Milwaukee native Cordwainer Smith a surprising voice in science fiction

In an obituary published on Aug. 8, 1966, The Milwaukee Journal paid tribute to Paul M.A. Linebarger as an expert on the Far East and psychological warfare, a professor of international studies at Johns Hopkins University and a colonel in the Army Reserve.

And in the last line, almost as though it were the hobby that humanizes a serious man of accomplishments, Linebarger’s hometown newspaper mentioned that he “wrote science fiction books under the pen name Cordwainer Smith.”

Long into his short but remarkable career as a science-fiction writer, Cordwainer Smith’s identity remained a secret and a subject of speculation. Some assumed that an SF giant such as Theodore Sturgeon was hiding behind the improbable pen name. That would explain how a writer no one had heard of produced the striking story “Scanners Live in Vain” (1950) — a story that hinted at a strange universe of stories to come.

In one sense, the speculators were correct. An SF giant was behind that pseudonym, a giant who would channel his fascination with China and his singular imagination into the creation of a future history spanning thousands of years.

“One essential component of great science fiction is strangeness,” grandmaster Robert Silverberg wrote in analyzing and praising “Scanners Live in Vain” for an anthology.

The strangeness of Smith’s fiction compelled and excited readers in the 1950s and continues to do so. His fans include important contemporary writers of speculative fiction. World Fantasy Award winner Lavie Tidhar cited Smith as a direct influence on his book "Central Station." “What Smith did so brilliantly was evoke the sense of a universe already ancient, filled with a history already turning into myth and legend,” Tidhar wrote in an article for Tor.com.

In the introduction to their massive anthology "The Big Book of Science Fiction" (2016), editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer call Smith “perhaps the most unique and important science fiction writer of the 1950s.” The VanderMeers echo the opinion of many readers when they state that Smith’s far-future tales “came out of seemingly nowhere and had no clear antecedent.”

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“Even today,” the VanderMeers write, “Smith’s stories stand alone, as if they came from an alternate reality.”

From Milwaukee to Asia

Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger was born on July 11, 1913, in Milwaukee. His parents had been living overseas, but his father, Paul Myron Wentworth Linebarger, made sure they returned to the United States for Paul’s birth so their son would be eligible one day to be elected president. Linebarger Terrace in Milwaukee’s Bay View neighborhood was named after the family because Paul M.W. Linebarger played a major role in developing it.

The future fiction writer did not live very long in Milwaukee. His father had served as a U.S. federal district judge in the Philippines until joining up with Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, who led the movement that overthrew China’s Qing dynasty. Judge, as the elder Linebarger liked to be known, lobbied, raised money, wrote propaganda and gathered intelligence for Sun in the United States, Europe and Asia. His travels meant many moves for the family. While Paul was going to school in Shanghai, Sun Yat-sen became fond of him, and the Judge began to draw his son into his activities on behalf of Sun.

In his analysis of “Scanners Live in Vain,” Robert Silverberg sees the key to Cordwainer Smith’s distinctive fiction in Paul’s boyhood abroad. “More so than any other science-fiction writer I can think of, Linebarger had had close experiences with alien cultures from childhood on, and I think the power of his science fiction sprang primarily from that.”

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In 1936, Paul earned his PhD in political science at Johns Hopkins, writing his dissertation on Sun’s book of political philosophy, “San Man Chu I” (“Three Principles of the People”). Paul began his career as an academic and scholar, teaching first at Duke University and then at Johns Hopkins. He also began working for the U.S. military on psychological warfare, eventually as a commissioned officer. After World War II ended, Paul continued in the Army Reserve and advised on military intelligence, leading to his quip that he was a consultant on small wars.

Had he not written the Cordwainer Smith stories, he likely would be best remembered today as the author of "Psychological Warfare" (1948), considered a seminal text on propaganda work and PsyOps in its time and translated into multiple languages.

“Psychological warfare seeks to win military gains without military force,” he writes in beginning his extended definition of the subject. “The problems of psychological warfare for the future are problems of how better to apply it, not of whether to apply it.”

He even finds wit in his subject, such as this aphorism worthy of Oscar Wilde: “Propaganda is like a newspaper; it has to be timeless or brand-new. In between, it has no value.”

Future tales of the past

Cordwainer Smith’s universe is neither diagrammed the way Isaac Asmiov’s "Foundation" series is nor intensely documented with passages from invented secondary literature, à la Frank Herbert’s "Dune." Smith’s stories are often told in retrospect by an unnamed narrator, as though he were the brothers Grimm of this universe, gathering whatever tales he could collect and recounting them.

Sometimes, he alludes to the presumed common knowledge of people hearing these tales: “Everyone knows the reference to Helen America and Mr. Grey-no-more, but no one knew exactly how it happened,” he declares at the start of “The Lady Who Sailed the Soul.”

Smith’s most anthologized story, “The Game of Rat and Dragon” (1955), might be the best place for a casual reader to start. Like “Scanners,” this story suggests the backdrop of a richly imagined universe while focusing tightly on its protagonist’s predicament. Plus, it has cats (Smith loved them).

Humans have found a quicker way to travel through space: planoforming, in which ships jump almost instantaneously from place to place. But they have discovered new danger, too: hostile space entities that psychically kill or cripple humans traveling in those ships. People call them dragons. During one space journey, a human telepath sensing a dragon fortuitously aimed a light beam at it, dissolving it. This led to the pinlighting defense, with telepaths aiming lights at onrushing dragons. Because humans were not consistently quick enough to respond in time against the speedy dragons, they recruited partners: cats, connected to the humans by telepathic amplifiers, who react to the interstellar dragons as though they were rodents.

“The Game of Rat and Dragon” follows Underhill, a sensitive and excitable young man, through a dangerous mission with three other human pinlighters and their four feline partners. Smith describes their military space adventure in crisp, well-paced detail. But his greatest achievement here is capturing the emotional rapport between Underhill and the Lady May, his feline partner for this mission. When connected telepathically, the partners think the intellectual part of human minds is fouled up and overcomplicated. But they can bond emotionally, on both sides, a welcome connection Underhill feels after putting on his headset:

“With a thrill of warmth and tenderness, he felt the consciousness of the Lady May pouring over into his own. Her consciousness was as gentle and clear and yet sharp in the taste of his mind as if it were scented oil.”

What makes their bond piquant is Underhill’s frustration that he’ll likely never make a connection that powerful with a woman of his own species.

NESFA Press, the excellent publishing arm of the New England Science Fiction Association, has simplified life for contemporary readers by collecting all of Smith’s science-fiction short stories in a single volume, "The Rediscovery of Man." Smith’s background in PsyOps shines through “Golden the Ship Was — Oh! Oh! Oh!,” in which humans defend Earth from invaders through misdirection generated by a ship ninety million miles long, “the largest scarecrow ever conceived by the human mind.”

In “A Planet Named Shayol,” one of his grimmest stories, humans convicted of crimes are left on a prison planet where native symbiotes infect them, causing them to grow extra organs, which a caretaker harvests.

“The Dead Lady of Clown Town” reimagines Joan of Arc through the story of the dog-girl D’joan, who is burned to death for leading a peaceful march of the underpeople. The underpeople and their largely peaceful movement to obtain equality will remind many American readers of the civil rights movement. However, in his essay "Origins of the Underpeople: Cats, Kuomintang and Cordwainer Smith" (1991), biographer Alan C. Elms argues that the young Paul M.A. Linebarger “had literally grown up identifying deeply with the fate of a vast body of underpeople: the common people of China.”

This article is an excerpt from "Wisconsin Literary Luminaries: From Laura Ingalls Wilder to Ayad Akhtar" (The History Press).