Cordwainer is an obsolete term for a shoemaker. It derives from the Old French word cordoanier, referring to someone who worked with cordwain or cordovan, which was equine leather produced in Cordova. I only know the term because two authors of science fiction incorporated it into pseudonyms.

The talented but irascible misanthrope Harlan Ellison wrote the stories that evolved into my favorite episodes of two 1960s science fiction television series: Demon With a Glass Hand for The Outer Limits and The City on the Edge of Forever for Star Trek. Harlan’s original story for the latter had to be rewritten to be practical, affordable, and compatible with the show.

Harlan was so incensed that he threatened to take his name off the story credit and apply his infamous pseudonym “Cordwainer Bird”, something he did whenever he felt his work was mangled. He’d done that with The Price of Doom in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry knew that would hurt the show’s chances of getting stories from other notable authors, so he threatened to blackball Harlan in Hollywood if he did so. It was one of the few battles Ellison lost, and he never forgave Roddenberry.

The strange pseudonym was actually a tribute to fellow science fiction writer Paul A. Linebarger, who used the pen name Cordwainer Smith. Linebarger thought his pen name about shoemaking and blacksmithing implied industriousness, while Harlan said Cordwainer Bird was a reference to a shoemaker for birds, which could be taken to mean “this work is for the birds”.

In high school I came across Cordwainer Smith’s most famous short story, which was his first or second published in science fiction, in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume I, which was edited by Robert Silverberg and published in 1970.

Scanners Live in Vain was written in 1945 and had been rejected by several magazines before being published in the obscure Fantasy Book in 1950. Thankfully science fiction writer and editor Frederik Pohl had co-authored a story with Isaac Asimov that appeared in the same issue. He was so impressed by Smith’s story, despite having no idea who actually wrote it, that he republished it in 1952 in a more widely-read anthology. That helped put Cordwainer Smith on the map, and Linebarger would go on to have a number of his stories published before his untimely death at age 53 in 1966, while keeping his true identity obscured.

Linebarger had an interesting background. He had been a US Army officer, a noted East Asia scholar and the godson of China’s Sun Yat-sen, and the author of the Central Intelligence Agency’s manual on psychological warfare.

Many of his stories were set in a shared universe, the Instrumentality of Mankind, with tales starting in the year 2,000 and extending to the year 16,000. What is striking about Scanners Live in Vain, besides its sheer originality, is that he included multiple unexplained references to that shared universe.

The story is contained to a single day out of a 14,000 year history that he would build out in later stories, not in a chain of sequels but instead in what Algis Budrys described in 1965 as “tesserae in a mosaic” providing glimpses into “a completely consistent phantom universe.”

I hadn’t thought of Cordwainer Smith in four decades. He was brought back to mind by Matt of Bookpilled:

I find Matt’s opinions to be cogent and persuasive, so based on his recommendation, I purchased the Cordwainer Smith short story collection The Instrumentality of Mankind as a used paperback from a seller in Webster, New York.

I read the first five of the 14 stories in it, and decided I needed to read everything Smith wrote in that series, following a timeline that was cobbled together by John J. Pierce. That meant I needed to fill in many gaps.

Cordwainer Smith’s works are not nearly as well known as other greats of the golden age of science fiction. Consequently, I could find some, but not all, of his work in Kindle format. So I purchased the 681-page hardcover book The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith. It was published in 1993 by the New England Science Fiction Association Press.

I had already read the first four stories in that collection, so happily next came Scanners Live in Vain, which I had last read about 40 years ago.

Egad! What a treat, now that I had read enough of his later stories to know what he meant when he mentioned a Manshonjagger, a Beast, and an Unforgiven one. I was now familiar with the long weird history behind the antagonist Vomact, who led the Scanners through their strange rituals, a bizarre yet believable blend of psychological conditioning and Robert’s Rules of Order.

What a strange and wonderful man. There has been speculation that Linebarger might have been the patient in The Jet-Propelled Couch, a famous psychoanalytic case history about a man who spontaneously found himself living a heroic life as “Lord of a planet in an interplanetary empire,” far in the future. Back in 2009, Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing convinced Harper’s to make that famous case history freely available: Part I, Part II. If you have ever enjoyed the case histories of Oliver Sacks, you might enjoy the tale of Kirk Allen, who might have been Paul Linebarger, alias Cordwainer Smith.

I am skeptical that Linebarger was the patient in question, but with that possibility in mind, I am struck by what Linebarger wrote to a friend, as relayed by Jeffrey Irtenkauf:

Life is a miracle and a terror. The progress of every day, any day, in the individual human mind transcends all the wonders of science. It doesn’t matter who people are, where they are, when they lived, or what they are doing—the important thing is the explosion of wonder that goes on and on—stopped only by death.

Paul Linebarger