This page contains selections from the 2000 and 2001 ezines. Click here to go to the 2002 ezine page. (I discontinued the ezine in October 2002.)

#7, December 2001

SOLAR SAILS

Here is part of a press release from the Planetary Society:

"In early 2002, the Cosmos 1 solar sail will launch a test flight to orbit Earth on wings of light, carrying on board a CD that will include solar sail stories by science fiction greats Arthur C. Clarke and Cordwainer Smith, as well as the names of all members of The Planetary Society.

"Cosmos 1, a joint project of The Planetary Society and Cosmos Studios, will be the first mission to test the concept of sailing through space using photons as propulsion. Solar sailing utilizes reflected light pressure, which pushes on giant panels that adjust to the continuously changing orbital energy and spacecraft velocity. The pressure of sunlight alone is enough to push spacecraft between the planets, from Mercury out to Jupiter. Powerful lasers focused over long distances in space could propel solar sails to the edge of the solar system and beyond to interstellar flight."

For more information, see http://planetary.org

SLICED RAT BRAIN...

Thanks to Jean-Marc L'Officier for alerting me to the beginning of an article in the online New York Times, October 9, 2001.

"New Ideas in the War on Bioterrorism"

"An oily mixture resembling salad dressing that can blow up anthrax bacteria. A toxin detector made of a slice of living rat brain on an electronic chip. A drug that would kill all bacteria and another that would boost a person's immune system to withstand any pathogen.

"These are all ideas, some far off and some surprisingly close at hand, that are being pursued in what could become the nation's newest medical battle — the war against bioterrorism."

#6, August-September 2001

MEMORIES OF PAUL LINEBARGER FROM A GOOD FRIEND

Chu Djang was one of my father's very closest friends, and I have many memories of visiting him, his wife Jane, and his sons William and Arthur in New York, as we were growing up. (Once, when I was about 9, Daddy and Genevieve had managed to get us quite lost in the car as we went out through Long Island to visit our friends.. I have a strong mathematical streak from the OTHER side of my genetic inheritance, and I knew exactly where we were relative to our goal by reading the street numbers and names. But did the grownups listen to me? Whaddya think? Of course not!)

Anyway, recently I was delighted to receive in the mail Chu Djang's "From Loss to Renewal: A Tale of Life Experience at Ninety," available from www.iuniverse.com. (It's $11.95 and the ISBN is 0-595-18294-1.) Later I would read and savor the details of Chu's fascinating life and illustrious career, but immediately I went searching for what he might say about my father. They became friends as graduate students at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and later they collaborated, with Ardath Burks, on a college textbook called "Far Eastern Politics and Governments."

Here's a little from the book:

"Paul and I used to have rag sessions after school in a coffee shop near the school, discussing many things in life...[He] was quick-witted and had such a sense of humor that he could laugh at his misfortune. After he obtained his degree, he and John Fairbank were employed by Harvard as two teaching interns. When the term of internship expired, Harvard dismissed Linebarger and retained Fairbank. When asked about the incident, Paul replied, 'I guess Harvard couldn't afford to employ two geniuses at once.'" [page 49]

I found some of the ideas in this commentary rather startling:

"Paul's versatility was at once his asset as well as his liability. He was one of the few pioneers of Chinese studies, a leading authority of psychological warfare and a recognized writer of science fiction.

"Had he concentrated on a single subject, his accomplishment would have been much greater...Science fiction, therefore, was a natural product of his mind. His mind shifted from one idea to another with the swiftness and ease of a computer. His lectures sounded like science fiction and there was more imagination than reasoning in his presentation. However, he did not take pride in being a successful author of science fiction. To him writing science fiction was only an escape, a way to keep his sanity and additional therapeutic treatment to his self-psychoanalysis." [page 50]

That caused me to think a bit. It's a measure of the friendship between the two men that Djang knew about the science fiction. I do remember that my father felt his political science and psywar colleagues might think less of him if they knew of his sci fi activities, so my guess is that he downplayed them with Djang.

In my memory, he was very proud of his science fiction stories. I remember him waving around copies of magazines that he was in, quite pleased. He liked whatever money he got, too. Letters he wrote to me when I was college would mention stories being published and how much money he was earning from them.

READERS WRITE:

Al Katerinksy wrote in the forum: "Growing up in the 70's I read every story by Cordwainer Smith that I could get my hands on. Early in my teen years I went through therapy in a drug program. The world was so fearsome a place for me I could not imagine anything beyond an impending nuclear Holocaust. Reading CS's works gave me the courage to face my fears and the world. Here was something that expanded the mind far beyond any drug had ever done for me. I was fascinated and filled with admiration that has only grown through the years, as I myself have begun to write. He is still my favorite writer in any genre.

"The beautiful, poetic, near hypnotic quality of CS's work has yet to be duplicated in any writing anywhere. After 30 years, I still cry when I read 'The Lady Who Sailed the Soul,' or 'Lost Ballad of C'Mell.'

"If you suffered with the birth pangs that accompanied the creation of such beauty, I'm sorry for your pain. Take heart, your agony was not in vain. My world would have been an infinitely poorer place without your father's creations. They are expressions of genius, and I hope you can see that they are worth the price of sleepless nights and frightened dreams.

"His work is so evocative, it could be used to teach any prospective aliens we meet what it is like to be human. My life would be less, and my capacity for love would be less without having read those words. I thank you for not letting his memory fade in a world that may need to learn how to become human again."

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Two alert readers sent me this on the same day:

Man-beast hybrid beyond talking stage
Human DNA in cow egg
By Scott Foster, The Edmonton Journal

Melding man and beast may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but it's not. Amid all the advances in genetic manipulation, the idea of combining the DNA of animals and humans has gone beyond the talking stage -- it's been attempted.

Indeed, many scientists and academics are wondering how far it might go and what the ethical implications would be. If a human were crossed with a chimpanzee, for example, would it still be human? And if not, then what would it be?

The first publicized case of animal-human hybrids took place in 1996 when Jose Cibelli, a scientist at the University of Massachusetts, took DNA from his white blood cells by swabbing the inside of his cheek. He then inserted the DNA sample into a hollowed-out cow egg. Cibelli's experiment came to an end after a week of growing the cell mass, he told scientists earlier this month at a panel meeting of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.

This raised the question of what might have emerged had the cell mass continued to develop. "As far as we know, it would still look like a human being, but some of the characteristics of individual cells might be slightly different," said James Cross, a molecular biologist at the University of Calgary who attended the meeting....

"This suggests that we can create new human-animal species," said Jeremy Rifkin, biotechnology critic and president of the Washington-based Foundation on Economic Trends. Rifkin called the experiment "the most extraordinary single development in the history of biotechnology."... "Chimpanzees share between 95% and 98% of our genes, so the prospect of creating a human-chimpanzee hybrid are highly probable," Rifkin said. "The question becomes: What percentage of human genes will it take before human rights kick in? Would a hybrid have to look and talk like a human before it can get human rights?"

#5, June-July 2001

ARTHUR BURNS WRITES ABOUT PAUL LINEBARGER

The last issue of the ezine included some comments about my father from his close friend, Australian Arthur Burns, in an interview with John Foyster. Here are some bits from an article Arthur wrote after my father died--they sure brought back memories for me, especially the physical description. Thanks to John Foyster for the right to use this material, which appeared initially in "Australian SF Review."

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"He was above medium height, terribly gaunt, bald, high-nosed, narrowing in the chin; he wore severe excellently-cut suits; his favourite hat was a soft black velour like an Italian film producer's. He was constantly ill, usually with digestive or metabolic troubles, and had to put up with repeated surgery, so that in middle age he always lived close to the vital margin. He took time off from a dinner party in Melbourne for a long drink of hydro-chloric acid, at which a guest, quite awed, remarked that Linebarger probably *was* a man from Mars...

"Some intelligent and sensitive people have found the cat stories, particularly 'The Game of Rat and Dragon,' quite creepy. They seem to me less creepy than uncanny. The Linebargers' house population of cats varied from seven to eleven, and they lived in all three and a half levels of it. Paul's communication with each of these cats, as individuals, suggested a distinct variety of ESP. It was as though one was watching a subtle and moody conversation amongst grandees who took care to respect each other's dignity.

"The house itself I cannot remember without a pang, for I mostly remember it with Paul tapping away upstairs at his typewriter, or as another feline presence in the bow-windowed living-room, flicking through some elegantly-bound work from the curve of the bookshelves.

"Beyond the living-room arch, an oblong dining-room displayed a New Year card, two or three feet by three or four feet, bearing in great Chinese characters greeting from Sun Yat Sen. In the basement were yards of bookshelves, some open and some encaged, and most devoted to science fiction. I have never seen so much of the latter in one place. This was also especially cattish country.

"In the attic were two collections of objects--the more predictable, firearms, notably pistols and revolvers including a lot of weapons dropped to World War II resistance movements; the less predictable, dozens of more or less antique typewriters...Paul's study upstairs was piled high with the manuscripts, first editions, and scoria of his numerous writings.

"We often conversed about science fiction--his own and others'. Characteristically, he admired the craftsmanship and consistence of Arthur C. Clarke's Defoe-like tales, while feeling that there were vast dimensions of human experience that Clarke never touches. Cordwainer Smith's stories were a kind of important 'playing' (Paul was greatly impressed by Huizinga's 'Homo Ludens'): through them are dotted irrelevant cryptograms, geographic allusions, and names transliterated from foreign languages."

FROM READERS:

Ralph Benko emailed me: "One of the greatest working SF writers, James Patrick Kelly, has the cover story of the June Asimov's. 'Undone' is prefaced by Kelly's comment, 'If you like 'Undone,' and I certainly hope that you do, let me commend your attention to the work of two giants on whose shoulders Mada and I stand -- Cordwainer Smith and Alfred Bester.

---

ALAN ELMS emailed me: "My most recent publication on CS has just come out. The citation is "Between Mottile and Ambiloxi: Cordwainer Smith as a Southern Writer," Extrapolation, Summer 2001, vol. 42, pp. 124-136. Extrapolation is a scholarly journal of science fiction research, published quarterly by the Kent State University Press. The paper deals with your father's early childhood in Mississippi and its influence on his later fiction, especially "The Game of Rat and Dragon" and "On the Storm Planet."

#4, April-May 2001

PAUL LINEBARGER: MEMORIES OF ARTHUR BURNS

Arthur Burns was an Australian friend of my father's. I remember him and his wife Netta, and their children, particularly from 1961, when I was a college student in France and I stayed with them in London around Christmas; they were living there for the year.

One evening as we discussed plans for the next morning, Arthur said to me with a twinkle in his eye, "Shall I knock you up around seven?" He knew perfectly well what the American meaning of that term was, and I still remember blushing while he and Netta grinned.

So here are some comments about my father from Arthur Burns. Thanks to John Foyster for the right to use quotes from a 1966 interview he did with Burns. This material appeared initially in Australian SF Review.
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Let me see if I can say some other things which would give you some sort of insight into his very strange kind of personality. Now before he wrote any SF he wrote a story called "Atomsk," which was the first sort of Russian nuclear spy story--and it got a very savage review, I remember, in a Russian journal...

The first impression people here had of him was that he was a real reactionary, a bit tough and a bit bloody minded and that kind of thing. He was here for the whole of 1957 and took on a lot of the academic left wing, and quite a lot of the non-academic left wing, and made lots of speeches about China, wrote a number of articles, and that kind of thing. But you had to get to know him to realize that a great deal of this was simply the uninhibited expressions of aggression that you get from people who've been analyzed. In fact, he was an extremely humane man. In his stories one sees this, incidentally, in the sort of allegories he was constantly writing...

He was an Anglo-Catholic, a very high one by American standards, and his religion in a strange way meant a great deal to him--in a funny way, one might even say loosely. Often he was unserious about it. Once when he was very ill in Mexico...he said he thought he was pretty bad and that the only thing to do was to invoke the Virgin Mary, because Mexico was her territory.

His liking for Australia comes out in the Old Norstrilia stories. Once again, it was characteristic of him--it was very much a part of his SF writing--that all of his stories, in some sense or another, were oblique commentaries on contemporary politics and society... He was never one to attempt to draw a terrific moral--I mean, any morals in his stories were all concealed. They were meant to amuse, to be fun; they were something he did because he liked it.

He called himself a Pre-Cervantean. By this he meant that if the European novel--a connected story dealing with a group of persons, having a beginning, a middle, an end, and that kind of thing--was started by Cervantes with "Don Quixote," then he was a Pre-Cervantean in the sense that his stories were more like medieval stories--more like parts of a legend or cycle, such as Malory collected in "The Death of Arthur."

[Foyster asks what the reason was for CS's increased output of stories in recent years.] Partly, being more and more sick. He was confined to bed a great deal and he'd often write these stories when he couldn't get up and lecture...He was a man who wrote naturally and very easily. He'd sit at his typewriter and just knock it out. I've never seen anyone compose so fast when he had it on him.

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READERS' CONTRIBUTIONS

David Doughan of London, England, sent another favourite quote: "News is the mother of opinion, opinion is the cause of mass delusion, delusion the source of war." (_Norstrilia, p. 124 of the Ballantine paperback).
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Bala Menon wrote: "I first encountered CS in the much-anthologized 'Game of Rat and Dragon', and promptly started hunting more of this. Which was kinda tough to do, because Science Fiction, as a whole, didn't get much distribution in India, at the time. When I finally did manage to locate Norstrilia and The Instrumentality of Mankind, they promptly went way up to the top of my list. C'Mell, Jestocost, D'Joan ... this was probably my favourite SF then. (Still is ... when asked the 'which books would you take to a desert island' question a few months back, I voted for CS's Instrumentality books)

"Imagine my surprise when I land up in the US, and find practically no one who knows my favourite author ...True, I did find a few bibliophiles who knew CS, but good grief, I expected torrents more! I used to buy extra copies of Norstrilia and The Best of CS and pass 'em around to rave reviews from the pals who got them."

------

You ask, did your father believe, 'as I have come to, that cats and other animals, here and now and in the flesh, can communicate via pictures and feelings with people? I don't think so.'

"Well, his former grad student and textbook collaborator Ardath Burks told me that at seminar meetings at the Linebarger DC home, Paul would often conduct long and 'very profound' conversations with his one-eyed cat Little Paul -- pausing occasionally to let Little Paul respond telepathically before Paul went ahead with his side of the conversation. Ardath said some students remained 'off balance all the time' in the seminars, and implied that Paul enjoyed keeping them that way through techniques like the cat conversations. So maybe your father didn't truly believe Little Paul was telepathic -- but I suspect he did." --Alan C. Elms

#3, February-March 2001

READERS' CONTRIBUTIONS

I just got this email from writer Neal Barrett, Jr.: "I was so pleased to discover your web site. I have been a writer since l960, and my work appeared, at least once (likely more than that) in the same issue where your father appeared (Galaxy, June, 1961- -"Mother Hitton's Little Kittons," is the one I recall.)

"Some 50 novels and several hundred stories later (and 41 years) I can honestly say there is no one in the field of science fiction---or out of it, for that matter---that I admire and respect more than Cordwainer Smith. I was in awe of his work then, and still am. He was a man way ahead of his time, and as far as I am concerned, he is still the master."

--

Alan Macdougall from New Zealand, writes "I grew up in a small country town of around 200 people. This was the late 70's. Every year the town would have a 'white elephant' fair as a fundraiser for the local community hall rebuilding project. "This particular year, as always, I had about $0.50 to spend, and after much poking about and thinking and agonising I came away with two books: 'The Martian Chronicles' by Ray Bradbury and the Sphere Books edition of 'The Planetbuyer.'

"The latter immediately struck a chord with me - although I had read lots of Sci-Fi by this time (I would have been about 10 or 11) this was the first with a recognisable character, someone who could be me, just an Antipodean farm boy... except 15 thousand years in the future after a nuclear war.(In those days I was very very worried about nuclear war and to think there might be an Australia somewhere 15 thousand years hence made me think there might be a New Zealand too.) Rod looks after sheep, has chores to do... much like me. He didn't always feel like he fitted in... much like me. And then the sheer depth of invention was amazing to me, and I longed to know more - all the whos and whats and whys... and what happened to Rod next.

"[Later]I found an original paperback of "Space Lords" with that wonderful dedication to his readers that your father wrote. I felt like he was speaking to me personally... from a distance of years, (written before I was born) it felt really special."

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After he emailed me, I looked up that dedication. Here is the heart of it:

"These stories are for us-- for me who wrote them, because I loved them; for you, who are looking at them...

"This is science fiction, yes. But it comes from your own time, from your own world, even from your own mind.

"All I can do is work the symbols.

"The magic and the beauty will come of our own past, your present, your hopes and your experience. This may look alien but it is really as close to you as your own fingers. Some people will like this very much. Many will not understand it, and push it aside. That is their loss, reader, not yours, not mine.

"We two, we have this story between us. "Read a bit and see how it goes.

"At this instant, you are yourself the prologue. All I have done is supply the makings."

CS scholar Alan Elms replied to a couple of queries... I think the questions are obvious from the answers: "Paul Linebarger wrote a book manuscript called 'Ethical Dianetics,' which was in part a response to Ron Hubbard's book 'Dianetics.'

The Linebarger book is mainly an argument for self- analysis or informal mutual analysis between spouses; it was intended to provide an alternative to the Hubbard model and other psychotherapeutic approaches, rather than being a further development of Hubbard's ideas.

Linebarger and Hubbard knew each other as college undergraduates, but as far as I've been able to determine, they didn't maintain their acquaintance later. The manuscript of 'Ethical Dianetics' (which was never published) is now in the Linebarger Papers at the Hoover Institution Archives; it is not available online."

"I can add to Rosana's reply to that question on the 'lost notebook': Nope, never found. I've gone through all the Cordwainer Smith papers at the U of Kansas and the Hoover Institution several times, and though there are other notebooks there, the notebook detailing the early development of the Instrumentality etc is missing. Paul Linebarger apparently told different versions of how and where it was lost to Genevieve (who told her version to J. J. Pierce and to me) and to Fred Pohl--or maybe they just remembered differently what he told them. But whatever story he told about the notebook's loss, he never found it again.

I've had the fantasy that it's somewhere out there in a Chinese bazaar or an Egyptian cave, and someday maybe someone will come up with it yet. If so, please let me know--right away!"

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David Doughan of London, England, comments, "It's interesting to contrast PMAL's attitude to psychological warfare (anything to save human life) with that of his older contemporary, the non- Communist leftist George Orwell, who believed that it was worse to manipulate people than to kill them. He cites [_Tribune_, 4 August 1944] German action just before Caporetto, when they issued leaflets stating that German soldiers were about to shoot their officers and fraternise with Italian comrades, and urging them to come over and join them. Those who believed this and came over were simply imprisoned and mocked for their naivete. To quote Orwell: "I have heard this defended as a highly intelligent and humane way of making war - which it is, if your sole aim is to save as many skins as possible. And yet a trick like that damages the very roots of human solidarity in a way that no mere act of violence could do."

#2, Dec 2000/Jan 2001

READERS' CONTRIBUTIONS

From an email from Alan Elms, a scholar who is writing a biography of CS: "You mention two or three times that the 'Best of Cordwainer Smith' volume is out of print. Technically it is, but the recent British paperback reprint titled 'The Rediscovery of Man' (done under the Millennium imprint of Orion Books) is exactly the same book, printed from the same plates as the original Ballantine paperback or scanned from a copy of the Ballantine version. So it has the same Timeline and the same biographical introduction by J. J. Pierce. As you note elsewhere in the e-magazine, this British reprint called 'The Rediscovery of Man' (originally published in hardcover under that title a number of years ago) is considerably shorter than the NESFA volume also titled 'The Rediscovery of Man.' Furthermore, at $16.95 US (if people can find it in American bookstores, where it's pretty scarce), the British reprint costs nearly as much as the far more complete NESFA volume per your three-copy deal--and the NESFA volume is a well-bound hardcover edition with acid-free paper. (The British edition does have a striking cover, showing Alpha Ralpha Boulevard in the background and a rather strange-looking C'mell in the foreground, but I don't think the cover is worth $16.95)."

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I turn to Alan with archival questions. Here's his answer to one: "Rosana passed on to me your inquiry about the stories listed in Box 30, Folder 14 of the Hoover Institution's Linebarger Archives--"The Vanguard of Venus," "The Girl from Mars," and so forth.

"Alas, those are not unpublished Cordwainer Smith stories, nor even Paul Linebarger juvenilia. Rather, they are stories by various early SF writers, published by Hugo Gernsback in the late 1920s in the form of pamphlets (as in Box 30) as well as in his magazines. They were early entries in Paul's science fiction collection; they wound up in the Hoover Archives (which focus on his academic and political roles) more or less by mistake. If you're really interested in tracking any of them down elsewhere, try one of the SF bibliographic databases on the Web--but be warned that none of the stories (as I recall from skimming through them at the Hoover) is any sort of SF classic. Paul was an omnivorous reader, and he seems to have grabbed hold of any scrap of science fiction he could find."

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"One of the things that I found funny about your dad's work was that when I first read it I thought he had just the most extravagant imagination, and then as word of some of the intelligence agency projects began to leak out in the 70s it turned out that some of his oddest ideas were thinly veiled transcriptions of intelligence projects: remote viewing (rogov), electronic voice phenomenon (angerhelm), LSD (drunkboat).... so now I kind of wonder what other things I thought were a product of his vivid imagination he was just...reporting." -- a reader

I was in third grade when my father was in Korea. He was always very diligent about sending postcards to my sister and me, and I can still remember my indignation when I received one asking, "How is my big second grader?"

Thinking of him in Asia reminded me of a couple of stories he used to tell about himself in Hong Kong. He spent a lot of time there, and had most of his suits, shirts, and ties custom-made by the same tailor. Once, at a fitting, the tailor said, "Dr. Linebarger, I have not seen you for some time. Have you been out of town?"

I was only in Hong Kong once, in 1961, when I was coming back from a year at the Stanford campus in France. My father arranged for me to meet him, my stepmother Genevieve, and my younger sister Marcia, in Hong Kong. I had to go to the dentist but we will mercifully skip over that memory.

I did get a chance to do something I had long wanted to: we had lunch one day at his favorite restaurant. It had booths, with tall wooden dividers between them. I had heard this story numerous times:

Once he and Genevieve were having lunch in this restaurant, when from the other side of the divider behind him came the sounds of someone imitating him. He recognized the voice of one the graduate students who had studied under him at the School of Advanced International Studies, back home in Washington, D.C. Quietly he turned around and gradually raised himself up until his head was sticking above the partition. The fellow imitating him had his back to my father and carried on, having no idea why his friends suddenly became red in the face and very quiet. Finally, the fellow followed his friends' eyes upward, and was aghast at what he saw. My father would always laugh heartily at this point.

#1, Oct/Nov 2000

PAUL LINEBARGER: ROSANA'S MEMORIES

During the Cuban missile crisis, I was a junior at Stanford. The girl across the hall from my dorm room was convinced that nuclear war was coming. I phoned my father--which was something of a big deal in those days--and he started out by reassuring me that he thought the crisis would be resolved.

But then he added the disquieting advice that if anything did happen around Washington, D.C.(where he lived), I should make my way to Mexico with the American Express card he had supplied me with. From there, he added, I would be in a better position to help him and the rest of the family. He had already told me from time to time that being his daughter meant that I was at some risk from the KGB, and I think that was part of why he suggested Mexico. (Probably also because San Francisco could have been the target of a nuclear bomb.)

READERS' QUOTES

"It was heartwarming for me to find that there are other folks out there who love Smith's works as much as I do. Thank you Rosana for building this website." This comment from Ric Berquist on the CS guestbook was a great way to start my workday. (Thanks again, Ric, for supplying the Chinese translation for my grandfather's postcard in the photogallery.)
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"Cordwainer Smith (along with Philip K. Dick) kept me from becoming a clerk in some dumb office! What a superb writer he was." --Richard Fenno

Now that's what I'd call having an effect!
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Here's one that surprised me: This email came as a response to a routine tech support question I sent to FirstPlace Software, the makers of WebPosition Gold:

"Wow, 'When The People Fell' is a short story of your Dad's that I remember from a sci-fi anthology that I read at least 15 years ago! As soon as I read that part of your mail, I buzzed over to your site for a closer look and also told some of my fellow sci- fi fans here at work about your site.

"Your Dad was a good writer with a quirky sense of humor. I don't have a copy of 'When The People Fell' anymore, but I'm pretty sure it was about a Chinese invasion of Venus, right? The part about the Chinese wanting to build a casino right after they invade made me laugh right out loud."
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"When I was rather young (maybe 9 or 10?) I distinctly recall making a sort of playacting game for my younger sister inspired by "The Game of Rat and Dragon," using a discarded television that would still light up, a old motorcycle helmet, a generic "space music" album, and a somewhat reluctant cat." -- Iain Edgewater
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"The huge imaginative leaps are what I like best about the Cordwainer Smith stories, and the realistic feel for distant history, and how diffused and mysterious it can be - I'd never read anything that took place THAT far into the future. I love the great words, and the unexpected characters with their complicated back stories." -- Burk Sauls.