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resembles poetry than the conventional dry prose of science-fiction, and his stories are dense with literary and historical references and more or less complex linguistic puns.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.

Stop-action Super-fast Freeze-frame Bongo-beat Photography

A bullet piercing, penetrating, pulverizing an otherwise placid pear, from the IDF Tactical Logic website.

IDF Tactical Logic a bunch of cool bullet-going-through-things pictures, along with panoramic shots of destroyer fleets and ads for glock holsters. Definitely a Peace-Through-Superior-Firepower kinda site. 

Now let's use the same technology for art. Alva Bernadine 's Slap  
 

Not a bongo, but more fun to slap.

Which do you prefer? 

"A friend phoned me one lunchtime and asked what I was up to. I told her I was taking portraits of people bursting balloons, shooting bottles and smashing panes of glass using a sound activated switch. I could freeze the moment of impact rather like the famous Harold Edgerton picture of a bullet passing through an apple. In a dark room you attach the switch to the flash then open the shutter of the camera. The sound of impact fires the flash freezing the action at several thousandths of a second.
"She was a submissive and immediately offered her bottom for experimentation. She already had a video of arses wobbling in slow motion. She and her partner came round with a bag full of flagellation implements and we tried them all.
"Subsequently, I decided I wanted to try it on a variety of different shaped arses and asked female acquaintances and women I met at parties to aid me in my objective scientific experiments by having there arse spanked. To my surprise 50% agreed."— Alva Bernadine

Dredging epistles past. The following from early 2005, right when I had plunged into composing the pastel works which would comprise [working title] Sun Change: Summer of '68, Autumnal Sun, Winter Blue, Isle of Islay Revisited—technicolor reworkings of which to be released later this year.

Friends-

I've been remiss with my updates, I know. After my last epistle in September, wherein I described going to the Playboy radio talkshow, Night Calls, to talk about HoneyBun, several people suggested I write a book about the vagabond marketing of HoneyBun and my newfound gypsy lifestyle.

Then it was time to go the International Lingerie Show in Las Vegas, preparing for which consumed every waking minute for almost a month. After Las Vegas, I was waiting for some major revelation to come to me about Las Vegas to come to me that I might share some grand new insight. Alas, what can I say about that place which hasn't already been said?

I just finished a stint of house-(and dog)-sitting in Laguna Beach. Lovely house. The dogs were three adorable pugs, cute, affectionate, prolific beyond any expectation in befouling and beshitting the lovely home up on the hill.

My cup runneth over.

Acquiring one of these pug dogs (rescue cases) is both noble and honorable, I think; two: evidence of neurotic and masochistic tendencies of the most narcissistic and grandiose kind; three: symptomatic of mental illness, unimaginable grandiosity, borderline megalomania, plain and simple.

But the house was lovely and when the dogs were peaceful or sleeping, afforded a magnificent view of the Pacific Ocean.

In the afternoons, the sunlight on the water shimmered like a great silver pavilion stretching to the horizon, rippling into blue at the edges.

At night, the moon rose in the sky and its light made a shining pathway across the waters. Venus shone brightly right above the moon in the dark, star-splattered sky. The multi-colored lights of jets, whispering in and out of the Long Beach airport, floated across the muted blur of the horizon in the distance.

Along the reef in the bay, calamari boats lined up, perhaps two hundred feet apart, halogen lights burning down into the sea to attract the squid—an incandescent necklace on the calm waters of the bay. They moved night after night, following the squid.