The Instrumentality of Mankind by Cordwainer Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The strangeness of Cordwainer Smith as a writer only deepens when one reads the story of Paul Linebarger, who is the person behind the pseudonym. The stories of Smith are exotic, a glimpse into a distant future, an imagining that humans go on and on for tens of thousands of years, iterating ourselves into a civilization in which there is not quite a government but in which there is definitely a structure, an instrumentality of humans that stands behind everything else, that intervenes when necessary, with a brutal swiftness, for reasons of its own. Yet in stating this so directly I violate Smith’s own method of telling a story, which is more in tune with the fable, and in which we glimpse the instrumentality in dozens of ways throughout the short stories here. It is as if Olaf Stapledon developed an interest in narrative and wrote fiction rather than the sweeping future histories he created. All the stories here are classics of early science fiction; he was revered by his contemporaries. They are dated in their approach to women, which is their worst aspect. But character was not what Smith was about; he wrote big, strange ideas into his stories, in language that evoked a distance in time, a richness of future in which men become something else. His ideas, though, are singular. “When the People Fell” is a good example. The story is about China dropping millions of its people onto Venus in order to colonize it -literally dropping them out of the Venusian sky, knowing that most of them would die, but aware that this brutal act would create a great leap forward in which the planet would instantly become Chinese. Yet the act is simply presented, in detail but without a speck of emotion other than bemusement, as if a godlike historian were recording it all. Reading his work in a body, one sees the threads connecting them all, rich and intricate and hard to describe because they exist in themselves so fiercely, so densely. His fiction predicts the work of Philip Dick, echoes with Kafka at moments, but stands alone in terms of its elements. At its heart it is, in fact, work that is preoccupied with Christianity; Linebarger, for all his mastery of psychological warfare, knowledge of realpolitik, and vast experience among the powerful, was devout. Like all the other elements of his writing, the spiritual moments are small, vivid, and uncanny.