The Rediscovery of Man (Cordwainer Smith)
Oct. 15th, 2013 11:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahn...So I meant to have this done before Yuletide signups ended, but anyway! At least assignments are not out yet :)
5/5. Short stories, reread. I found earlier this year that there are OTHER PEOPLE IN THE WORLD who have read these stories (who are not people I have personally force-fed them to). So then I had to reread them all to make sure they were as good as I remembered them being, and I was so afraid they wouldn't be. But they were.
This is a subset of Cordwainer Smith (pen-name for Paul Linebarger)'s short stories on the Instrumentality of Man, and as far as I'm concerned it's most if not all of the best ones. Unfortunately (if you live in the US) this particular collection is only available in the UK (part of their excellent SF Masterworks series, which also introduced me to Babel-17, which I have to get around to rereading one of these days), and I bought it while I was there many years ago. (However, if you live in the US, the collection We the Underpeople has most of these stories. And you can also get the complete collected stories.)
It is an amazing set of short stories: the dense and imaginative and poetic use of language is equaled only by the vast sweep of its future history. The animal-derived underpeople who fight for their own place! The humans who are regimented and coddled into unhappiness! Planoformed ships that sail between the stars (and sometimes burn out the brain of the pilots)! The always-ethical-but-frequently-magnificently-amoral Lords and Ladies of the Instrumentality! (Or perhaps the other way around?) The Rediscovery of Man! The scintillating display of idea and prose pyrotechnics, not to mention the constant allusions (only about a fourth of which I think I get)! The investigation of questions of humanity and free will and equality! And I always, always cry when I read "The Dead Lady of Clown Town," bah. I have never read anything else like these stories. I don't think there is anything else like these stories. (Although I've read stories by other authors that were clearly influenced by these, hi early Orson Scott Card!)
I love these so very much I don't have much to say about them. Instead, here, have some quotes from various stories:
"The Burning of the Brain":
I tell you, it is sad, it is more than sad, it is fearful—for it is a dreadful thing to go into the up-and-out, to fly without flying, to move between the stars as a moth may drift among the leaves on a summer night.
"The Dead Lady of Clown Town":
You already know the end - the immense drama of Lord Jestocost, seventh of his line, and how the cat-girl C'mell initiated the vast conspiracy. But you do not know the beginning, how the first Lord Jestocost got his name, because of the terror and inspiration which his mother, Lady Goroke, obtained from the famous real-life drama of the dog-girl D'joan.
"Under Old Earth":
There were the Douglas-Oyang planets, which circled their sun in a single cluster, riding around and around the same orbit unlike any other planets known. There were the gentlemen-suicides back on Earth, who gambled their lives—even more horribly, gambled sometimes for things worse than their lives—against different kinds of geophysics which real men had never experienced. There were girls who fell in love with such men, however stark and dreadful their personal fates might be. There was the Instrumentality, with its unceasing labor to keep man man. And there were the citizens who walked in the boulevards before the Rediscovery of Man. The citizens were happy. They had to be happy. If they were found sad, they were calmed and drugged and changed until they were happy again.
"Alpha Ralpha Boulevard":
We were drunk with happiness in those early years. Everybody was, especially the young people. These were the first years of the Rediscovery of Man, when the Instrumentality dug deep in the treasury, reconstructing the old cultures, the old languages, and even the old troubles. The nightmare of perfection had taken our forefathers to the edge of suicide. Now under the leadership of the Lord Jestocost and the Lady Alice More, the ancient civilizations were rising like great land masses out of the sea of the past. I myself was the first man to put a postage stamp on a letter, after fourteen thousand years. I took Virginia to hear the first piano recital. We watched at the eye-machine when cholera was released in Tasmania, and saw the Tasmanians dancing in the streets, now that they did not have to be protected any more. Everywhere, things became exciting. Everywhere, men and women worked with a wild will to build a more imperfect world.
The only thing I do not love about these stories — and you can start to see it even in these short excerpts — is that it struck me on this latest reread that, particularly in the early stories, the treatment of gender/women in them is, um, very 1950's, full of romanticizing and protecting women because they're so frail and beautiful, y'know? And/or putting them on a pedestal. I mean, he tries, he really tries — Helen America is a heroine in her own right, as are Elaine and C'mell… but it's just all a bit off.
This actually usually doesn't bother me in Golden-Age-era SF (I mean, I can read books' worth of Asimov or A.E. Van Vogt or whoever without blinking an eye at the male-domination and the damsels in distress), but it does bother me here because in so many other ways — prose, the nuanced treatment of the underpeople and their rights, grappling with tricky questions about the meaning of life and free will and what it means to be human — in all these other ways he was leaps and bounds ahead of his time, and it's just a bit jarring to have this one piece where he's… not. (But even here, he wins a bit: the Ladies of the Instrumentality are awesome. We just don't get to see them that much.)
5/5. Short stories, reread. I found earlier this year that there are OTHER PEOPLE IN THE WORLD who have read these stories (who are not people I have personally force-fed them to). So then I had to reread them all to make sure they were as good as I remembered them being, and I was so afraid they wouldn't be. But they were.
This is a subset of Cordwainer Smith (pen-name for Paul Linebarger)'s short stories on the Instrumentality of Man, and as far as I'm concerned it's most if not all of the best ones. Unfortunately (if you live in the US) this particular collection is only available in the UK (part of their excellent SF Masterworks series, which also introduced me to Babel-17, which I have to get around to rereading one of these days), and I bought it while I was there many years ago. (However, if you live in the US, the collection We the Underpeople has most of these stories. And you can also get the complete collected stories.)
It is an amazing set of short stories: the dense and imaginative and poetic use of language is equaled only by the vast sweep of its future history. The animal-derived underpeople who fight for their own place! The humans who are regimented and coddled into unhappiness! Planoformed ships that sail between the stars (and sometimes burn out the brain of the pilots)! The always-ethical-but-frequently-magnificently-amoral Lords and Ladies of the Instrumentality! (Or perhaps the other way around?) The Rediscovery of Man! The scintillating display of idea and prose pyrotechnics, not to mention the constant allusions (only about a fourth of which I think I get)! The investigation of questions of humanity and free will and equality! And I always, always cry when I read "The Dead Lady of Clown Town," bah. I have never read anything else like these stories. I don't think there is anything else like these stories. (Although I've read stories by other authors that were clearly influenced by these, hi early Orson Scott Card!)
I love these so very much I don't have much to say about them. Instead, here, have some quotes from various stories:
"The Burning of the Brain":
I tell you, it is sad, it is more than sad, it is fearful—for it is a dreadful thing to go into the up-and-out, to fly without flying, to move between the stars as a moth may drift among the leaves on a summer night.
"The Dead Lady of Clown Town":
You already know the end - the immense drama of Lord Jestocost, seventh of his line, and how the cat-girl C'mell initiated the vast conspiracy. But you do not know the beginning, how the first Lord Jestocost got his name, because of the terror and inspiration which his mother, Lady Goroke, obtained from the famous real-life drama of the dog-girl D'joan.
"Under Old Earth":
There were the Douglas-Oyang planets, which circled their sun in a single cluster, riding around and around the same orbit unlike any other planets known. There were the gentlemen-suicides back on Earth, who gambled their lives—even more horribly, gambled sometimes for things worse than their lives—against different kinds of geophysics which real men had never experienced. There were girls who fell in love with such men, however stark and dreadful their personal fates might be. There was the Instrumentality, with its unceasing labor to keep man man. And there were the citizens who walked in the boulevards before the Rediscovery of Man. The citizens were happy. They had to be happy. If they were found sad, they were calmed and drugged and changed until they were happy again.
"Alpha Ralpha Boulevard":
We were drunk with happiness in those early years. Everybody was, especially the young people. These were the first years of the Rediscovery of Man, when the Instrumentality dug deep in the treasury, reconstructing the old cultures, the old languages, and even the old troubles. The nightmare of perfection had taken our forefathers to the edge of suicide. Now under the leadership of the Lord Jestocost and the Lady Alice More, the ancient civilizations were rising like great land masses out of the sea of the past. I myself was the first man to put a postage stamp on a letter, after fourteen thousand years. I took Virginia to hear the first piano recital. We watched at the eye-machine when cholera was released in Tasmania, and saw the Tasmanians dancing in the streets, now that they did not have to be protected any more. Everywhere, things became exciting. Everywhere, men and women worked with a wild will to build a more imperfect world.
The only thing I do not love about these stories — and you can start to see it even in these short excerpts — is that it struck me on this latest reread that, particularly in the early stories, the treatment of gender/women in them is, um, very 1950's, full of romanticizing and protecting women because they're so frail and beautiful, y'know? And/or putting them on a pedestal. I mean, he tries, he really tries — Helen America is a heroine in her own right, as are Elaine and C'mell… but it's just all a bit off.
This actually usually doesn't bother me in Golden-Age-era SF (I mean, I can read books' worth of Asimov or A.E. Van Vogt or whoever without blinking an eye at the male-domination and the damsels in distress), but it does bother me here because in so many other ways — prose, the nuanced treatment of the underpeople and their rights, grappling with tricky questions about the meaning of life and free will and what it means to be human — in all these other ways he was leaps and bounds ahead of his time, and it's just a bit jarring to have this one piece where he's… not. (But even here, he wins a bit: the Ladies of the Instrumentality are awesome. We just don't get to see them that much.)
no subject
Date: 2013-10-17 09:47 pm (UTC)(Isaac Asimov, though: still awesome.)
Yaaaaay Cordwainer Smith! (5 offers? Seriously? Those people are much braver or much better writers than I am. Probably both.)
no subject
Date: 2013-10-18 06:08 pm (UTC)Isaac Asimov: still awesome, still super problematic. (I unsuccessfully petitioned
no subject
Date: 2013-10-18 06:22 pm (UTC)