I recently finished Cordwainer Smith's THE INSTRUMENTALITY OF MANKIND (1979), the first book by him I had read.
Frederik Pohl's introduction is characteristically clear, humane, interesting. Pohl was very good at this form: talking about SF and narrating its history and personnel.
The book contains a timeline indicating Smith's projected future, to 16000 AD. Nine of the stories in the book are from this future plan. Five more are apparently not but are rather free-standing.
From the first set:
'No, No, Not Rogov!' depicts Soviet scientists setting up telepathic science in the Cold War era. It's rather unusual in being set near the present and featuring actual people like Stalin. It may be politically significant in suggesting that much of the high tech of Smith's future, especially involving telepathy or psychic powers, derive from the Cold War and specifically from the Soviet side. Smith was a deeply political person so this must have meant something to him.
'War No. 81-Q' is a very short piece first published in 1928 (!!). It depicts a future war between the US and Mongolia. The war is fought in proxy fashion, at a distance, with pilots controlling craft remotely, under conditions set by the 'Universal War Board'. This story seems very perceptive for 1928, in seriously imagining a different way that war could be conducted in the future.
'Mark Elf' (1957) takes us to a further future Earth in which telepathy is prevalent. A young woman, Carlotta, lands in a spacecraft that had been fired out in the Nazi period as WWII was ending; she has been cryogenically preserved. Oddly then the story is rooted in real 1940s history, yet also an alternate history, as the Nazis did no such thing. The world in which this girl lands is odd, hard to fathom. It features talking animals (a bit like those of Wells' DR MOREAU or Lethem's GUN).
'The Queen of the Afternoon' (1978) is a direct sequel to this story, featuring another German girl, Juli, who does just the same the first one. She lands amid talking dogs who can read her thoughts, in a world full of strange things like 'Fighting Trees'. It's not very easy for the reader to orient amid all this. Eventually the girl is taken on as a replacement wife by the ageless husband of Carlotta. At the end a third German girl, Karla, is landing. It is bizarre how Smith has constructed a whole sequence of future events around cryogenically preserved survivors from Nazi Germany landing. His world here combines something dangerously close to home - Nazism, WWII - with a future that is very strange and hard to understand.
At this point I am rather struggling with Smith, not finding much reward for the effort he takes.
In 'When The People Fell' (1959) a journalist is interviewing a space pilot about his past, and the pilot recollects an event on Venus. He describes its colonisation, I think, by a body called 'the Goonhogo', a not very memorable or suggestive name for a future political entity which seems to correspond to China: 'a sort of separate Chineseian government. Seventeen billion of them all crowded in one small part of Earth' (73). This Goonhgo invades Venus by landing 82 million people who work to smother the local fauna called 'loudies'. Many sacrifice themselves. The story thus presents an image of a state (like China) using its population as dispensable raw material to gain land.
'Think Blue, Count Two' (1962) describes a long-distance space voyage where people are frozen and asleep for the duration. But they can wake up, and technological contingencies are prepared to stop them doing bad things if this happens. The technology is obscure and hard to understand. Here it involves something about a mouse brain that is encoded with positive messages that will affect any assailants of a girl. Writing that, no, I don't understand it. The girl does indeed get awoken on the voyage, along with two males, one of whom prepares to torture and kill his companions, until she activates the mouse brain defence. This produces apparitions who are not real but who, because they are wired to the people's psyches, can affect them and damage them. This intervention enables them to reach their destination successfully. One feature of the story is that the bad passenger is partly motivated by misogyny, a desire for revenge against women who he thinks manipulate males. This is unpleasant, but he later disavows it.
'The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All' was I think previously unpublished. It somewhat resembles another story, 'Drunkboat'. It describes the return of a character, one Colonel Harkening, from a new form of space travel which 'sought to compress living, material bodies into a two-dimensional frame while skipping the living body and its material adjuncts through two dimensions only to some inconceivably remote point in space' (120). Smith is interested in such things: imagined science that allows movement through space to be faster and more efficient, via other dimensions, yet which then takes a physical toll on humans. He describes the after-effects quite a lot. (A slight parallel with the 'jumping' of Bester's THE STARS MY DESTINATION.) The Colonel is brought back to life by a 'secondary telepath', a young woman who talks in archaic fashion: 'I am thy sister under the love of God' (125). The other scientists also have to join in a technical experiment using helmets to get into the Colonel's mind. 'We felt that we had been made the toys or the pets of some gigantic form of life immensely beyond the limits of human imagiantion, and that that life in looking at the four of us [...] had seen us and the colonel and had realized that the colonel needed to go back to his own kind' (128). It works. So here Smith comes close to religion.
'From Gustible's Planet' (1962) describes the arrival on Earth, shortly after 'the four thousandth anniversary of the opening of space', of an alien race, the Apicians, who look like ducks. They have the ability to freeze people through telepathy. They love food above all, and spend their time on Earth eating it. Eventually human beings start cooking and eating the Apicians. Conveniently their ability to freeze people is cancelled when people are 'animated by a mad hunger' (135). The story is basically zanily comic. I'm not sure it can be called satire as it may not have a target.
'Drunkboat' (1963) reprises the scenario mentioned above: an individual has returned from what I think is called 'planoform' through distant space. He is in hospital and the scientists seek to revive him. This time the story has more complications. One is that the man is called Artyr Rambo, so the whole story is somehow an elaborate reference to Rimbaud and 'The Drunken Boat'. This Rambo is also fixated on one Eliabeth. It seems that his journey was arranged by one Lord Crudelta, a senior figure in the Instrumentality, which is some kind of galactic government. Thi Lord lands on Earth and starts a battle at the hospital, then is put on trial. Why? I don't recall. I'm afraid that this quite long story is not very clear to me. At the trial, Rambo describes his space-hopping experience in a way that is genuinely notable:
'I went down rivers which did not exist. I felt people around me though I could not see them, red people shooting arrows at live bodies [...] In the wintertime where there is no summer [...] Where crazy lanterns stared with idiot eyes. Where the waves washed back and forth with the dead of all the ages. Where the stars became a pool and I swam in it.' (169)
What this reminds me of is Bob Dylan's 'A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall', c.1963 - the same year as the story's publication.
That concludes the stories that are part of Smith's elaborate future plan. The others are more free-standing. They tend to be closer to the present.
'Western Science is So Wonderful' (1958) depicts a Martian who can change shape, who is in China. He meets US, Soviet and Maoist troops, then departs from CT. I suppose the main idea is the Martian's cheery fascination with minor human technologies like cigarette lighters.
'Nancy' (1959) is another tale about new forms of space travel. One Gordon Greene is sent into space. Alone, he encounters a young woman, Nancy, who is 'every girl that you ever wanted. I am the illusion that you always wanted but I am you because I am in the depths of you' (195). The concept is about encountering your ideal as if it's real. After returning to Earth, Greene is told that Nancy isn't real, but he won't believe it. In italicised passages, a weeping Greene also later talks to a cousin: 'A man has got to be fearfully drunk to tell about a real life that he had and a good one, and a beautiful one and let it go, doesn't he?' (195). In some way he never gives up the illusion of the love of this woman. I think that Smith may be getting at something large and serious here, about belief, feelings, hope, though he can make his themes hard to get at through the tech paraphernalia.
'The Fife of Bodidharma' (1959) describes an ancient instrument that can bring utopia or disaster depending how it's played. The story ends on a cliffhanger as we don't know whether the fife's playing is about to bring disaster to the world. The story shares with others Smith's interest in ancient Eastern mysticism and in Nazi soldiers.
'Angerhelm' (1959) is set in the Cold War, and describes intrigues between the US and USSR over a secret message that has been discerned amid a tape of static. The message leads to the home of one Nelson Angerhelem in Minnesota. He can hear onthe tape what others cannot: a message from his late brother, speaking from purgatory or even a private 'hell' full of regret. He dictates it to the officials. The story might recall, say, PKD's Ubik, in which characters communicate beyond death.
'The Good Friends' (1963) is a short story describing, once again, a man who has returned from space and is being treated by medics. This is clearly a recurring trope, with all its implications. The spaceman describes how his last cruise came back with all his pals having a great time. The doctor then tells him that these pals are imaginary: 'You were alone in a one-man craft [...] You were starved, dehydrated and nine-tenths dead. The boat had a freeze unit and you were fed by the emergency kit [...] You didn't have any friends with you. They came out of your own mind' (238).
This is cold, but it isn't as bad as it might be, or as some other stories are. The fellow has survived, he was enabled by a pleasant illusion. But I do now see patterns. Smith has a fascination with extreme forms of space travel and their effect on body and mind. He's interested in versions of telepathy, which are crucial to his scientific future. He often uses medics and scientists as characters, who are dealing with damaged people and trying to revive them. The theme of telepathy often crosses with a theme of delusion - in 'The Good Friends', 'Nancy', perhaps 'Drunkboat' - illusions that make people happier or keep them going.
The book improves somewhat as it goes. I still can't make much sense of those early ones about Germans landing in the far future and meeting talking animals. The stories outside the 'Intrumentality' canon are, on the whole, easier for me to manage than the ones in it.
― the pinefox, Thursday, 31 August 2023 10:46 (one year ago) link