Dr. Paul Linebarger, aka Cordwainer Smith

Cats, cruelty and children

Idealism and morality in the Instrumentality of Mankind

[I found this article in the WayBack Machine, no current links for attrbution, so my apologies in advance for once again simply repurposing* content I find appropriate and essential for Sun Pop Blue.—kb]

"The Lords of the Instrumentality who are here on Fomalhaut III. There is the Lord Femtiosex, who is just and without pity ... There is the Lady Goroke ... who has shown kindnesses to underpeople, as long as the kindnesses were lawful ones. And there is the Lady Arabella Underwood, whose justice no man can understand." ["The Dead Lady of Clown Town", Cordwainer Smith]

The science-fiction writings of Cordwainer Smith consist of some twenty-odd short stories and two novels, which chart the history of an evolving civilisation over some fifteen thousand years. The history is internally consistent, and each story contributes to a coherent picture of the technological, social and spiritual development of the future described.

In real life, Smith was Dr Paul Linebarger, Professor in Asiatic Studies at Johns Hopkins university and colonel in US military intelligence, accomplished linguist and foreign policy adviser to the state department. His writing style, partly inspired by Chinese narrative techniques, more closely resembles poetry than the conventional dry prose of science-fiction, and his stories are dense with literary and historical references and more or less complex linguistic puns. Running through the entire work is a consistent morality and outlook, whose principal themes recur again and again in stories often written many years apart.

The broad outlines of Smith's future civilisation can be briefly sketched. Travel between the stars and the consequent expansion of human culture through the universe is made possible by the invention of 'planoforming' ships that travel faster than light, and by the development of novel systems to protect their passengers and crew against the dangers of space. In this new interstellar culture, true humans live lives of privileged ease, while work is done by robots and by 'underpeople', animals genetically modified to have near-human intelligence and form. Over it all presides the Instrumentality, a benign but absolute dictatorship composed of a ruling nobility who use their technological and telepathic powers to maintain the status quo and to dispense an abstract and dispassionate justice. It is against this background that the principal themes of Smith's stories - love, courage, cruelty, hope, innocence, belief - are played out.

*Repurposing: dot-com-speak for outright theivery.