Four stories by Cordwainer Smith from the period 1958-1961

It has been a while since I have read any Cordwainer Smith stories.  In 2014 (when we were young!) I read "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell," "The Game of Rat and Dragon," "Scanners Live in Vain," "No, No, Not Rogov," "War No. 81-Q," "Mark Elf," and "Queen of the Afternoon."  In 2015 I read "A Planet Named Shayol."  I recommended all those stories, some of them ecstatically, but somehow I haven't read any Cordwainer Smith stories since.  Well, today is the day Smith comes back into my life!

Some time ago I acquired a copy of the 1970 Berkley edition of You Will Never Be the Same, a collection of eight stories that, according to the publication page, were "specially revised for inclusion" in this book.  All of the stories are part of Smith's future history, known as "The Instrumentality of Mankind"; four of them I have already read in other books--the other four, which I have never before read, are the subject of today's blog post.  I am reading them in the order in which they appear here in You Will Never Be the Same.

"The Lady Who Sailed The Soul" (1960)

This one first appeared in an issue of Galaxy with both a space suit and a bikini girl on its cover--cover all those bases, Emsh!  Within the pages of Galaxy, the story itself is illustrated by the Dillons, credited just as "Dillon."  Similarly, isfdb strongly suggests "The Lady Who Sailed The Soul" was co-written by Smith with his wife, Genevieve Linebarger (Smith's real name was Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger) but in Galaxy, and here in You Will Never be the Same, it is just credited to Cordwainer Smith.

In this tale Smith (and his wife, it seems), cleverly and charmingly, give us insight into two future human societies, the society of Earth people who colonized the galaxy on ships driven by colossal solar sails and the later interstellar society that travels almost instantly across the galaxy via "the planoform": the later civilization remembers the sailing days through legends, in particular the legend of the love of Helen America, the sole female master of a solar sailing ship, and Mr. Grey-no-more.

Helen America's mother was a celebrity, a radical feminist (though not terribly radical by 2019 standards, I suspect) apparently driven to feminism because she was unattractive, who kept the identity of Helen's father a secret, a secret she took to her grave when she died in a spacecraft collision when Helen was a teen.  Helen, who took after her unknown father and was in many ways the opposite of her mother, was a genius (at age four she spoke six languages) and became the first woman to train to be a solar sailor.  A solar sailor's career features only one voyage; while the passengers lie frozen in pods, the sailor, integrated into the ship cyborg-style, kept awake by drugs and suffering terrible pain, pilots the ship for forty years, the drugs making it seem to him that only a month has passed, though his body ages the full four decades.  In his sixties after a successful voyage, the pilot's reflexes and nerves are no longer suitable for the job of mastering a solar ship.

When she is in college, the press, as a sort of stunt, set Helen, the genius who is the only woman in the world who wants to be a sailor, up on a date with a sailor who had just arrived from the colony of New Earth, Mr. Grey-no-more.  In part because Mr. Grey-no-more was not from Earth and so had no preconceptions about the famous Helen, which put her at ease, Helen fell in love with him, and asked him to marry her.  He loved her but refused, because he hated the artificial, decadent, corrupt Earth and wanted to get back to New Earth, a colonial society full of vigor where life was still real.   

In a plot development we can see coming but which is still powerful, after he was frozen, Helen got the job of master of the sailing ship Mr. Grey-no-more took to New Earth.  When they arrived on New Earth they were the same age and had both had the agonizing, horrifying, psyche-bending experience of commanding a space ship, totally alone, for forty years, and made a happy life together on the colony, their love becoming the subject of a hundred films over the centuries.  The story ends with what we might call a Christian message, Helen suggesting, as she lies on her death bed a century after their wedding, that if their love was able to conquer space, perhaps it can conquer death itself and she and Mr. Grey-no-more will be together again in the afterlife. 

It makes sense to compare "The Lady Who Sailed The Soul" with Thomas N. Scortia's 1956 "Sea Change" and Walter M. Miller's 1953 "Crucifixius Etiam"; in all three stories people have their bodies radically altered and sacrifice themselves to further man's dream of conquering the stars.  One of the things I like about these stories is that they accept the Malzbergian complaint--"Technology is devouring us and diminishing our humanity!"--but insist that the sacrifice is worth it, that those who sacrifice themselves so we can conquer space are not victims but heroes.  One could probably write a dissertation contrasting Barry N. Malzberg's pessimistic, cynical, individualistic, Jewish-influenced view of space travel with the optimistic, romantic, communitarian, Christian-influenced view of SF writers like Miller and Smith.  Get to work on that, grad students!

"The Lady Who Sailed The Soul" is a moving love story that is also a good future history and high-technology story; it is both romantic and tragic, but avoids being sappy or maudlin, and all the scenes about the space craft and all the medical stuff done to the sailors are effective.  Very good.

When I say "The Lady Who Sailed The Soul" is superior I am embracing the conventional wisdom of the SF community: the story was republished in collections of the best pieces from Galaxy, The Best of Cordwainer Smith, as well as the volume of Issac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories that covers 1960.

"The Burning of the Brain" (1958)

Like "The Lady Who Sailed The Soul," "The Burning of the Brain" is about the sufferings, the sacrifices, of the people who crew the space ships that carry passengers in comfort between the stars.  It feels kind of slight, however.

In the period of Smith's future history in which this story takes place, people travel between the stars via planoform ships; I guess "the planoform" is like hyperspace or whatever.  Passengers can relax in the ship, which can take most any form--the one in the story is a reproduction of Mount Vernon--while the psychic "Go-Captain" and his crew of "pinlighters" guide the vessel through the turbulent stuff of space with their minds; voyages take a few hours.  The greatest of all Go-Captains is Magno Taliano.  A century and a half ago it was a sensation when he married Dolores Oh, the most beautiful woman in the galaxy.  In this period, people get juvenesence treatments so they look as good at 70 or 80 or 150 as they did when they were 20 or 30, but Dolores Oh has decided to skip the treatments and become hideously ugly with age--she wants to know that Captain Taliano loves her for herself, not her looks.  Taliano is a stand up guy, and really does seem to love her as much as he did when she was the dream girl of every man in the galaxy.

The plot: There is a malfunction on Taliano's ship that looks like George Washington's plantation house--all the many maps of the planoform are gone, so they are lost in hyperspace and will soon die.  But wait--in Taliano's memory are enough map fragments to get them back home, but letting the pinlighters extract these fragments for use will destroy much of Taliano's mind, reducing his intellect to that of an amiable moron.  Dolores Oh seems to relish this prospect--if Taliano is an imbecile he won't have the ability to fake still loving her, so if he still loves her it must be sincere.  Taliano's niece, Dita from the Great South House, is also aboard the ship.  She is a psychic herself, and, somehow, as Taliano's brain is burned up, his Go-Captain skills are transferred to her brain, and she becomes one of the greatest Go-Captains in the galaxy.

This story is not bad, but pales beside "The Lady Who Sailed The Soul," with which it shares its themes.  The science stuff didn't hold together as well here--how did Dita got her uncle's skills as his brain was degraded?--and I am not sure really what the point of having her in the story at all was, I guess as a sort of viewpoint character?

After first appearing in If, "The Burning of the Brain" has been included in several anthologies, including some of stories deemed "masterpieces," stories about starships, and even a Baen collection of stories influenced by Rudyard Kipling.

"Golden the Ship Was--Oh! Oh! Oh!" (1959)

In this story, which is good, but like "The Burning of the Brain," a little slight, we see how the corrupt Lords of the Instrumentality, Earth's decadent rulers, defend Mother Terra from hostile space empires.

The dictator Raumsog, ruler of some planet outside Earth's control, wants to conquer the Earth.  He tries to bribe the Lords of the Instrumentality, but when this does not work he resorts to launching his powerful space navy.  The forces of Earth outwit and outfight Raumsog through trickery (the Earth has a huge space ship, a ship bigger than a star, but it is a sham, a thin shell built around a tiny space ship which could not withstand a single hit) ruthlessness and unconventional weapons (a small Earth ship raids Raumsog's planet, using the psychic powers of a little girl to cause the planet's population bad luck and the psychic powers of a "chronopathic idiot" to shift the vessel a few seconds in time in order to dodge enemy fire and then releasing poison and disease on the world that wipe out 95% of its inhabitants.)  The Lords then erase the memories of the crew that destroyed Raumsog so that their means of victory remains a mystery and many Earth people never even knew a war took place.

"Golden the Ship Was--Oh! Oh! Oh!" was first published in Amazing, and, as with "The Lady Who Sailed The Soul," isfdb asserts it was co-authored by Smith with his wife Genevieve Linebarger.  "Golden the Ship Was--Oh! Oh! Oh!" has mostly been republished in Smith collections, though it did show up in the Souvenir Book of Readercon 10 in 1998.  I have to say the Readercon 10 Souvenir Book looks pretty awesome, with fiction by and essays about some of the MPorcius Fiction Log staff's favorite writers, including Gene Wolfe, Barry Malzberg, Edmond Hamilton, Leigh Brackett, and Thomas Disch.     

"Alpha Ralpha Boulevard" (1961)

"Alpha Ralpha Boulevard" was first published in F&SF and would go on to be republished in numerous anthologies, including Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg's Great Science Fiction of the 20th Century, which has a cover illo of a sexalicious space queen and her beautiful space palace that is turning me into a monarchist.

Life on Earth has become so easy, with no work and no danger, so stale, that society is on the brink of suicide.  So the Lords of the Instrumentality launch a program called "The Rediscovery of Man" that reintroduces disease, accidents, violence, and all kinds of pre-computer age cultural artifacts.  For example, the narrator, Paul, and his wife, Virginia, have their brains reprogrammed so that they are like 19th- or 20th-century French people--they speak French, want to go to cafes (which the government has built and staffed with robot waiters) and so forth.  Many Earthlings embrace these exciting changes to their lives, but Virginia, like Dolores Oh in "The Burning of the Brain," wants to know that the love she shares with Paul is real, no just something programmed into them like the conjugation of French verbs.

To find out if their love is real, they climb up Alpha Ralpha Boulevard to consult a mysterious computer that rests halfway up a twelve-mile high tower--some people worship this computer, especially artificial people ("homonculi"), though consulting it is considered declasse by most pure-blooded humans.  Virginia is one of the few natural humans to take the computer seriously.  Now that the weather machines are all deactivated, and people's brains are no longer programmed against violence and fear, the trip up Alpha Ralpha Boulevard is dangerous and Paul and Virginia experience a horrible and tragic adventure.

This is a good story, full of SF ideas and images, and features an appearance by cat-woman C'Mell, though I am afraid it doesn't move me like "The Lady Who Sailed The Soul" does.  I guess "The Lady Who Sailed The Soul" set a high bar.

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The critics consider The Instrumentality of Mankind to be a major work in the SF field, and I feel no reason to dissent--the four stories we dealt with today are all worthwhile, and the first I found quite powerful.  There are still more Instrumentality stories I have not read, and hopefully someday I will read them.