taliano's jonasoidal ship in 'The Burning of the Brain'). But beyond these direct references, CS's work has many examples which can be used to illustrate the importance of the past - whether mythic or historical - in the meaningful construction of the present. Indeed, this is arguably a very basic principle underlying the Rediscovery of Man.

Perhaps even more interesting from an archaeological perspective is 'A Planet Named Shayol'. While it may perhaps be open to question as to whether or not this was CS's intent, the almost total absence of material culture (the objects constructed by humans) of any form - apart from B'dikket's cabin - very much helps to emphasise the dehumanisation of Shayol's 'herds' of people.

The reference is:

Brooks, A. (2002) "'Under Old Earth': Material Culture, Identity and History in the Work of Cordwainer Smith" in M. Russell (ed.) _Digging Holes in Popular Culture: Archaeology and Science Fiction_. Oxbow Books, Oxford. (based on a paper originally presented at the 1999 Conference of the University of York Archaeology Society).

Apparently due to overwhelming public interest (well, overwhelming by the admittedly low standards of academic archaeological publications, anyway), the publication date has been brought forward to February 2002 from the original April.

I should also note that I've placed "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard" on the reading list for the 'Archaeology and Science Fiction' component of our department's 'Representations of Archaeology' course this next semester.

PS: the reference in Alpha Ralpha Boulevard to Tasmanians 'dancing in the streets' when they start dying of cholera always gets a big laugh in this part of the world!"