Cordwainer Smith: The Ballad of Lost Linebarger Part 2 - Frederik Pohl

"There was a problem. After a few more fine stories about the associates of Lord Jestecost and C’Mell the cat lady and all, I got a saddening letter from him. He wouldn’t be writing any more stories about the Instrumentality, he said, because he had totally run out of additional story ideas. He hadn’t thought that would happen, he told me, because for years he’d kept this little pocket notebook with him, filling it with ideas as they occurred to him, including a number for additional stories in the series. But, alas. he’d been in a small boat somewhere — maybe it was on some Italian lake or Mediterranean bay — and he had leaned incautiously over the side … and the notebook had fallen out of his breast pocket into the water … and he been able to watch it dropping through the crystal-clear water until at last it was out of sight, and was gone. Along with all those never-to-be-written stories"


5 out of 5

http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/2010/12/cordwainer-smith-the-ballad-of-lost-linebarger-part-2/

Cordwainer Smith: The Ballad of Lost Linebarger Part 1 - Frederik Pohl

"It was a story that had appeared in a semi-pro sf magazine from California called, if I remember aright, Fantasy Book. Its title was “Scanners Live in Vain.” It was about a bizarre kind of spaceflight, set in a bizarre future world, .and it was signed as by someone named Cordwainer Smith. So I included it in my lineup, and then had the problem of finding out who could sign a permission for the use of the story and accept the payment for it. “Cordwainer Smith” smelled very much like a pseudonym to me. But for whom? "


5 out of 5

http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/2010/12/cordwainer-smith-the-ballad-of-lost-linebarger-part-1/

The Creation of Cordwainer Smith - Alan C. Elms

Science-Fiction Studies, 1984, 1J, 270-279

A biographical highly detailed overview.

"The eye destroyed in childhood had been replaced by a non-organic prosthesis, a glass shell covering a metal ball. Linebarger wore that prosthesis in his eye-socket for the rest of his life, just as the scanners wore a kind of prosthesis embedded in their chests, their control boxes. Linebarger's glass eye was less trouble-some that his remaining "good" eye (which continued to be an intermittent focus of disease and anxiety). But getting that glass eye necessitated a loss of sensory input, as with the pain-free but non-functioning sensory organs in "Scanners."
An interesting defensive reversal occurs in the story: instead of being blinded when their other sensory connections are severed, the scanners retain only the use of their eyes. For Linebarger, the loss of one eye had increased the importance of the other, and of vision generally. (According to his widow, "That was the one great fear of his life, to go blind. He would rather have been dead than blind. ") A similar defensive reversal involves the fact that Linebarger's eye had been pierced by a wire thrown at him. In the story, the scanners' senses are temporarily restored during "cranching" by a wire with a small sphere at one end, which must be tossed into the air to be activated.
Linebarger's experience of losing his eye as a child does not appear to have been solely responsible for the central theme of "Scanners" (and certainly not for the similar themes of his mainstream novels). But it may well have offered him a powerful set of metaphors and defensive reverse-metaphors to represent another sort of disaster in his life, his "cutting off' or restriction of ordinary human pleasures and social interactions as a means of controlling anxiety and maintaining self-esteem."



5 out of 5

Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger Biographical Summary - Alan C. Elms

[Note: This is a partial working summary, based in large part on Paul Linebarger's own autobiographical lists. I will add to it and further correct it as I continue to work on his biography. For additional biographical information and many photographs of PMAL, see the website maintained by his daughter, Rosana Hart: http://www.cordwainer-smith.com/]


4 out of 5


http://www.ulmus.net/ace/csmith/linebargerbiography.html

A Forest Of Incandescent Bliss a profile of Paul Linebarger wordsmith extraordinary

Short bio from a fanzine.


2.5 out of 5

http://fanac.org/fanzines/Speculation/Speculation33-02.gif