It's been a lot of years since I first read Scanners Live in Vain, but I always remember the first two lines.
...
Martel was angry. He did not even adjust his blood away from anger. He stamped across the room by judgment, not by sight. When he saw the table hit the floor, and could tell by the expression on Luci's face that the table must have made a loud crash, he looked down to see if his leg were broken. It was not. Scanner to the core, he had to scan himself. The action was reflex and automatic. The inventory included his legs, abdomen, Chestbox of instruments, hands, arms, face and back with the Mirror. Only then did Martel go back to being angry. He talked with his voice, even though he knew that his wife hated its blare and preferred to have him write.
"I tell you, I must cranch. I have to cranch. It's my worry, isn't it?"
That story stunned me when I first read it, because it was so far ahead of its time. It reads like something out of Warhammer 40k, but it was written in 1950.
I really like Cordwainer Smith. Those books are quite strange though. I wouldn't even call them ahead of their time, I would call them sui generis. Completely idiosyncratic. One brilliant weirdo's brain. I keep spare copies of The Instrumentality of Mankind and The Best of Cordwainer Smith around, and a couple months ago somebody asked me about them. I hesitated before lending them to him, because it's impossible to guess whether a given person will like them or not.
I read most of the related stories online after seeing the reference to "think blue, count two" when trying to remind myself what Serial Experiments Lain was about.
It is very idiosyncratic. A heavy role for psionics, uplifted animal species, and animal brains conditioned to perform tasks and then preserved in something like a circuit board. And space, economics, politics, and a civil rights movement for the uplifted animals.
"Oh yeah, I'm here on another planet having a telepathic chat with an uplifted cat who is mad about the oppression of her species."
But engaging writing and worldbuilding that makes that feel more plausible.
I think you could say that it's space opera that puts organisms' bodies and minds at the heart of things, rather than machines. Electronic devices with any kind of important agency in the stories are rather few and far between, but stuff about bodies and minds, and what Cordwainer Smith could imagine them doing and wanting, kept coming back again and again and again.
Like being dropped into a very other world. I'll have to dig some out and read again. The feel is like it's written by someone not sane. Gormenghast, a least the first 2 books, felt the same - not-quite-sane leaking through. Then again I may not have been at the time so maybe a bit of projection.
Book three of the Gormenghast trilogy of course being the one were the reader is figuratively wading in a deluge of not-quite-sane. Anyone interested in the weird world-building of Gormenghast: don't feel bad about skipping the third book.
I enjoyed Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia (1975). Australians in space, and utterly weird things to do with sheep (sorry, that may sound a bit iffy, but the book is cool).
There was a French comic book series (whose name escapes me), which I think is heavily inspired by Gormenghast. It followed a girl/young lady who had been kidnapped/sold off to the (illusive) lord of the house, and her discovery of the unique rules of the house, which seems to have a life of its own, and the petty (to this new outsider) squabbles of its inhabitants, servants and "nobles" alike.
I'm having a hard time finding that comic book series across the translation barrier.
A.k.a The guy who is positively obsessed with cats, and may be the unknowing member (grandfather?) of a certain deviant demographic gaining mainstream appeal today (no judgement, it's just not for me).
That being said, I loved Mother Hittons Little Kittons
One of the greatest of the Golden Age writers with Ted Sturgeon, unlike the insipid and grossly overrated Heinlein.
NESFA Press has excellent omnibus reissues of The Rediscovery of Man and Norstrilia. I just wish they had eBook versions as well like they recently did for Fredric Brown.
I myself first read his work in French translation when I was 12 or so (unlike the US, classics like Cordwainer Smith or Fredric Brown never went out of print in France, thanks to Denoël's excellent Présence du Futur imprint).
I never finished "The Rediscovery of Man" anthology, yet "The Lady Who Sailed the Soul" remains one of the most memorable sci-fi stories I've read and one I think about relatively often. (I don't want to re-read it now years later and find that I don't like it anymore).
His style is something else – there are not many SF authors (and fewer still of his generation) that I would describe as lyrical, but he in one of them.
It's always easier to find good material after the fact, going back in time and letting others filter it, instead of trying to figure out which of the present day material is not crap.
Hope you like them! And if you are looking for more, consider giving R.A. Lafferty a shot as well. Another very unique, intelligent SF author without a lot of peers who wrote like him.
"[In SAIS,] Linebarger was known to end class with a maxim: 'The essence of psychological warfare is shock and surprise.' To illustrate his point, the professor then "took the glass eye out of its socket, flipped it up in the air, put it into his pocket and exited the classroom."
I highly recommend Psychological Warfare (and its development from the 40's to the 50's). Read it, and apply its lessons to itself. I think you'll find that Linebarger has more to say, between the lines, and you'll probably also get a more nuanced idea of his views than the writers of TFA had.
Thanks for the ref. A few passages in the beginning chapters make me wonder what he would make of US today, specially whether he would recognize the 'conversion' regiment that he deems "as sure as a steam-roller" as having been|being applied.
An interesting perspective on Cordwainer Smith can be found in Robert Silverberg's "Science Fiction: 101." He reprints Smith's "Scanners Live in Vain," offers his analysis, and reminisces on how the sci-fi community buzzed over this newcomer's strange approach to the field.
A brief bio and blurb about his SF writing was made by the Extra Credit folk, link below. But don't just watch the video, read Cordwainer's stories too.
...
Martel was angry. He did not even adjust his blood away from anger. He stamped across the room by judgment, not by sight. When he saw the table hit the floor, and could tell by the expression on Luci's face that the table must have made a loud crash, he looked down to see if his leg were broken. It was not. Scanner to the core, he had to scan himself. The action was reflex and automatic. The inventory included his legs, abdomen, Chestbox of instruments, hands, arms, face and back with the Mirror. Only then did Martel go back to being angry. He talked with his voice, even though he knew that his wife hated its blare and preferred to have him write.
"I tell you, I must cranch. I have to cranch. It's my worry, isn't it?"