Book Review: Instrumentality of Mankind by Cordwainer Smith

 

Instrumentality of Mankind by Cordwainer Smith

238 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Published May, 1979 by Del Rey / Ballantine

Cordwainer Smith is more famous than the real-life person behind his work. The author publishing under that name had a short career in science fiction. He was prolific considering the short span he worked in and the busy life he lived under his real name. Paul Linebarger was a famous professor, a noted East Asia scholar, and an expert in psychological warfare. He was also Cordwainer Smith.  I am going into his story more in an upcoming Amazing Stories Column. I have heard many times that Cordwainer Smith was one of the best weird SF writers active in a window between the Golden Age and the New Wave. His death at 53 years old in the early 60s means we have very little to go on.

Cordwainer Smith lived up to all the hype. I knew he was a weird writer but the loudest LOL I had when read it on my bus commute, Let's just say I was not prepared for the Martian Kiju Mao Tze-Tung "I'm a pro-Soviet Demon," said the apparent Mao Tze-Tung. "and these are materialized Communist hospitality arrangements. I hope you like them."

The Instrumentality of Mankind is a 14-story collection that is set loosely in the same fictional future Smith envisioned for 13,000-16,000 AD.  There is a helpful timeline published at the opening of the book. I now feel I should have looked at it a bit more. The stories were produced mostly in the last decade before the author died, but most curious is War No. 81-Q which was published in 1928, and two were published long after his death in the late 70s with the first edition of this. "The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All" and "The Queen of the Afternoon" were new to this book.

The fun thing about the 1928 story was published when Linebarger was 15 years old in a Washington D.C. schools publication. It doesn’t come off as Juvenile at all. It was clear that this soon-to-be-famous academic grew up much like many of the authors who walked that line between the major eras. He was reading SF magazines and making up his own stories early.

“No, No, Not Rogov!” Written in 1959 highlights the author’s knowledge of political issues and makes it a great introduction to the collection. The first story highlights some of the science fiction elements that CS was great at. A more common idea today the telepathy spy helmet is very cool. “With infinitely delicate tuning he had succeeded one day in picking up the eyesight of their second chauffeur and had managed thanks to a needle thrust in just below his own right eyelid, to “see” through the other man’s eyes as the other man, all unaware, washed their limousine 1,600 meters away.” I liked that the telepathy espionage was difficult.
 
“Mark Elf” the story has a bit of WW II German feeling to the start. It is a German rocket test that curiously sends a Nazi into the far future. The atmosphere of this story played to CS’s talents. His knowledge of other countries and cultures is one of the keys that makes his books stand out.
My favorite story in the collection is the one that graces the cover of the Del Rey paperback. “When the People Fell” is a delightfully weird tale of Chinese colonists using balloons to land on Venus. It is a little out of date and silly but if you like retro SF that is a feature, not a bug. “The Waywonjong didn’t come to Venus. He just sent his people. He sent them floating down to Venus, to tackle the Venusian ecology with the only weapons which could make the settlement possible  - people themselves. Human arms could tackle the loudies, who had been called “old ones” by the first Chinesian scouts to cover Venus.”

What most amazed me was an incredible story called “Think Blue, Count Two.” That included a spaceship with a solar sail and the description is not that far off from how the solar sails work on the breakthrough star shot. The fact that the ship in the story uses the sun for the first 80 years of the journey and has to find interstellar sources for the rest was amazingly ahead of the times.
Another great story is “The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All” which tells the story of the first ship to “Planoform” which is the Cordwainer Warp/Hyperdrive hand wavium device. The story reminded me of the TARDIS from Doctor Who and my favorite Leigh Brackett Novel The Big Jump.

As a three-decade-long ethical vegan the 1962 story from “Gustible's Planet” brought up tons of ethical issues that of course disturbed and pleased me at the same time. In the story, humans make contact with intelligent bird-like creatures the Apicians.  They are telepathic and smart and when a bunch of them are burned in a spaceship accident meat-eating humans discover they are delicious. Played mostly for laughs I found this to be a misanthropic little ditty.

So yes the hype is real. Cordwainer Smith’s stories are great examples of mid-20th century transitional Science fiction that has the influences of the golden age while planting seeds for a coming revolution of the New Wave. The next review will be his Hugo-nominated novel The Planet Buyer.