I don't know if any works COMPLETELY (the poetry for one thing is terrible), but taken together they're fantastic. But the real "Cordwainer Smith" is a fascinating character with a biography frankly more much more interesting than Lafferty's (well, something that makes Lafferty so weird and interesting is how mundane his biography is) and after knowing who exactly he is, it's fun looking for secret Cold War codes in his stories.Īt any rate, each story in this collection is worth reading for the marvelous weirdness of their shared, psychotic-to-us world.
In fact, after reading "The Dead Lady of Clown Town," with its earnest but totally loopy and frightening Christian message and "under people" who are more recognizable people than the people in the story, I was almost convinced Cordwainer Smith was some Lafferty pseudonym. I didn't expect it to be as WEIRD as it is, with a sort of heightened allegorical old fashioned meta-storytelling quality to it that reminds me very much of one of my favorite authors, R.A. Picked this up semi-randomly from my gigantic stack of SF books (I want to read Norstrilia by the same author because I've had it for a looong time but this collection was published first). I'm sorry, I was really looking forward to reading this and feel like I've failed some sort of sci fi test. It does read like propaganda and that is his field in real life, psychological warfare. Maybe that is why I find his stuff so repelling. Taking a look around for more on him, I see that Christianity was very important to him and that his science fiction is riddled with his consequent beliefs. Surely nobody thinks he can write? Surely. I'm sorry, but what I want to say is I don't blame him.
You can guess what happened.Īpparently he couldn't write unless nobody knew who he was. One day he bent over the side of a boat on the Meditteranean. He had any number of ideas which he kept in a note book. Pohl tells a story on his blog about the reason Smith stopped writing about the world of the Space Lords. I know he's a cult figure and I seem to be down on them, but.
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