1. So I have an idea for great book that someone (not me) should write: Cordwainer Smith's Science Fiction & the Bad Conscience of American Empire.
2. Cordwainer Smith was the pen name of Paul Linebarger (1913-1966), an American who grew up in China, where his father was an advisor to the great nationalist hero Sun Yat-sen,
3. Because much of his upbringing was in China (Sun Yat-sen was his godfather) Linebarger was fluent in Chinese (claimed he dreamt in it) & developed a larger expertise in Asian culture, which he used in the services of the CIA.
4. Linebarger was a key theorist of psychological warfare & seems to be involved in some dirty work in Vietnam & Indonesia in 1950s & 1960s. (There's a hint of this in letters page of Washington Post: washingtonpost.com/archive/entert…)
5. While working for the CIA, Linebarger started writing science fiction under the pen name Cordwainer Smith. Strange, exotic stories (his Asian background helped) of a post-human far future involving The Underpeople (tortured animal/human hybrids) in revolt).
6. Linebarger/Smith's science fiction was very important in genre in terms of creating plausible alien cultures, & moving from xenophobia to xenophilia. Very much influenced later work of Le Guin & Delany.
7. I read Linebarger/Smith's science fiction as either an apologia or a confession or maybe an expiation for the dirty work he had to do for the CIA. It's about the ultimate salvation of the subjects of empire.
8. That's exactly how I see Linebarger/Smith's work: as grappling in fiction with the horrors the author was implicated in in reality.
8. Anyways, Linebarger/Smith lived a fascinating life & there is a great story here about the tensions between that life & the fiction he wrote. Someone should write a doctoral thesis or a biography! I'm offering this as a free idea.
9. Tangentially, there's a Jack Kirby (I know, I know) connection here. Linebarger/Smith's Underpeople parallel the many subterranean peoples (i.e. The Mole Men) that Kirby treated as monsters in 1950s & early 1960s but came to sympathize with (as say with Inhumans).
10. More broadly: science fiction was the genre that allowed the wounded soldiers weapon makers, torturers, psywar experts, etc to work out their traumas & fears: Heinlein, Smith, Tiptree, Wolfe, many more.
