The Rediscovery of Cordwainer Smith

Defining historical, biographical, and literary contexts for Smith’s writings, I analyze his oblique, elliptical style and discuss his approach to the portrayal of heroes. Smith’s consistent focus, even in such non-sf as Ria (1947), Carola (1948), and Atomsk (1949), is on isolated protagonists caught in a maelstrom of contrary impulses; Martel in “Scanners Live in Vain” is torn between body and spirit, domesticity and duty, indoctrination and independent thought. Smith’s sf also assesses the “human” cost of shifting paradigms—sudden social and scientific change—and provides a haunting critique of social control, a matter addressed covertly in his fiction and quite openly in his military intelligence textbook, Psychological Waffare (1948). Inherently speculative, science fictional, in his bold extrapolation (into a very far future) of postwar social and epistemological issues, Smith is unique among postwar writers in rejecting the violence and xenophobia of the popular tradition and also the tidy closure of Campbellian hard sf. During the 1950s and 1960s, his enigmatic stories redrew the boundaries (and re-stocked the visionary imagery) of science fiction

Art · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Scottish History and National Identity