Showing posts with label essay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label essay. Show all posts

Monday, June 14, 2010

Cordwainer Smith - Frank Northern Magill

Critical Survey of Short Fiction: Current writers. Index By Frank Northen Magill

"Book overviewThis series contains 515 essays, revolving around authors of short fiction. Essays are arranged alphabetically by author and provide in-depth overviews of short-story writers. Each essay contains full birth and death data, substantial listings of literary works by genre, and an analysis and survey of the major themes and techniques in the writer's work, using specific titles for examples. Finally, there is a list of other publication by genre, and an annotated bibliography.

Snippet view - Item notes: v. 7 - 1981 - 2901 pages -"


Unseen.

http://books.google.com.au/books?id=cAgnAAAAMAAJ&q=cordwainer+smith&dq=cordwainer+smith&lr=&cd=124

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Story Cycles of Future History: Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality of Mankind - David Seed

‘Story Cycles of Future History: Cordwainer Smith’s Instrumentality of Mankind’, in Yearbook of English Studies 31 (2001), pp.133-143.

The first part you can see at Jstor, here :-

http://www.jstor.org/pss/3509380

Will see if I can find it in a database.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Cats cruelty and children: Idealism and morality in the Instrumentality of Mankind - Angus McIntyre

"The science-fiction writings of Cordwainer Smith consist of some twenty-odd short stories and two novels, which chart the history of an evolving civilisation over some fifteen thousand years. The history is internally consistent, and each story contributes to a coherent picture of the technological, social and spiritual development of the future described.

In real life, Smith was Dr Paul Linebarger, Professor in Asiatic Studies at Johns Hopkins university and colonel in US military intelligence, accomplished linguist and foreign policy adviser to the state department. His writing style, partly inspired by Chinese narrative techniques, more closely resembles poetry than the conventional dry prose of science-fiction, and his stories are dense with literary and historical references and more or less complex linguistic puns. Running through the entire work is a consistent morality and outlook, whose principal themes recur again and again in stories often written many years apart."

http://www.raingod.com/angus/Writing/Essays/Literary/Smith.html

Sunday, December 27, 2009

The Limits Of Humanity in Comparative Perspective Cordwainer Smith and the Soushenji - Lisa Raphais

In World weavers: globalization, science fiction, and the cybernetic revolution By Kin-yuen Wong, Gary Westfahl, Amy Kit-sze Chan


Unseen.

Cordwainer Smith's Cruelty and Madness: or Jacque Lacan on a Planetary and Universal Scale - Pawel Stachura

"Paul M.A. Linebarger was a military expert in Far Eastern politics and in psychological warfare, active in many countries during World War Two and two post-war decades. At the same time, under different pseudonyms, he published two remarkable psychological novels and many acclaimed science fiction stories. The present paper focuses on thematic similarities between Linebarger’s politics, psychology, and fiction. Importantly, Linebarger’s treatment of barbarism, madness, bodily mutilation and disfigurement is uncannily similar to certain tenets of Jacques Lacan’s psychology. Given Linebarger’s incredible biography, wide travelling, excellent education, and insider knowledge of American special operations, his imaginative fiction can be treated as a philosophy of world supremacy, or at least a mad gloss to American power politics in the early decades of the cold war.
Cordwainer Smith, science fiction, psychological warfare
This is a discussion of more and less exact similarities between three bodies of writing: Cordwainer Smith’s science fiction, Felix C. Forrest’s mainstream psychological novels, Paul M.A. Linebarger’s works on international politics and psychological warfare. These texts were written in the two decades after World War 2, are all thematically related to American hegemony in the world, and were written by the same person: Smith and Forrest are two pseudonyms of Linebarger, a political scientist, intelligence and propaganda expert, who wrote highly original science fiction, published mostly in the 1950s and the 1960s. Even a superficial reading of Smith’s and Forrest’s fiction is enough to see the influence of Linebarger’s incredibly interesting biographical background, including his work for the American military. The intention of the paper is not to psychoanalyze the fiction, or the work for the military, but to show striking similarities between the vocabulary used by the American writer and the paradigm developed by Lacan at the same time.1"


4 out of 5

From Canberra to Norstrilia: The Australian Adventures of Cordwainer Smith - Alan C. Elms

Journal title FOUNDATION -DAGENHAM-
Bibliographic details 2000, ISSU 78, pages 44-57

Unseen.

Re-mythologizing Outer Space With C. S. Lewis and Cordwainer Smith - Robert Grosbach

In Space and beyond: the frontier theme in science fiction By Gary Westfahl

Unseen.

The Lever of Life: Winning and Losing in the Fiction of Cordwainer Smith - Terry Dowling

Science Fiction 10 (1982)


Unseen.

The Rediscovery of Cordwainer Smith - Carol McGuirk

Essay in Science Fiction Studies, July 2001.

"Smith's stories are often framed as fragmentary tales of long-ago events. "The Dead Lady of Clown Town" is set, according to Pierce's chronology, around 13,000 AD; yet the viewpoint of its narrator is firmly retrospective: "You already know the end-the immense drama of the Lord Jestocost.... But you do not know the beginning, how the first Lord Jestocost got his name" (223). Smith's readers look far forward, his narrators far back. His heroes, however, experience their story's crisis as urgently present, forcing choices and events that may (like Martel's rescue of Adam Stone or the cruel burning of D'joan) change the world. Smith abandons popular sf's futuristic narrative tone and unilaterally forward-facing plots, achieving full freedom (looking backward, forward, and inward) to express his horrified fascination with time, "which tricks man while it shapes him" (143). His preoccupation with human time goes along with a preoccupation with death that may seem extravagant to critics because it goes against the grain of sf's utopian heritage, its emphasis on progress and change: in mortality, Smith selects a human problem that can be palliated but hardly solved by technological or social innovations. It is at any rate unsurprising that religion is so often touched upon in these stories, with their emphasis on time and mortality and their frequent representation of painful or ecstatic separations of spirit and body ("Scanners Live in Vain," "Drunkboat," "No! No! Not Rogov!" [1959]). Allusion does not in itself,"

4.5 out of 5

The Majesty of Kindness: The Dialectic of Cordwainer Smith - Gary K. Wolfe and Carol T. Williams

Published in a book edited by Tom Clareson, Voices for the Future, volume 3 (Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1984)

Unseen.

Mythic Structures in Cordwainer Smith's Game of Rat and Dragon - Gary K. Wolfe

In Science-Fiction Studies, in 1977

"All three themes are evident in the short and widely anthologized story "The Game of Rat and Dragon." While this story on one level is a highly imaginative treatment of conventional themes of romance and heroism, it is also a revealing treatment of science fiction as a codification, perhaps "mythification," of contemporary beliefs and concerns. There are four principal sets of actors in the tale: "pinlighters," or telepathic humans; "partners," or intelligent cats used to assist the pinlighters in their dangerous duties; "dragons" or "rats," primeval interstellar beings that destroy or drive mad humans in space; and the ordinary humans whom 'the pinlighters and their cats serve to protect from the dragons. Each set of actors plays a particular symbolic role in the antinomy of known-unknown. The known is represented by the ordinary humans and their planetary environments-the "`same old ticking world,"' says the pinlighter protagonist Underhill. "`Down here with the hot sun around us, it feels so good and quiet. You can feel everything spinning and turning. It's nice and sharp and compact. It's sort of like sitting around home."' The unknown is clearly the realm of the dragons, which Smith de-scribes in images of elemental chaos: "entities something like the dragons of ancient human lore, beasts more clever than beasts, demons more tangible than demons, hungry vortices of aliveness and hate compounded by unknown means out of the thin, tenuous matter between the stars." When telepaths try to read the minds of those damaged by dragons, they find only "vivid spouting columns of fiery terror bursting from the primordial id itself, the volcanic source of life.""


3.5 out of 5