We the Underpeople Introduction - Robert Silverberg

"Nobody—with the possible exception of A.E. van Vogt, whose dreamlike, surreal The World of Null-A was first published around the time Cordwainer Smith was writing "Scanners"—wrote science fiction that sounded like that. The lucid, unadorned prose setting forth the immeasurably strange—it was a new kind of voice.

I read on and on. One bizarre term after another tumbled forth: Scanners, the Up-and-Out, the habermans, the Cranching Wire. In time, it all made sense. By the end of the story, forty pages later, I knew that some incomparable master of science fiction had taken me to an invented world like none that had ever been portrayed before.

But who was this Cordwainer Smith?

Suddenly, everybody in the little inner world of science fiction—there couldn't have been more than a few hundred who really cared about it in any more than a casual way—was asking that question. But no answers came forth. William Crawford let it be known that the name was a pseudonym—but for whom? Van Vogt? Hardly. If he had written it, he would have been proud to publish it under his own name. The prolific Henry Kuttner, famous for his innumerable pseudonyms? Heinlein? Sturgeon? None of the theories seemed to add up. The name itself provided no clue. ("Cordwainer" is an archaic term meaning "leather-worker" or "shoemaker.")

The hubbub died down within a few months, and the unknown Mr. Smith and his remarkable story receded into obscurity and might have remained there forever but for Frederik Pohl, not only a writer but an editor of s-f anthologies. Pohl knew about "Scanners" because he had had a story in that same issue of Fantasy Book, and he republished it in 1952 in a paperback called Beyond the End of Time, a fine fat collection that also included work by Bradbury, Asimov, van Vogt, and Heinlein. Science-fiction paperbacks were few and far between back then, and everybody who liked s-f pounced on the Pohl anthology. Thousands of readers who had never so much as heard of Fantasy Book now discovered Cordwainer Smith and clamored for more of his work."


4.5 out of 5

http://www.webscription.net/chapters/1416520953/1416520953.htm

No No Not Rogov! - David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer

Introduction to the story from The Ascent of Wonder

" Cordwainer Smith was the pseudonym of Paul Linebarger, a mysterious and colorful figure who was an expert on psychological warfare (he wrote a standard text) and spent his career in the Intelligence community. He went to college with L. Ron Hubbard, the famous pulp science fiction writer who later invented Scientology, and they published in the same literary magazine. There was apparently some real competitiveness in Linebarger, for he wrote an entire book manuscript (never published) in the late 1940s on the science of mental health. In typical hard sf fashion, both Linebarger and Hubbard were trying to raise psychology to the status of a "real" science.
Nearly all of Smith's science fiction takes place in a consistent future history, "The Instrumentality of Mankind," comprising many stories and one novel, Norstrilia (1975). The series chronicles events in the millennia-long struggle between the human Instrumentality and the Underpeople, intelligent animals biologically transformed into humanlike forms. A devout High Anglican, Smith built complex levels of religious allegory into his series.
As is evident from the foregoing, he was not characteristically an hard sf writer, but he did occasionally explore hard sf territory, although always in an highly ornamented style at the furthest remove from the traditional unornamented prose of scientific reportage normally identified with the "hard stuff."
"No, No, Not Rogov!" is his only sf story set in contemporary times. It is in the mode of invention fiction, but is set in the Soviet Union during the 1940s and beyond. It explores the work of science under totalitarian political conditions, a subject that Linebarger knew well. The setting reflects the ambiguous attitude toward the linkage of the military and scientific establishments that has characterized post-atomic bomb sf. The political/psychological portraits may be assumed to be accurate. It is also a link between the present and his visionary future of the Instrumentality.
The portrayal of experimental science is a chilling parallel to Tiptree's "The Psychologist Who Wouldn't Do Awful Things to Rats." And the portrait of the scientist as a partly-willing political prisoner is an ironic contrast to Kornbluth's "Gomez." It is a work that explodes into something visionary and transcendent and shows Cordwainer Smith's distinctive and unusual voice in sf."


3.5 out of 5

http://ebbs.english.vt.edu/exper/kcramer/anth/Rogov.html

An Introduction to The Ruined Queen of Harvest World - Damien Broderick

"It’s as if I’d always lived part of my dream life—these memories of the future—in the strange, terrible universe of the Instrumentality of Man, with its animal-derived Underpeople and laminated robot brains, its enigmatic Lords and Ladies, ancient Daimoni, planoforming ships crossing the terrors of the Up and Out, Viola Siderea, the vast mushroom tower of Earthport rising from fabled Meeya Meefla."


4.5 out of 5

http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=50231