February 2005

--e*I*18- (Vol. 4 No. 1) February 2005, is published and © 2005 by Earl Kemp. All rights reserved.
It is produced and distributed bi-monthly through http://efanzines.com by Bill Burns in an e-edition only.

Contents -- eI18 -- February 2005

…Return to sender, address unknown….10 [eI letter column], by Earl Kemp

We Are Four, by Earl Kemp

Bad Timing, by Earl Kemp

Cordwainer Smith: Five Introductions, by Bruce R. Gillespie

My Walk to Work, by Richard Coad

Using Google As An Oracle, by Alexei Panshin

Beating the Burro, by Earl Kemp

Roastin’ Tunes, by Joshua Wachtel

Earl’s Birthday Roast, by Gary Sohler

Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain, by rich brown (Dr. Gafia)

Shelby Vick, by rich brown (Dr. Gafia)

Me & My Paltry, Pilfering Porn, by Shelby Vick

Finding Chet Collom, by Brittany A. Daley

Finding Bill Edwards, by L. Truman Douglas

the lost portfolio (cover) William Rotsler

The Masque of The Tattooed Dragon, by Earl Kemp

A Life Synopsis, by William Rotsler

“I Am, I Said….,” by William Rotsler

The Art of William Rotsler, by Robert Bloch

the lost portfolio, William Rotsler

There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination.
               --Ralph Waldo Emerson

THIS ISSUE OF eI is for Bruce Gillespie, the Melbourne Science Fiction Group, and all the people who ran the Bring Bruce Bayside fundraising program. It was a great effort on the part of many to bring a popular Australian fan to two science fiction conventions in San Francisco on two consecutive weekends.

In the world of science fiction, it is also in memory of my old friend from the 1950s, Frank Kelly Freas. When I produced Who Killed Science Fiction? in 1960, Kelly drew two pieces of original artwork for the project. One of those featured a group of Freas aliens mourning the death of science fiction. It is only fitting that they return now to mourn Kelly instead. A great man, a great science fiction fan, and one hell of an artist.

It is also in memory of Will Eisner, Stieg Larsson, Sven Christer Swahn, and Anna Vargo.

#

As always, everything in this issue of eI beneath my byline is part of my in-progress rough-draft memoirs. As such, I would appreciate any corrections, revisions, extensions, anecdotes, photographs, jpegs, or what have you sent to me at earlkemp@citlink.net and thank you in advance for all your help.

Bill Burns is jefe around here. If it wasn’t for him, nothing would get done. He inspires activity. He deserves some really great rewards. It is a privilege and a pleasure to have him working with me to make eI whatever it is.

Dave Locke gave all of us quite a scare for Christmas in the form of a heart attack. We are delighted to report that Dave, being a bit obstinate, is recovering at home and continues as eI Grand Quote Master. You will find his assembled words of wisdom separating the articles throughout this issue of eI.

Other than Bill Burns and Dave Locke, these are the people who made this issue of eI possible: Robert Bloch, Ron Blum, Robert Bonfils, Bruce Brenner, Tom Brinkman, rich brown (Dr. Gafia), Richard Coad, Brittany A. Daley, L. Truman Douglas, Bruce Gillespie, Steve Harris, Elaine Kemp Harris, Tony Jacobs, Robert Lichtman, Lynn Munroe, Alexei Panshin, Doug Pinney, Edith Kemp Pinney, William Rotsler, Gary Sohler, Robert Speray, Shelby Vick, and Joshua Wachtel.

ARTWORK: This issue of eI features original and recycled artwork by William Rotsler and recycled artwork by Frank Kelly Freas and Shelby Vick.

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
               --Tom Stoppard

…Return to sender, address unknown…. 10
The Official eI Letters to the Editor Column
Artwork recycled William Rotsler

By Earl Kemp

We get letters. Some parts of some of them are printable. Your letter of comment is most wanted via email to earlkemp@citlink.net or by snail mail to P.O. Box 6642, Kingman, AZ 86402-6642 and thank you.

Also, please note, I observe DNQs and make arbitrary and capricious deletions from these letters in order to remain on topic.

This is the official Letter Column of eI, and following are a few quotes from a few of those letters concerning the last issue of eI. All this in an effort to get you to write letters of comment to eI so you can look for them when they appear here.

Thursday December 9 2004 Launch Day
Correction to eI17

Never met Milton Luros, never dealt with him, was never published by Brandon House. Olympia Press you bet, Midwood Books, absolutely. But no Essex or Brandon House.
              --Barry N. Malzberg

Barry, thanks for making this correction. –Earl Kemp

Friday December 10 2004

New issue of your eI is full of wonders, and I do hope that you will eventually compile your memoirs &c. and publish them as a "real book." By which I mean, ink on paper widda cuvva anna spyne. I know, I know, e-publishing is just as "real" in its own way as paper publishing is in its. But I'm afraid I'm just a hopeless paper junkie, and to me electronic publication just isn't quite real. Not in the same sense that a book or magazine is, that you can pick up in your hand, carry around with you, shelve, take back down, sit with in bed, etc.

Of course you can sit in bed with an e-book or a laptop, so even that line is getting blurred. But if my attachment to paper brands me as some kind of luddite I'll just have to live with that.

Great to see Agberg in the lettercol of a fmz again. Hey, Bobbie, I still have my Gestetner in the basement. Any time you want to drop by and pub an ish. . . .

But I must say that it was the Luros covers that got me choked up. Look at the names that we took for granted when they're listed as "in this issue." And Luros was working for the bottom-feeder pulps, at that! Those images (and the type too!) were most evocative. I wonder what was so special about those magazines and that era.

Sometimes I think it was that we believed in science fiction as some kind of societal movement or maybe even a religion. The wonders of technology were going to lead humankind into a brave new world. We fans were the saved and the vanguard of the glorious future, and the magazines were our ongoing scripture.

Other times I think we were just a bunch of goofy kids lacking in interpersonal skills and living in a shared dream dimension of distant planets, spacefleets, alien creatures, and of course gorgeous women.

Whatever it was, it was wonderful.

Do youngsters today have any equivalent? Maybe it's their own dream dimension, which they reach via their PlayStations and X-Boxes instead of by way of Thrilling Wonder Stories and Weird Tales.

But then, I've already said that I'm a hopeless paper junkie, haven't I?
                -- Dick Lupoff

#

What a blockbuster!  Wow, and your tribute to Milt was a stunner.  I had no idea that you knew him that well.

This one is terrific.  Thanks, and I'm proud to be included.
               --Gary Sohler

#

I've just looked at eI17 and I am totally blown away. It's one of the greatest compliments I've had, partly for being so generously treated as regards my efforts at creating graphics, but mainly for showing those images off so well. I suspect that if I was as enthusiastic in this email as I feel, right now, it'd sound more than maudlin because I doubt if I could find the proper words. So - maybe just a simple Thank You is what I should be saying right now...

As before, there is SO much in eI17 to read that it will take me a few days to absorb. I will, I hope, have comments to make, even if they are mainly words of jealousy at the plethora of socially-unredeeming literature discussed in the 'zine - works which we, in the then-tyrannical Land of Aus were prohibited from reading.

But - once again - Thank You !
               --Dick Jenssen (aka Martin, Ditmar)

#

Earl, el17 was more than just slightly the good side of spectacular, it was fabulous, and reading all that good stuff about Milt (and thank you for putting in a kind word for Bea, too, she was a mess but I liked her) made me Wax Nostalgic; and, frankly, Nostalgic just hates to be waxed. In the interest of historical accuracy, however, since el seems to have become THE historical archive for matters pulp-y, let me add one little correction. The first count of the indictment that led to Suck City was a conspiracy count naming all the defendants. Subsequent counts charged the others with various crimes against nature, but I was only named in the first (conspiracy) count. Our first morning back in court after the Christmas break, the judge (whom Sam called Judge Please Rise) dismissed the conspiracy count as unproven, thus in effect dismissing me as well, and I was gone in a trice. The other charges and the fates of the other defendants then went to the jury for deliberation; my point being, the jury did not in fact vote guilty on all the charges and all the defendants, since they never got to consider the first count. Minor point, but worth clearing up, I think. However, let me add, that my memory never was as good as it used to be, so if one of the other happy participants (Dick Geis?) remembers otherwise, I will be glad to eat my words. Considering some of the other stuff I've had to swallow over the last 60 years...well, never mind, that's another story.

I tell you, by the way, that all Stanley Fleishman's papers are at UCLA; they can be researched by a qualified researcher, but there's rather a lot of it, so it would not be worthwhile without specific information and dates in mind, and even then I think it's a task; when last I checked, it was all just in boxes without a sort of table of contents for each box.
                --Victor Banis

#

You're to blame, you know, for my going to bed late and actually missing a meeting of Ted White's "Second Friday's" -- I was too involved plowing through ei17 to notice the passage of time so that I had to do the former rather than the latter. Not *quite * enough to indict you as part of the on-going and long-standing Conspiracy Against **Me**, but I want you to know I'll be keeping an eye on you.

The several personal essays at the beginning revolving around memories of Milton and Bea Luros were fascinating, if a bit repetitious; I hasten to add that I'm not sure how you could cure that, or even that you should, given that it's perfectly natural that it would be, since it's about the same people in the same time frame. On balance, I find I actually like the fact that it has all been presented together. I'm afraid, though, that the only comment it sparks in me is a tilt, if not rather far off, topic. It was the mention of a WWII Fokker airplane as a prop in one of the shoots that prompted me to point out that the Fokker was a WWI aircraft. But I've had enough experience in putting my foot in my mouth not to do so without first checking it out, and of course it turns out Fokker made aircraft, albeit of course different aircraft, for both world wars. A pity, in a way, because it raises suspicions that something I heard sometime ago might be just an urban legend. It was an amusing enough story that it stuck in my mind. A WWII fighter Ace was the subject of the television program This Is Your Life, which in those days was broadcast live, and at host Ralph Edwards' instigation he was regaling the audience, in his broad Swedish accent, about one of his exploits: "…jah, and den I look op, and suddenly der vas *three * of these Fokkers coming at me--" Edwards interrupted to say, "Ah, excuse me, Sven, but I always thought Fokkers were World War I aircraft?" The WWII Ace smiled and nodded, "Jah, dey vas. But *dese * Fokkers vas Messerschmitts!"

I'm more personally involved in the history of sf fandom, as I'm sure you know, so I was even more fascinated once the focus changed in that direction. I do have to quibble with Race Mathews' otherwise excellent essay; he mentions various chapters of the Science Fiction League that Fred Pohl belonged to in the US, but posits that, had Kingsley Amis wanted to join a pre-WWII sf club in the UK, one of his choices might have been among "various chapters of Hugo Gernsback's Science Fiction Association." Nope, it was chapters of the SF *League * (being chartered by Gernsback's Wonder Stories) in the UK as well as the US, not "Association."

The early SFL chapters available to Amis could have been in Leeds (Chapter 17), Belfast, North Ireland (Chapter 20), Nuneaton/Leicasterchire (Chapter 22) or Glasgow, Scotland (Chapter 34). Many chapters continued meeting and substituted "Association" and/or "Society" for "League" in their names after Gernsback stopped chartering them, of course, but by then they could no longer be called Gernsback's. Picky, picky, picky, that's me. The first *real * sf convention was sponsored by the Leeds chapter, so Amis might have even toddled into that. (One commonly credited as the first convention was actually just an outing involving members of the New York and Pittsburgh SFLs that, having heard the announcement of the Leeds chapter's intentions to hold a convention, declared themselves to be one. It's since been pointed out that they could have declared themselves to be a cheese sandwich, but the declaration wouldn't make people believe they actually were one.) But then, too, Race appears to be saying that this sort of thing was not available in Australia in the '40s and '50s; I have to suppose, then, that Chapter 27 of the SFL, formed in Sydney in 1935, was no longer around by that time.

I do want to say, though, that I semi-share an experience with Race -- I must've read The Lord of the Rings just a bit behind him, because I only had to cool my heels and wait a couple of months for the final volume, The Return of the King, to be published and reach my local public library. My friend Paul Stanbery was third on the list to get it and we cheated because after he checked it out and read it, he let me borrow and breeze through it before returning it; we then promptly shelved our plans to make various sf novels into movies and started on plans to make LotR a nine-hour epic; in our pipe dreams, we assumed we would show them in special dinner theaters, with a break at the 4½ hour mark for a meal. People laughed at us, of course, pointing out (among other things) that it was foolish to believe that we might get an actor of Alec Guinness' stature to "demean" himself by taking on the role of Gandalf. That's been a source of great amusement to me in the years since; not only is Sir Ian McKellan of equal stature, Guinness actually played Gandalf's archetypical stfnal equivalent, Obi-Wan Kenobi. (We were also laughed at, of course, because no one would commit the $50 million we thought it would take to make the movie, but Paul's brother Jim was drawing up plans for us to rob the First National Bank of Bolivia. Or maybe El Salvador. Or maybe both.)

There are numerous lines of convergence (as Alexei Panshin once called them) in the rest of the piece, other semi-shared experiences (e.g., discovering a significant volume of old sf magazines in a shed, in Race's case a relative's, in mine a friend's [who didn't want them and let me take them home in stacks as high as I could carry for several weeks]), but nothing much I might remark upon at any length until he mentions one of the Australian fanzines, Etherline.

I had been aware for a number of years that there were amateur magazines called fanzines being published, having stumbled across reviews of them in the old sf pulps I was buying second hand at five cents apiece around the time I first read LotR. A part of me wanted to send off for them, but a couple of factors stayed my hand. I mean, for one, since most of those pulps were no longer being published, it seemed probable that the amateur magazines described therein may have suffered a similar fate. And, for two, even at subscription prices as low was 12/50-cents, they were *almost * as expensive as my second-hand pulps. But then I sent off my name for listing in a new feature in the then-current Amazing Stories, "The Space Club," for people seeking sf pen pals. When I bought the issue off the stands, I noticed it had a fanzine review column, in which three fanzines were reviewed – Yandro, Cry of the Nameless, and Etherline. I was a bit plush in the pocket, having just finished collecting on my paper route, so I sent off $1 for all three.

My parents thought it was a scam, but with admonitions advising that "a fool and his money are soon parted," they let me do so (I suppose thinking that, having given me proper warning, it was best to let me Learn A Lesson). But both Cry and Yandro showed up, and the rest (as they say) is history; Etherline was the only one I never received.

Now, before anyone thinks I'm accusing Oz fans of scamming me, let me add that I've long since figured out that any fault must have surely been mine. The first factor among those leading to that conclusion being that what I popped into that envelope was a U.S. $1 bill; among the probably quite profuse number of gaps in my teenaged education at that point was the fact that people in different countries used different currencies. Well, no, I guess it really wasn't quite that bad, because I "got" the joke when people said, "The price of rice in China depends upon the value of the yen," but it was just so "obvious" to me that everyone in an English-speaking country (Australia, the U.S., Canada and the U.K.) would use the same currency that it didn't even occur to me to check my basic premises. On top of this, while I'd enclosed a typed note with that $1, asking for a subscription to Etherline and listing my address, I had such an unshakeable belief in the U.S. Post Office -- they'd battle rain, snow, sleet, meteor shower and attacks by wild wolverine to Get My Letter Through, don'tcha know -- that I didn't put a return address on the envelope. Compounding this error, since I'd never written to anyone outside the continental U.S., I didn't realize that it cost more to mail a missive to Australia than it did to send a letter of comment to a U.S. prozine. So in all likelihood it never arrived, and if it did it was with "funny money" they couldn't use without going to a bit of trouble to have exchanged. Besides, over the intervening years John Bangsund and Bruce Gillespie, individually or alone, sent me such a large number of fanzines at a postage cost of $1 or more each, with so little in return, that I've long since been more than repaid for my loss, and indeed am beginning to amble along under the weight of the shame of my own shortcomings in responding to them.
                --rich brown (DrGafia)

I've just spent a pleasant two hours or so reading through eI17.  Excellent issue. Wonderful stuff.  Congratulations to you both.
                --Pat Kearney

Pat: Glad you liked it! It's a lot of work on my part (and I can't even imagine how much more for Earl), but it's worth it to preserve this great historical material.  And it's fun!

Who would have thought, all those years ago when I used to stay in your spare room/erotica library, that it would one day come full circle to this?
                --Bill Burns

I just took a quick glance at eI17 and saw Stephen Gertz's article "Everybody Loves Milton." I was drawn immediately to it (for some strange reason, eh?) and scanned it, and found some of my old quotes there. I guess he ended up using some of my recollections after all.

I have to go back and read more (and more comprehensively), but it was interesting to finally see some of the history of the Luros enterprise before I went to work there. I really identified with the early-on comment about the rivalry between the Luros and Hamling organizations. If you remember, I once told you that Jack Abey was furious with me, and ostracized me in my final days at Greenleaf, when he learned that I was leaving to go to work for American Art Enterprises (never talk to co-workers!). Doug Saito hated me for that one too and never talked to me again, as he had such high hopes for me at Greenleaf. Rivalry indeed! I didn't think I merited that strong of a response, being a mere peon staffer that I felt I was (or at least paid like one).

By the way, I never felt "dirty" and ashamed of my work while at Greenleaf; I only felt that way at American Art. There was a totally different atmosphere and feeling there.
                --Dave Gardner

Sunday December 12, 2004

I am telling as many people as I can think of to check out eI17 - not for my stuff (of course not !!!) but for Race's and Bruce's.

Also - though I won't admit to this to many of my acquaintances - for the articles and reminiscences regarding socially-unredeeming literature. Which I have appreciated (articles and literature) in my time.

Thirty years ago, at the time when almost every film was cut, and many were banned, Race Mathews was a politician and secretary to a future Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam. Race and Gough belonged to the Labour Party, then out of power, while the censorship was due to the ruling Liberal Party. (A misnomer if ever there was one !). Race informed me that in the Parliamentary Library in Canberra the books which were banned were freely available for the pollies to read. Since the Liberal attitude was that these books would corrupt any who read them, it follows that either (a) politicians were corrupt, or (b) the Liberals lied, or (c) both.

Things are slightly better nowadays, but with the Liberals back in government - and with control of BOTH houses of parliament, and with Prime Minister Howard's mouth firmly glued to Bush's fundamental orifice, enjoying every dropped morsel - I have fears that censorship will become more restrictive again.(And forgive me if I have transgressed with that minor tirade...).

I 'phoned Race yesterday to persuade him to read your latest, but found he had already done so. He seemed very pleased with it - especially his article ! So even politicians can cope with reading a computer screen. But that may be because he has a MacIntosh...
                --Dick Jenssen (aka Martin, Ditmar)

#

I told you that I let friends know of eI17 - and just after my last email to you, I received one from Bill Wright (on whose Anzapa 'zine, Interstellar Ramjet Scoop my covers have been appearing, with only one break, for the past 8 years).

He said, in part: "Thanks for your email covering the interesting link to Earl Kemp's website. It was gracious of Lord Kemp to open his cyber-castle to the likes of you and Bruce, not to mention Race. I have spent the last two and a half hours reading material from the three of you in el17. It is nice to have other peoples' perspective on my involvement in things, as well as details of how the social frameworks that supported my youth came into being."
                --Dick Jenssen (aka Martin, Ditmar)

Tuesday December 14, 2004

I must say you have done a tremendous job of writing and editing.  I am so happy to have been able to contribute. This issue (as is the case with the others I have read) is a fascinating and critically important document on an important part of the 20th century's popular culture landscape -- but as enormous as it was, it is yet unspoken of -- much like the joke about the elephant in the living room.
                --Tony Jacobs

Face it.  If the pols want a war, they're gonna start a war ... and if the pols decide to start a war, the whores in the media are gonna spread their buttcheeks for ratings and grease up their brownies.
               --Al Curry, 3/26/03

EDITORIAL:

We Are Four
Artwork recycled William Rotsler

By Earl Kemp

Here we are again, Bill Burns and me. Would you believe we’re into our Fourth Incredible Year of publishing eI? Say it isn’t so….

This is our Fourth Anniversary Issue and we’re rolling right along at a nice pace, gathering visitors and contributors wherever they fall. Trying our very best to assemble some really exciting and informative visuals to torment your imaginations with for every issue.

Something else four related makes this issue of eI special…the drafting of Robert Lichtman as our fourth slave estaffer.

We are four, us eIers:

Publisher/Editor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Earl Kemp

Producer/Distributor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bill Burns

Grand Quote Master . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dave Locke

Chief Executive eGraphics Consultant. . . Robert Lichtman

Hear us roar…!

Jolson sings…! Garbo speaks…!

It is all true, all those rumors you’ve heard, about us trying to break new ground in ezine publishing. We’re laying some preliminary attempts on you with this issue of eI, by incorporating linked sound and live-action digital video. As far as we know, neither has yet been tried in fanzines. I can hardly wait to see what Robert Lichtman’s printout looks like.

Those links all concern my 75th birthday party and are found inside “Roastin’ Tunes” and “Beating the Burro.” They are both located elsewhere in this issue of eI.

Please LoC earlkemp@citlink.net with your reactions to these efforts to move further into cyberspace, and your suggestions as to what you would like to see done in this direction.

Resleazed

I would be really negligent in my duties [to say nothing about missing an opportunity to give my tiny ego a stroke or two] was I not to say some nice things about Sin-A-Rama.

Coming from Feral House, Sin-A-Rama, sporting a fantastic Robert Bonfils cover, has just been released on a ravenously hungry market, the sleazemongers of the world. It is a big, heavy book and it lists at $24.95, so try the usual discount booksellers first.

I am in Sin-A-Rama. I am in it a lot. I am in it a really, really lot. And when I am not in it, things of me are. Anyone familiar with eI and the ongoing Perils of Pauline I’m tiptoeing through will see eI all throughout the whole book. There are nine bylined pieces of mine, one article that is an interview with me, and numerous mentions in the rest of the book.

Just bragging, just making sure everyone knows where it comes from…the good stuff.

Adam Parfrey, proprietor of Feral House and rabblerouser, asked me to both participate in the book and to be interviewed for it.

I served as one of the editors of the book, along with Brittany A. Daley, Hedi El Kholti [who was responsible for the book’s kick-ass design], Miriam Linna, and Adam Parfrey. We were in constant contact the last few weeks of production on the book, rapid-firing emails back and forth, trying to verify last-minute details and remove glitches. Makes for comradeship, sharing sleaze with colleagues. There should be a lot more to come.

In fact, two pieces that are direct results of our work on Sin-A-Rama can be found elsewhere in this issue of eI. They are Brittany A. Dailey’s “Finding Chet Collom,” and L. Truman Douglas’ “Finding Bill Edwards.”

Sin-A-Rama is filled with hundreds of thought-tweaking sleazy illustrations in glorious color that span the entire sleazebook era. Cover scan after cover scan. Fact after fact. Little known or totally unknown details about stars and writers and personalities and world-class icons.

I enjoyed the book very much. I do each time I pick it up again. I hope I continue to do so for a long time to come.

Go ahead, try it. You might like it….

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.
               --Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

Bad Timing 2

By Earl Kemp

A few things have surfaced a bit late that should have been included in material already covered in eI. Because these are so significant, I am including them here and now with reference to where they should have appeared but didn't.

Clear? Not by me.

The first one of these inserts should appear as a sidebar inside "The King of Somewhere Hot” that appeared in eI2. It follows the paragraph ending “because of Don’s connections.” and is inserted before the paragraph beginning “The Gilmores lived in….”

Note also that this sidebar (below) should also appear in this issue of eI inside “Beating the Burro.”:

Even the CIA couldn’t pull off a stunt like that. I tried my best to find out why and how it had happened, but Don wouldn’t tell me. Instead, he said, “I had to return to San Diego so I could give you the biggest damned going-to-prison party there ever was. I mean it literally; invite everyone you know.”

And he did, and I did. For the first time ever, I crossed all lines with all of my friends and gathered them up together into the Gilmore’s impressive mansion near downtown San Diego. There were writers, editors, artists, photographers, and models. There were auto mechanics and delivery persons and professors and most of the office staff and their partners and lovers. There were lawyers and hookers and—surely not?—an undercover cop or two.

I wish that someone had filmed that party, the drunks all over the place, the house filled with well wishers and some of that gorgeous Mexican furniture that got trashed along the way.

And then Time Out, Lock Up, and Mind Fade Away.

               --Earl Kemp, “Donald A. Gilmore,” Sin-A-Rama

#

The second of these inserts should appear as a sidebar inside “A Stranger, and Afraid….” that appeared in eI9. It follows the paragraph ending “a brochure advertising Illustrated.” and the time break #. It is inserted before the paragraph beginning “In February 1972….’

This is that sidebar:

If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other.
               --Carl Schurz (1829 - 1906)

[The following article was written in Australian (mostly British) English. Every effort has been made to retain this language intact and to not translate it into US English.     --Earl Kemp]

Cordwainer Smith: Five Introductions*
By Bruce R. Gillespie

Last weekend I realized I had so much to say about Cordwainer Smith and his work that I couldn't’t say a thing. Other people have said it better. Besides, I would prefer to do almost anything rather than give a talk such as this.

Part of the trouble is that I have at least five different talks I could give about Cordwainer Smith. If I were a clever chap, I could tie all five into one talk. Not being clever, I offer five talks, each with its own introduction.

Introduction I

It was a quiet week in Lake Wobegon.

No?--I’ll save that for a future Nova Mob talk.

Try this. It was a quiet year in science fiction when Victor Gollancz Ltd of Britain, in the person of Malcolm Edwards, decided to re-release all of Cordwainer Smith’s published work in four volumes. Those volumes, appearing during 1987 and 1988, are Norstrilia, a novel, The Instrumentality of Mankind and The Rediscovery of Man, which are collections of short stories, and Quest of the Three Worlds, which is a collection of four linked novellas. Each has appeared in both hardback and paperback editions, except Quest of the Three Worlds, which so far has been published in a paperback edition. Since this is probably the first time all of Smith’s work has been available at the one time, do yourself a favour and buy these books.

Introduction II

Once upon a time I was a smaller chap, aged fourteen, living in the Melbourne suburb of Syndal, when I decided to buy my first copy of Galaxy magazine. A whole 5 shillings, out of a weekly allowance of 11 shillings! This magazine had better be good.

In that magazine was a story that convinced me, if I still needed convincing, that science fiction was unique, wonderful--my greatest discovery since reading itself. I had read nothing like this story before. Until I read it again a week ago, I had read nothing like it since. It was ‘A Planet Named Shayol’ by Cordwainer Smith.

Two images remain from my original reading of that story. One was my impression that Mercer, the prisoner, was unable to remember his crime, although he was about to be punished in some indescribable way. Elaine tells me that his crime is mentioned in the story, but it’s the impressions you remember from a story that change your life, not the things that are actually there. When I was fourteen, the idea of being punished for a terrible unspecified crime seemed original to me. In those days I hadn’t read Kafka’s The Trial.

My other image was of the fate that met Mercer. He was condemned to sit on a sullen plain, as extra limbs and organs grew from him and all the other prisoners. From time to time the limbs and organs were clipped, and sent off-planet for medical purposes. To obliterate the pain, and to extend the prisoners’ lives endlessly, they were given condamine, a drug that offered them endless pleasure in the midst of endless horror.

This image was reinforced by the Virgil Finlay illustrations, which I remember as his greatest work of magazine illustration. This was powerful stuff for a fourteen-year-old: the extremes of pleasure and pain contrasted yet attuned; hopelessly condemned prisoners offering hope to people who needed parts of their bodies.

In 1961 I was already struck by another aspect of Smith’s originality: that he assumed you already lived in his universe. There was little background as such: only the bits of the story needed for the moment.

The next Cordwainer Smith story I read in Galaxy [October 1962] magazine was ‘The Ballad of Lost C’Mell’. In the new Gollancz edition, it appears in The Rediscovery of Man. This was the strangest story I had read. It left out the middle of the story. You meet Lord Jestecost--and those marvellously euphonious characters’ names were as irresistible as the stories themselves--and the cat girl C’Mell--not actually a cat, but an underperson, appearing human but constructed from cat genes. You are introduced to Earthport, the twenty-mile-high city and spaceport that is the headquarters of the Lords of the Instrumentality. Smith tells you that C’Mell and Jestecost met, that they fell in love, and that C’Mell eventually died without telling Jestecost of her love. They plan the revolution of the underpeople, who throughout history had never been more than tools of the humans. Somewhere in the gap between two parts of the story, the revolution happens. All that remains of their romance in this far-future society is ‘The Ballad of Lost C’Mell’, which people and underpeople still sing. Jestecost himself, alive long after C’Mell’s death, only realizes that she loved him when he is told the meaning of the rhyme.

As Smith’s stories appeared in Galaxy and Amazing during the 1960s, I found it hard to define the original qualities there, but I didn’t worry too much about the definitions. Most of all I was drawn to the wonderful names in the stories, the unexpectedness of the ideas and plots, and the sense of immense periods of time elapsing. The Lords of the Instrumentality and people from Norstrilia had thousand-year lifespans; other inhabitants of this future universe were allowed to live 400 years. We, the audience of ‘The Ballad of Lost C’Mell’, are not twentieth-century people being told about the future. Instead, we are people from far in the future being told about our own distant legendary past. The story-teller’s voice is that of a slightly garrulous old nanny gathering children around her feet to hear these legends.

Introduction III

In August 1966 I bought, very tentatively, my first copy of Australian Science Fiction Review. It was the second issue, and the only place to find it was the counter at McGill’s Bookstore, which seemed to stock far more science fiction than any other shop in Melbourne. The man who sold it to me was, as I found out later, Merv Binns, who was then the manager of McGill’s. Discovering ASFR--the first series--was as much of a revelation as discovering science fiction itself. It showed me that there were intelligent people who read and commented on sf, fiercely critical and funny writers such as John Foyster and Lee Harding, who demanded that sf should be subjected to same searching standards as other literature.

The August 1967 issue of ASFR, No. 11 of the old series, was even better than those I had already bought. It contained three articles about Cordwainer Smith and a bibliography. The articles, together less than 20 pages in length, had a great impact on me. By then I knew that Cordwainer Smith had some importance in the sf community, but had read nothing about him except a pioneering article by Robert Silverberg in an Amazing of the mid 1960s. In that article Silverberg wrote:

I think that Cordwainer Smith is a visitor from some remote period of the future, living among us perhaps as an exile from his own era or perhaps just as a tourist, and amusing himself by casting some of his knowledge of historical events into the form of science fiction.

The implication was nobody in the sf community the identity of Cordwainer Smith. ASFR 11 revealed that identity. John Foyster had detected the name of the man who was Cordwainer Smith, without realizing that a very small number of sf writers in America had met him. One who regrets not meeting him is Roger Zelazny, who lived less than a mile away from ‘Cordwainer Smith’ for some years.

Just as he was preparing to publish the results of his investigations, Foyster heard that his quarry had died, on 5 August 1966. Cordwainer Smith was actually Dr Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, Professor of Asiatic Studies at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA.

To find out the truth about Cordwainer Smith John Foyster had only three clues. They are contained in Cordwainer Smith’s own prologue to the original paperback edition of Space Lords, a 1966 collection of stories. He knew that ‘Cordwainer Smith’ was an Anglican, that he had a stockbroker named Mr Greenish, and that in 1965, while writing the Space Lords prologue, he was connected in some way with the Australian National University. I don’t know how Foyster found Dr Arthur Burns, who was then a member of the Department of Modern History at ANU. Burns was Linebarger’s host, both in 1957, when he was at ANU for a year, and in 1965. Burns’s comments about his friend were published in ASFR, then reprinted in a booklet called Exploring Cordwainer Smith, published by Andy Porter. The whole of the ASFR 11 material was republished in ASFR, Second Series, and in the last edition of Peter Weston’s famous British fanzine Speculation.

Speculation cover scans courtesy Robert Lichtman Collection.

In 1967 Burns wrote:

[Linebarger] once said that Cordwainer Smith was a ‘pre-Cervantean’ -- the stories are like cycles of medieval legends, without the Aristotelian beginning-middle-and-end of classic tragedy, and certainly without the same structure as transposed into the modern novel, which Cervantes began. They are legendary cycles of the future, rather than future history, and were meant to be connected with and consistent with each other on the legendary and not the historiographic model.

Burns also says that:

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.

Which is another way of saying, I think, that Linebarger wrote the Cordwainer Smith stories for fun.

What was Paul Linebarger like? No biography of him has yet appeared, but the details that emerge from various sources make fascinating and confusing reading. Among other things, as Burns says:

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 hydrochloric acid, at which a guest, quite awed, remarked that Linebarger probably was a man from Mars . . . I do not hold with spiritualism but if a typewriter were to start now reeling off a Cordwainer Smith story, my disbelief would not be nearly strong enough to surprise me.

Elsewhere in the same magazine, Burns says:

He was confined to bed a great deal and he’d often write these stories when he couldn’t get up and lecture -- that kind of thing. He and his wife were writing a great political history of South East Asia and when he wasn’t well he had to put that and his lecturing and his army work aside, so he wrote more and more sf.

His interviewer, John Foyster, comments that ‘This might help to explain the sick sheep of Norstrilia. The sheep were permanently sick . . . They had to be sick to produce this drug.’

There is no necessity, of course, for details of a writer’s life to end up in his stories. Yet while rereading Foyster’s comments and the Cordwainer Smith stories recently after more than 20 years away from them, I found that illness, medical intervention, and benign torture make up much of Smith’s best work:

a	Smith gives several different accounts of space travel: via scanners; via photonic space-sailing ships; through planoforming and pinlighting; and through space 3. One method is supposed to supersede the other; but they read to me like alternative solutions to the same problem.
b	Each of these forms of space travel depends on inflicting intense suffering on the spacecraft pilots. In ‘Scanners Live in Vain’ the scanners are rebuilt into cyborgs in order to endure the pain of space. In ‘The Lady Who Sailed the Soul’ and ‘Think Blue, Count Two’, the pilots are changed by surgery so they can control the photonic craft during the immense times taken for journeys. In ‘The Game of Rat and Dragon’, at great personal expense the pinlighters link with cat minds to fight subspace forces that attack ships. In ‘The Burning of the Brain’, a planoforming captain becomes unexpectedly lost in space 2 offers his own brain as a sacrificial instrument to steer the ship home. And in ‘Drunkboat’, when Magno Taliano emerges from space 3 he can barely be described as alive or human.
c	The anatomical details of these sufferings--and of the horse in ‘On the Gem Planet’, Madigan in ‘On the Storm Planet’, and the sick sheep in Norstrilia--are described in more intense detail than almost anything else in the Smith stories.
d	I surmise that this detail is drawn from Linebarger’s own experience of numerous operations and near-misses with death. In fact, as Foyster hints, the suffering of scanners, go-captains, and others might have represented to Linebarger both life itself and the suffering associated with writing his stories.

In an excellent essay in Twentieth-Century American Science Fiction Writers, Gary K. Wolfe and Carol T. Williams give a few details, not covered elsewhere, about Linebarger’s life. Although born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin:

Linebarger as a child spent little time in his native country. In addition to Honolulu and Washington, he lived in Monte Carlo, Baden Baden, Shanghai, and Nanking. His father was a former US District Judge in the Philippines who later became a legal advisor to Sun Yat Sen, and at the age of seventeen young Linebarger not only became his father’s secretary but also negotiated a silver loan to China. A multi-cultural background was guaranteed by his early schooling [in Honolulu, Shanghai and Baden Baden]. He attended the University of Nanking and the North China Union Language School in 1930 before taking a BA at George Washington University in 1933.

He took his PhD at Johns Hopkins University at the age of twenty-three. He was married twice, to Margaret Snow in 1936, and to Genevieve Collins in 1950. He published his first story in his teens, and published poetry and novels during the 1940s as Carmichael Smith and Felix C. Forrest. His first sf story published under the Cordwainer Smith pseudonym was ‘Scanners Live in Vain’ (1950). As well as becoming Professor of Asiatic Studies, he was a colonel in the US Army, advising armies in Malaya and Korea. The result, as Arthur Burns points out, was a man who could move easily in traditional societies and had ‘a sharp perception of racial and cultural differences’.

In short, P.M.A. Linebarger was much more than Cordwainer Smith. The Cordwainer Smith stories were merely one part of Paul Linebarger’s varied life. He wrote much else, especially about politics, but also used quite a different style in his novel Ria, published under the Felix C. Forrest pseudonym. Linebarger did not depend on his fiction for his income. He certainly valued his audience, but he did not need to compromise his work to get it published. Indeed, if Frederik Pohl at Galaxy and Cele Goldsmith at Amazing had not been ardent fans of his, most of the Smith stories might never have been published.

For some of us, Linebarger was also something less than Cordwainer Smith. In 1967 I was upset and disappointed to read in ASFR 11 that Linebarger was very right-wing. He was closely tied to the pre-Chiang Kai Shek Kuomintang in China, and maintained his opposition to all Communist regimes, especially after the Communists came to power in China. As well, he became an expert in psychological warfare, and published Psychological Warfare, which is referred to as the classic text on the subject. I would very much like to have read it before preparing this talk. When in Australia, Linebarger went to some pains to annoy orthodox left-wing academics. Burns reports that such confrontations were often very funny.

Cordwainer Smith, on the other hand, always seemed politically ambivalent. The Lords of the Instrumentality rule the universe, and are called Lords and Ladies, but they also provide everybody’s needs. During the Rediscovery of Man, humanity returns to some of the terrors of what we consider ordinary life, but the whole exercise is stage-managed by the Instrumentality. In other words, it’s not even clear whether the Instrumentality is meant to be a left-wing or right-wing dictatorship. Their great crime is constructing the underpeople to be merely chattels of the humans, then ignoring their needs for centuries - but it is only the intervention of some members of the Instrumentality that enables the revolution of the underpeople to succeed.

The total impression I get of Linebarger is of a crusty gent, probably rather difficult in social situations, who would always come up with the least expected idea about any subject under discussion. He wasn’t, as Burns admits, a ‘systematic thinker’, but he was probably the last person alive who knew almost everything, including the next few thousand years of our history.

Introduction IV

During a very recent holiday at Lorne, I subjected myself to one of the more embarrassing episodes in my life. Lorne is a seaside resort, but the main delight of staying there is exploring the walking trails that stretch back into the hills behind the town. One day, Elaine and I rounded a bend in the path to be faced by what was supposed to be a bridge over a fast-flowing stream. The ‘bridge’ was merely a log. The top of the log had been cut flat, but the log had later tipped about 20 degrees to the side. An iron handrail had been placed in the log, but it now lurched out at an angle from the log, which looked slippery. Elaine went out on the log, going slowly, short step by short step. She reached the other side. I went three steps and found that under no circumstances could I continue. My fear of heights plus my fear of slipping stopped me dead in my tracks. Elaine wasn’t coming back. I wasn’t going forward. So I had to retrace my steps, and walk up the road to our agreed rendezvous, while Elaine finished the planned walk. On the way she had to cross two more equally difficult bridges.

Cordwainer Smith’s fiction presents nearly as many difficulties for readers as crossing that bridge did for me--but Cordwainer Smith’s stories don’t offer a handrail. In some stories, such as ‘Under Old Earth’ and ‘The Dead Lady of Clown Town’, you creep through the stories from one sentence to the next, one paragraph to the other, hoping some recognizable pattern will emerge. For me, a pattern emerged only on second reading, 25 years after my first reading of those stories.

It’s not merely that Smith’s universe is difficult to understand, although that’s a problem. Smith often puts in references to people or places that have already been explained in some other stories, or will be the subject of some future story. A fascinating way of doing things, and refreshing when compared with all those writers who explain every dead detail of their future histories, but difficult nevertheless. One of Smith’s readers, John J. Pierce, has constructed a diagram, based on his reading of the stories, which fits all of them on a time-line from now to 17,000 AD. That diagram, about which we could disagree all night, appears in the introduction to The Instrumentality of Mankind and The Rediscovery of Man.

Let me return to ASFR 11. The beauty of ASFR to me, isolated in a Victorian country town in 1967, was knowing that somewhere out there were legendary figures like Bangsund, Harding, and Foyster, who saw the same sorts of things in science fiction as I did, and also cared about literature. Indeed, I was a bit startled to read Foyster saying in ASFR 11 that ‘Cordwainer Smith was the first writer to write science fiction which could possibly be accepted as ‘Literature’.’ I’m not sure I agreed then, or do now, but Foyster’s case is persuasive. He says:

Robert Silverberg writes of Smith’s world as being ‘so tiresomely familiar to him that he does not see the need to spell out the details’. This is not quite true. The details of Smith’s future are only made clear as this becomes necessary . . . Smith has achieved something that no other sf writer has; the ability to make his fiction read as truth, through the careful use of facts and explanations, or rather revelations.

Foyster then examines the extraordinary effectiveness of both the beginnings and endings of Smith’s stories. The two most moving story beginnings I know of--that is, the two beginnings that promise most of the fiction to come--are from Ford Maddox Ford (‘This is the saddest story I have ever heard’ from The Good Soldier) and from Cordwainer Smith. At the beginning of ‘The Dead Lady of Clown Town’ he writes: ‘You already know the end--the immense drama of the Lord Jestecost, seventh of his line, and how the cat-girl C’Mell initiated the vast conspiracy.’ To me that’s a master stroke, to begin an sf story with ‘You already know the end’, which makes the story to come even more mysterious than it would have been otherwise. Here we are again, at the end of time, sitting at the story-teller’s feet, waiting for her to return to a story that has thrilled us many times before. Either we as twentieth-century readers make that imaginative leap with Smith, or we don’t. If we don’t, we won’t even begin to cross the difficult bridge that is ‘The Dead Lady of Clown Town’.

As Foyster writes:

Smith’s technique could easily fail; in writing thus he walks on one side of the narrow gap between beauty and fatuity. But his foot is sure. As an indication of his masterly control - indeed, to use the two sentences by which I would be prepared to let his reputation stand or fall, I will quote the ending of a story sometimes forgotten: ‘The Burning of the Brain’:

Magno Taliano had risen from his chair and was being led from the room by his wife and consort, Dolores Oh. He had the amiable smile of an idiot, and his face for the first time in more than a hundred years trembled with shy and silly love.

Assuming that any other sf writer had written the story, it would have ended with the word ‘idiot’. Go further; try to find any writer who would have finished the sentence more or less in that way. It would not be the same. For the words ‘and silly’ are unique with Smith. In these words, these two words, he transcends the petty world of science fiction and reaches out into the world of reality . . . The agony of space, introduced in ‘Scanners Live in Vain’, comes down to Earth.

This is one of the finest pieces of literary criticism I’ve read, all the more so because Foyster is so far the only Cordwainer Smith commentator to talk about the way he uses words. The real difficulty--and the greatest delight--of Smith’s writing is his style.

I can find plenty of individual examples of ‘style’--individual fine sentences--in Smith. In ‘Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons’ we read of Mother Hitton: ‘One of her weapons snored. She turned it over.’ In context, this is funny and horrifying. The ‘weapon’ is a psychopathic mink, called a ‘kitton’, who, when woken, telepathically projects its feelings of absolute hatred and loathing at any enemy trying to steal stroon from Norstrilia. At the beginning of ‘Alpha Ralpha Boulevard’ we are told: ‘Everywhere, men and women worked with a wild will to build a more imperfect world’. Elaine found a wonderful piece of Smithiana in ‘Drunkboat’. When Artyr Rambo is placed in hospital after returning from space 3, he uses all his force in attempt to break out of the hospital room. After he is restrained:

The robot was out in the corridor, gently patting the steel floor back into shape. He was a tidy robot, probably animated by an amplified chicken-brain, and when he got tidy he became obstinate.

Bits of style are easier to show you than real style. In fact, Smith’s work is nothing but style, in the way explicated by Ursula Le Guin in her collection of essays, The Language of the Night.

After my recent complete rereading of Cordwainer Smith’s stories I rediscovered ‘The Lady Who Sailed the Soul’. Like so many of the other stories, this is a future legend, a story that purports to give the true account of the romance between Helen America and Mr Grey-no-more. The author writes:

Their names were welded to the glittering timeless jewellery of romance . . . two things stood forth--their love and the image of the great sails, tissue-metal wings with which the bodies of people finally fluttered out among the stars.

Then there is a lot of background, about the histories of Helen America and Mr Grey-no-more, how they became captains of interstellar lightships. Smith slowly moves into close focus--firstly on the profession itself, describing how lightship captains age 40 years in one voyage; then on the brief but passionate romance between the two; then closer, onto Helen America’s preparation for her voyage. All this seems mere explanation, circling around a story that hasn’t happened yet. In fact, it is all part of the actual story, for the characters are circling around each other, and Helen America is drawing in towards her great voyage.

Before they part, Mr Grey-no-more says to Helen: ‘All these people have said that they wanted to be sailors too, even when they looked at me. They could not know what it means, but they said it anyhow. . . . Perhaps you will sail among the stars, but I hope that you will not.’ The doctors and the technicians try to warn her against her chosen profession. She says: ‘And if the sails fail, I wait as long as I live.’ The technician ticks her off: ‘There is no call for you to get tragic about it. Tragedy is easy enough to contrive . . . Tragedy is not the hard part. The hard part is when you don’t quite succeed and you have to keep on fighting. When you must keep going on and on and on in the face of really hopeless odds, of real temptations to despair.’

Here is Linebarger telling us about himself, but also telling us as much as we need to know to understand the significance of Helen America’s voyage. This turns out to be greatest short account of space travel in sf literature, so I won’t spoil it by quoting from it. At the end of the perilous voyage, however, Helen America is barely alive. Mr Grey-no-more has travelled as cargo in her ship; as a result they are now both the same age-- - their real age plus forty years. Now they can marry; now their romance means something. He says to her ‘But you have sailed The Soul in here and you wanted me.’ All very romantic; but the romance has been authenticated by the intensity of the experience that the characters and the reader have been through.

Introduction V

Now I’ve reached the point at which I might have started this talk. So--my fifth, and last Introduction.

One morning last week I woke up remembering the tail end of a dream. I dreamt that I had travelled the length of five Cordwainer Smith stories. I couldn’t remember what they were, but I knew that in my dream I had gone the distance. Now I wanted to start the sixth story, but it wasn’t there. I would have to make it up for myself. I was sitting in a forest glade, on a park bench, waiting to begin the new journey.

When I woke, I realized that I could not possibly start a Cordwainer Smith story from there. There are no forest glades in Cordwainer Smith stories. There is barely a tree or a blade of grass. There are no original animals left in this universe, except the sick sheep on Norstrilia and the horse in ‘On the Gem Planet’-- - there are only highly modified Earth animals or the underpeople, which look like humans but have been manufactured from animal stock. Smith’s manufactured universe is Asimov’s Trantor gone mad--a completely built environment spread like cancer from planet to planet. A title for this talk could have been ‘More Stories about Cities and Spaceships’. There are virtually no landscapes in Smith’s stories, except those of barren planets (Norstrilia, or Henriada of ‘On the Storm Planet’) or totally sterile planets like Pontopiddan of ‘On the Gem Planet’.

In short, and at last, this brings me to what Cordwainer Smith’s stories are about. I’ve left this matter to last because I don’t care much about it. All I really care about is what it is an author’s work that, line to line, interests the reader. I leave the big picture to others, but here offer a brief summary of what I discovered.

I suspect that Linebarger’s work on psychological warfare is essential to understanding this aspect of his work, which makes it all the more annoying that Psychological Warfare is unavailable. What is a human being if she or he can be ruthlessly manipulated and reconstructed against the free will? In Norstrilia, for example, Rod McBan’s computer tells him: ‘You are Rod McBan the hundred and fifty-first. Specifically, you are a spinal column with a small bone box at one end, the head, and with reproductive equipment at the other end. Inside the bone box you have a small portion of material which resembles stiff, bloody lard. With that you think . . . You are a wonderful object, Rod McBan. I can understand what you are made of. I cannot share your human, animal side of life.’ Later in the novel, McBan is reduced in size by surgery in order to travel through space without being kidnapped, yet seems to be the same person when he is reconstructed at the other end.

Again I recommend the essay by Wolfe and Williams to which I referred earlier. They show brilliantly how Smith is constantly torn between his love for authority and controlled environments--in other words, the Instrumentality’s future, a future built by humans for the greater good of humanity - and his total mistrust of manipulative, unfeeling inhumanity.

Of ‘Scanners Live in Vain’ they say:

Part men and part machines, the Scanners are the first of Cordwainer Smith’s dialectical images, for they cannot be both at once; once Scanners, they must endure a hazardous process in order, temporarily, to feel human sensations . . . the Instrumentality’s triumph over pain proves paradoxically dystopian, for the author of Psychological Warfare knew that the diminution of sensory stimuli brings one closer to the state of No Feeling that is Hell. To eliminate pain is to eliminate life, and in ‘The Dead Lady of Clown Town’ (1964) the author defines the ‘Rediscovery of Man’, some thirteen thousand years hence, as the rediscovery of ‘variety, flexibility, danger and the seasoning of a little hate’ . . .

But again, what is life? Even our minds are merely chemical, since they can be horridly influenced by propaganda and drugs. We see this at its most Gothic in ‘A Planet Named Shayol’. Yet Smith always asserts that people are much greater than their physical selves. So are the underpeople; so are the robots.

Wolfe and Williams point to the way in which Smith will often pit a simple human gesture or offering of love against the might of the Instrumentality or of the great physical forces that rule this universe.

In ‘Alpha Ralpha Boulevard’ it is a simple, unconscious gesture by Paul that leads C’mell to rescue him and Virginia as they speed along the boulevard in the sky.

In ‘On the Gem Planet’ Casher O’Neill meets the only happy person he has ever met, an underperson serving woman who shows him the way to give comfort to the immortal horse rescued from the cliffside. She tells him ‘You will remain miserable as long as you seek justice, but when you give up, righteousness will come to you and you will be happy.’

In short, Smith’s quest was the same as that of any other great writer: how best shall we live and die?

From the introduction to Space Lords:

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 to work the symbols.
         The magic and 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 to supply the makings.

If these stories come from our own time, and if Smith is merely moving the symbols, then these stories are as much about the twentieth century, about the 1950s and 1960s, as about 15,000 AD. I’ve already said that Paul Linebarger, forever ill, transmuted his day-to-day experience into that of the go-captains and scanners. On the wider front, he was trying to account for the new forces that changed his beloved China. We know that he was a deeply conservative and religious man, and we would expect great changes in America and throughout the world to dismay him. He admires the power of the Instrumentality, but also condemns them for their banning of the ‘Old Strong Religion’, his own beloved Christianity. Why then does he not come across as a more lyrical version of Robert Heinlein or Poul Anderson?

Paul Linebarger knew too much about the world of the 1950s and 1960s to have a simple view of it. In his fiction he could move the symbols to dramatize the contradictions he found in that world. He was deeply interested in the new spirit sweeping America during the early 1960s. On the one hand, he reacted against that change by embracing a rather simple idea of an old-fashioned Australia and setting it on the planet of Old North Australia. On the other hand, he developed both the Rediscovery of Man and the revolt of the underpeople surely reflect the civil rights movement among blacks and other minority groups.

In science fiction he found an ideal way to paint the contradictions of those great questions on a colourful canvas. Somehow his romantic future legends gave him a way of looking at the ordinary world we make up for ourselves. Hence the idea of a far-future in which all our future is already one vast legend. The power of legend is to give meaning to human events. The result, as Gary K. Wolfe writes in an article about Cordwainer Smith’s short stories is:

A symbolic world through which he could explore the issues that most mattered to him: romance, nationalism, psychology, bigotry, morality, and the ways in which these issues are interconnected. Ironically, one result of this technique is that the author’s future universe appears so radically removed from anything we could rationally extrapolate from the present that it becomes almost believable.

Delete that word ‘almost’.

#

Notes 2004:

• Thanks to James Allen, I did read Linebarger’s Psychological Warfare some months after writing the above essay. An energetic and often funny book, it amplifies the proposition that the essence of waging psychological warfare is for one nation to persuade its enemy to surrender without fighting a war.

• The Gollancz editions of the late eighties have not only disappeared, but they have been superseded by the two volumes of the NESFA Press editions, which stay in print. See below.

SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY

NESFA Press edition of the complete Cordwainer Smith:

Cordwainer Smith, ed. James Mann: The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith (The NESFA Press; ISBN 0-915368-56-0; 1993; 671 pp. + xvi pp.; $US24.95).

‘Introduction’ (John J. Pierce), ‘Editor’s Introduction’.

Stories of the Instrumentality of Mankind: ‘No, No, Not Rogov!’, ‘War No. 81-Q’ (rewritten version), ‘Mark Elf’, ‘The Queen of the Afternoon’, Scanners Live in Vain’, ‘The Lady Who Sailed The Soul’, ‘When the People Fell’, ‘Think Blue, Count Two’, ‘The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All’, ‘The Game of Rat and Dragon’, ‘The Burning of the Brain’, ‘From Gustible’s Planet’, ‘Himself in Anacrhon’, ‘The Crime and Glory of Commander Suzdal’, ‘Golden the Ship Was — Oh! Oh! Oh!’, The Dead Lady of Clown Town’, ‘Under Old Earth’, ‘Drunkboat’, ‘Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons’, ‘Alpha Ralpha Boulevard’, ‘The Ballad of Lost C’mell’, ‘A Planet Named Shayol’, ‘On the Gem Planet’, ‘On the Storm Planet’, ‘On the Sand Planet’, ‘Three to a Given Star’, ‘Down to a Sunless Sea’.

Other stories: ‘War No. 81-Q’ (original version), ‘Western Science is So Wonderful’, ‘Nancy’, ‘The Fife of Bodidharma’, ‘Angerhelm’, ‘The Good Friends’.

Cordwainer Smith: Norstrilia (The NESFA Press; ISBN 0-915368-61-7; (1964/1968/1975)/1994; 249 pp. + xiii pp.; $US20.95). ‘Introduction’ by Alan Elms.

Also referred to:

Australian Science Fiction Review [First Series], No. 11, August 1967, ed. John Bangsund.

Contains (on Smith):

‘Editorial’ (John Bangsund), ‘Paul Linebarger’ (Arthur Burns), ‘Cordwainer Smith’ (John Foyster), ‘Extracts from a Conversation between John Foyster and Dr Burns’, ‘Cordwainer Smith: A Bibliography’ (Don Tuck), Three Cordwainer Smith drawings (Steve Rasmussen).

Australian Science Fiction Review (Second Series) , No. 21, Spring 1989, ed. Jenny Blackford, Russell Blackford, John Foyster, Yvonne Rousseau, and Janeen Webb.

‘Cordwainer Smith Revisited’: ‘Cordwainer Smith: Five Introductions’ (Bruce Gillespie), ‘Paul Linebarger’ (Arthur Burns), ‘Cordwainer Smith’ (John Foyster), ‘Extracts from a Conversation between John Foyster and Doctor Burns’, ‘The Mists of Legend’ (Marc Ortlieb), ‘How Cordwainer Smith Came Back from Nothing-at-All’ (Norman Talbot).

Gary K. Wolfe and Carol T. Williams, ‘Cordwainer Smith (Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger) (15 July 1913–6 August 1966)’, in Cowart and Wymer (eds.), Twentieth Century American Science-Fiction Writers, Part 2: M–Z (Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 8), Gale Research Co., 1981, pp. 127–32.

Gary K. Wolfe, ‘The Best of Cordwainer Smith’, in Magill (ed.), Survey of Science Fiction Literature, Vol. 1, 1979, pp. 186-9

Cordwainer Smith: Space Lords, Pyramid, 1965, ‘Dedication’ and ‘Prologue’.

- - -
*Dated 30 July 1989 and delivered as a talk to the Nova Mob, 2 August 1989.

Speculation cover scans courtesy Robert Lichtman Collection. Galaxy cover scans courtesy http://www.noosfere.com/showcase/pulps__magazines_americains.htm

Because you are in control of your life. Don't ever forget that. You are what you are because of the conscious and subconscious choices you have made.
               --Barbara Hall, A Summons to New Orleans, 2000

By Richard Coad

Some time ago, in another forum [Wegenheim], Ian Williams described his morning walk to work. It was a good piece but not the type to provoke a lot of comment; however, I enjoyed it enough to try my own hand at it.

I live in just about the exact geographic center of San Francisco just a few blocks from the start of Golden Gate Park. The Bay-to-Breakers race, in which about 75,000 people run from San Francisco Bay downtown to the Pacific Ocean at the outskirts of town, goes by our place – when they reach us they have covered about three and a half miles and have about the same distance still to go. I work downtown but it’s a large enough downtown that it’s only about two miles from home to work – a good walk when the weather is fine.

Starting out I head east, usually stopping briefly to chat with a neighbor who is generally standing in front of his garage smoking his morning cigar. After 15 years, you'd think I would know his name but it's an urban neighborhood where people tend to keep to themselves except for a nod or a brief exchange of pleasantries. When we first moved here, after the Loma Prieta earthquake, the neighborhood was about 50% black; after years of gentrification, my cigar-smoking neighbor is, I believe, the only African-American remaining on the block. Some folks died; others made huge profits re-selling homes they had purchased when the area was a true slum and moved away to spend their retirement years in a less expensive locale.

At the end of the block is Divisadero Street. As its name implies, this was once the westernmost border of San Francisco - hey, I actually live in the suburbs! There's a Popeye's Chicken on the corner which replaced Norris' Golden Fry - closed down back in the ‘80s for selling heroin along with fried chicken. Next to it, on Hayes Street, is the long-abandoned, now being remodeled, Horseshoe Club which features an arch over the doorway in the form of a horseshoe. Back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, when the Western Addition was to San Francisco what Harlem was to NYC or Watts to LA, the club was open and featured performers like Sam Cooke, B.B. King, James Brown, etc. Must have been quite a place in its day.

A block further on is the entrance to Alamo Square Park - four square blocks of running dogs and tennis courts and gardens with planters made from discarded shoes. The terrain turns steep here. This is the other side of the famous "Hayes Street hill" which slows down many in the annual Bay to Breakers race. From this side it's a steep climb over a block to the crest; for the racerunners it's a long steady climb over 5 blocks, which is extremely tiring.

At the crest of the hill there is one of the most photographed views in San Francisco. A row of seven lovingly restored Queen Anne houses lines the street across from the park. On a foggy morning everything behind them disappears in a haze but on a clear day the Transamerica Pyramid and other downtown high-rises are visible and, beyond them the Bay and East Bay hills.

It's a nice downhill or flat walk from here on. Crossing Fillmore Street - once San Francisco's version of Central Avenue or 125 th Street but redeveloped into nothingness (although the city keeps trying to promote a historic jazz and blues corridor seemingly missing the irony that they ripped it out in the first place) - I pass Walden House where it says on a sign in front that "Today Is The First Day Of The Rest Of Your Life" which is pretty trite but may help the drug addicts trying to kick the habit that stay there. Past the apartment building where longtime San Francisco fan, publisher of Starfire, and beneficiary of the Waft William Westward fan fund to bring him from Tucson back to SF for Corflu, William Breiding used to live and get frequently mugged by the unsavory characters from the Hayes Valley Projects just down the block (the main reason why I don't walk home at night is to avoid the loitering gangs from the Death Valley Posse - they're not up in the morning).

Past the projects the extensively gentrified Hayes Valley shopping district begins. Boutiques full of expensive objets d'art and designer or vintage clothing and very fancy furnishings line both sides of the street. There is no longer a freeway overpass bisecting the neighborhood - it came down shortly after the earthquake - and as soon as it was gone gentrification, already somewhat underway, began in earnest. One of the biggest changes is the bar that was once known as the Valley Club. This was a very tough place; the kind of place where people would get shot dead and everyone continued drinking and nobody saw anything. Now it's called Marlena's and is one of SF's premier gay transvestite bars.

A couple of blocks further on and I'm passing Davies Symphony Hall on one side and the former headquarters of the SF School District on the other. The latter is a lovely art deco building which has been abandoned since the earthquake and is gradually falling into disrepair. The only thing that has been done to it recently is adding some iron gates to prevent homeless people from sleeping in the entrance alcoves.

Crossing Van Ness Avenue, formerly San Francisco's Auto Row but now a mix of businesses with only a few car dealers remaining, I see the apartment building where Detroit and San Francisco fan Kent Johnson (an artist par excellence and aficionado of Asian pop culture) lived and died. Kent committed suicide in the spring of 2003 in despair over his inability to find work and the impossibility of living cheaply in the Bay Area. I miss him. A block further down Hayes is the monstrously ugly Fox Plaza Apartments, a high rise building that causes severe wind turbulence in its immediate vicinity. I've lost hats here.

Finally, Hayes Street runs into Market Street, San Francisco's main street at 8th Street. The Ramada Plaza, home to Potlatch 14, is here. Just down 8th is the Holiday Inn where Corflu 22 will be held. The new (well, not so new, now) Main Library is just up the block and the restored Orpheum Theater puts on Broadway musicals at the opposite corner. Most days I stop walking here and pick up one of the best features of San Francisco's public transportation system (MUNI). Along Market Street the city runs a fleet of historic streetcars from cities around the world. These include old Red Line cars from LA, a Desire streetcar from New Orleans, wooden-benched cars from Milan, an open air car from Melbourne, and several others. I enjoy riding these and will gladly let a few busses go by while waiting for one to approach.

On occasion, I have walked the remaining 5 blocks to work but Market Street, between 8th and 5th streets, has become a depressing place. Over half of the storefronts are boarded up. The sheer number of homeless people is rather overwhelming; the smells left by their various bodily functions can be very overwhelming. Aside from the homeless, the majority of the people in these blocks seem to be either severe addicts or people who supply them or prey upon them. It's illustrative, I think, that when I first visited NYC in the mid-‘90s I was struck by how clean and bum-free it seemed. Ever since the Reagan era homelessness has been the number one topic on the SF political agenda and 20 years on nobody seems to have any solution – meanwhile formerly residential hotels continue to transform themselves into tourist hotels further decreasing the available low cost housing (if $125 a week can really be considered low cost).

It's not all gloom and misery on Market, though. On Wednesday mornings a huge farmers market is set up at United Nations Plaza (the site where the UN was formally brought into being and, unfortunately, now a case study in failed civic spaces). This is really good for Asian vegetables - get your opo fresh and cheap (50 cents!). At 6 th Street, the heart of the SF skid row, there is the amazing Tulan - what looks like a typical greasy spoon serving some of the best Vietnamese food in the city for about $6 for a good meal. There are also a number of trendy night clubs opening on 6th - probably one of the last places where a group of cash-strapped kids can get a place they can afford to put on the entertainment they like.

At 5th Street, Market turns more upscale. The Cable Car turnaround is on one side and the Nordstrom-anchored SF Center on the other. A mall with valet parking was considered risky when this opened but the street people just moved down the block.

Finally, at 3rd Street, I reach work and wipe the sweat off my brow. It's all going to change, of course. I start a new job in downtown Oakland next week (3 jobs in one year - that's not too many!) and next month Stacy and I will be moving across the Bay to Point Richmond. I'll miss the walk.

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*Revised from an original posting on InTheBar dated October 26, 2004. Special thanks to Rich Coad for his photos of the walk.

Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting.
               --Alan Dean Foster, "To the Vanishing Point"

Using Google As An Oracle
By Alexei Panshin

I've got this website, see -- Alexei Panshin's The Abyss of Wonder. It has the lyrics of fifty songs Josh Wachtel and I wrote for the band Radio Free Earth. It has a series of considerations of Robert Heinlein, whom I've found endlessly fascinating for his special combination of authority and deceit. There's an essay about my father's miraculous escape from Russia, and another on the first telling of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. There are Old Space Ranger stories, an art gallery with pictures by Boris Artzybasheff, and a cross-cultural evocation of the dimension of myth.

I see all this as a dynamic inquiry into the roots of story, and picture the site as an evolving artistic whole in which all of the apparently different aspects reflect the overallness. The place of the site on the Neb is not on the "up today and down tomorrow" end of things, but among the sites that aim to be here longer and to work more slowly.

But then, as my son Adam tells me: "You know, everybody who has a website wants users to come in by the front door, follow their site through just the way they have it laid out, look at it all, and treat it as a whole. But that isn't the way things actually happen. In fact, most people go surfing around, come into a site sideways, look at one thing or maybe two, and then pass on again."

He's been right about that. Very few of the hits on my page come from people who enter by the front door looking for me and what I've been up to lately. Most of the hits I get come from people entering a word or a phrase in a search engine, the search engine offering my page as a possibility, even a top possibility, and the page getting checked out.

I don't get the hits that Matt Drudge gets. On the other hand, I'll bet the Drudge Report doesn't get people who are looking for:

slushypipp

or

meccan revelations

or

John Carter of Mars

After the John Carter of Mars movie comes out, there may be more of these.

Some of the inquiries I get are immediately recognizable to me, such as

his eyes were red and his teeth were green

That's a line from one of our songs -- a clean match.

Or:

separation - initiation - return journey of a hero

That's Joseph Campbell's monomyth.

But other intentions are more obscure to me, like the inquirers -- and there've been a pretty fair number of them -- who are looking for

pictures of people falling down

I'm not sure what the person wanted who typed

all the songs have been written

into his search engine and then found his way to me.

And what did the person think he was going to find when he hit on my site with the hope

help me invent a game on paper of the ugly duckling

People make pilgrimages to my site from distant places -- Nepal, Brunei and the fabled Cocos (Keeling) Islands -- seeking enlightenment. More than 90 countries in all so far.

A person from India looked in wishing to know about

points of developing personality of a simple man

If he'd asked me about a complex man, I'd have been stumped. But a simple man is one who works hard at sloughing off the excess. You can tell the points of development by the chips.

And an inquirer from Gambia wants to know

what makes monkeys crazy

Because story, and story about story, is the secret heart of my site, many of the people who pass through are in pursuit of story:

What underlies the human need to tell stories

and

to what extent is it true that we all have stories to tell

Some people are looking for story on a grand scale:

does the myth of excursion still exist among you

Some have more specific tales in mind:

stories of people who find sexual pleasure with monkeys

Perhaps what is most interesting to me is that so much of what comes my way isn't a topic, but rather a question, sometimes with a question mark, but more often without. It might be a specific question like

How does the atomic bomb work?

It might be something like

how and why I became a Sufi

This connected with our song "Sufi Girl," written to rib a friend who was finding a fellow devotee of his a hottie. Many of the hits on this song come from Islamic countries, apparently seeking to re-establish contact with lost traditions.

Some of the questions are more open-ended and philosophical:

must our informants mean what they say

and

how does cultural change happen

and

are human beings active creators of their lives

You could break your teeth on questions like those.

I'm not sure I can answer them -- at least not today. What I can say is that I'd like to continue working on a website that can draw questions like these its way. People may not know how they got there, and they may not know where they've been when they've passed through, but my hope is that they've had their heads bent a little for havin