The Rediscovery of Man

In 1950, an unknown author under the pseudonym of Cordwainer Smith published a short story in an obscure magazine that was hardly read. The magazine disappeared, but the story remained and slowly gained prestige and admiration in the world of science fiction. But nobody knew who Cordwainer Smith actually was. Over de next few decades, the mysterious Smith published another two score short stories of remarkable genius and readers discovered that all these stories were somehow linked and formed an immense arc of future history. But who was this Cordwainer Smith? It turned out to be a man named Paul Linebarger, an expert in psychological warfare and godson of Chinese prime minister Sun Yat-Sen. His best stories are now bundled as The Rediscovery of Man. The “rediscovery of man” has a double meaning for me. The starfarers in Smith’s tales are tragic, human figures (even if they are not always, technically, human) and are given a mythical feel in later stories that refer back to earlier ones. Smith asks himself what it means to be human, and what it means to love and feel, in strange future times. He does so far more profoundly than most SF writers. So, while Smith’s universe is one of the most unique, strange and beautiful, it is also one of the most real, because he combines it with real people. He rediscovered man in science fiction. After reading a few of his stories, I got the impression that Smith was narrating them to me from a distant future as legends of the past. I am reading singular moments in history, only it just happens that this history is my future. This is not the age of the Instrumentality of Mankind. Reading Cordwainer Smith feels like gaining a cultural background of an unknown age in the shape of striking stories from a genius imagination. See what science fiction is capable of.