The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith

Cordwainer Smith's slim body of work has been packaged and repackaged in many different ways. The first collection I read titled "The Rediscovery of Man" was a paperback, and the first story in it was "Scanners Live in Vain". The SF Masterworks edition seems to be the same as that collection.

A later edition is subtitled "The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith", and it is this more substantial book which I am reviewing here. It's worth seeking out. There could be some confusion about which one you have, possibly exacerbated by the "incomplete" SF Masterworks cover being used for the "complete" edition in some online entries. You can quickly tell if you have the longer one because the first story in it is "No No, Not Rogov", one of four stories detailing the early stages of Smith's so-called future history of the "Instrumentality of Mankind". It also has some marvelous illustrations from the original magazine publication of his stories.

Once you have the "complete" edition, you only need to get his one published novel "Norstrilia" and you are a Cordwainer Smith completist.

I've just read a short essay by Ursula le Guin, praising, critiquing and analysing Cordwainer Smith's work. She writes: ‘Cordwainer Smith’s stories were an amazement to me when I first read them. Forty years later, they still are…exuberant language, brilliant invention and hallucinatory imagery’.

As usual, le Guin gets it right, but sometimes I love Cordwainer Smith, at other times I find him slightly disturbing. A few of these stories drag, many of them are scintillating page-turners. At their core, they are myths, fantasy, or fairy tales, transposed to varying degrees into a science fiction setting. Occasionally I was put off by his Christian evangelising. It seemed to get worse as Smith became more devout later in his career. Earlier stories had a more nuanced approach to religion. He sexualises his child characters on a couple of occasions, and I couldn't immediately discern any excuse for it, but these were isolated incidents. On the plus side, he has more women characters than probably 10 of his contemporaries combined.

The idea of a closet science fiction nerd leading a double life working for the State Department and Johns Hopkins University adds to the fascination of Cordwainer Smith, whose real name was Paul Linebarger. He'd be a great subject for a biopic. One of his best creations, the underpeople, can be seen as a version of the wild and beautiful parade of minorities fighting for their rights before and after these stories were written. Smith even creates a sort of acid freak musical rebel in the form of Sun-boy, although you get the feeling he's more Charles Manson than Jimi Hendrix. I wanted him to be the latter. Smith mostly writes with nuance. It's hard to say who is a villain and who is a hero most of the time, and the descriptions of the bongo-slapping nuclear-enhanced hipster of the underworld are super cool, even if they were written by a military man who was in another galaxy compared to the beatniks and hippies rising up all around him.

For all his background in warfare and governance; for all his drift into traditional religion - Cordwainer Smith always seems to be seeking for a better way humanity can quest after. Ultimately love and hope are at the heart of his stories. In real life he was part of the establishment, but in his fictional universe he is a rebel, even a revolutionary at the same time.