Who Goes There?

Cordwainer Smith had such a colorful life that you could probably make a movie out of it. Where to even start? Real name Paul Linebarger, Smith was born to American missionaries who often traveled around the globe, such that Smith went from school to school and didn’t have much time to make any friends in his youth. Of all the places he visited China seemed to leave by far the biggest impression, with his father even being involved in Chinese politics in the early 20th century. Smith was Sun Yat-sen’s godson, although Sun Yat-sen died when Smith would’ve been only twelve. The Christianity of both his parents and godfather would also have an influence on Smith’s work, although he was by no means didactic about it. He came up with the name “Cordwainer Smith” to create a thick degree of separation between his life working in government and his SF writing. While he’s now most known for his SF, Smith (as Linebarger) wrote the first major text on psychological warfare, literally titled Psychological Warfare, as well as non-fiction works on East-Asian geopolitics. Under the pseudonym “Felix C. Forrest” (a reference to his Chinese name) he also wrote espionage novels, although good luck finding those nowadays.

Smith was one of the most idiosyncratic writers of his era, inside or outside of SF, and one has to wonder what more he could’ve done during the height of the New Wave (he died in 1966). His first SF story as an adult, “Scanners Live in Vain,” was published in 1950, but Smith wouldn’t get consistently published until the last half-dozen or so years of his life, in no small part thanks to Frederik Pohl. From circa 1961 onward Pohl had first dibs on Smith’s fiction, such that “Drunkboat” is one of the few Smith stories from this era to not be published in any of Pohl’s magazines—which means he must’ve rejected it. I can see why: it’s kind of a hot mess. But it’s the kind of noble failure that showcases a unique talent, and the individual components are very much worth your interest.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the October 1963 issue of Amazing Stories, which is on the Archive. It’s been reprinted quite a few times, in The 9th Annual of the Year’s Best SF (ed. Judith Merril), Amazing Stories: 60 Years of the Best Science Fiction (ed. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg), and the heckin’ chonker The Science Fiction Century (ed. David G. Hartwell). Of course it’s also in The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith. Now, it’s come to my attention that most of Smith’s work has fallen out of copyright—in Canada. This story is on the Canadian version of Project Gutenberg. I’m not advising you do this, but if you (as a non-Canadian) were to use a VPN and disguise yourself as one of the filthy, unwashed denizens of Toronto…

Enhancing Image

This is a hard story to spoil, if only because Smith spoils it for us, right at the beginning. We’re told that Artyr Rambo (yes, that is his name) was a man looking for his beloved, Elizabeth, apparently separately by many light-years, and he would do anything to get to her, including hopping aboard a rocket ship “of an ancient design” with the letters IOM (Instrumentality of Mankind) on its side and jaunting his way over to the hospital where she’s being kept. We know from the start that Rambo succeeds, that he and Elizabeth are reunited, and that Rambo himself has since gone down as a legend. The story, as such, is written like an oral telling of something ancient, mythical, and probably fabricated, but which serves an inspirational purpose. We know how this story starts and ends, but without context and without what will turn out to be a frenzied middle that will take a fair bit of explaining. Rambo winds up naked and unconscious, but apparently alive, just outside the Old Main Hospital where Elizabeth is being kept—or rather her body is. (Death does not have the same ramifications at this point in the Instrumentality history as it does for us.) How he got there, without his rocket ship anywhere in sight, is the mystery that will drive the plot. But of course I’ve already mentioned “jaunting”…

“Drunkboat” starts basically as a hospital drama, with the doctors trying to get the comatose Rambo to response—then later realizing that trying to get a response from him may leave everyone worse off. One of the doctors, Grosbeck, even suggests killing Rambo once it becomes clear that there’s something monstrously wrong with the patient, but Vomact, the chief doctor, vetoes the decision. This will have disastrous consequences short-term, but his survival will turn Rambo into a legend and so revolutionize space flight. (Smith also adds in parenthetical asides, like this one, telling us about things that haven’t happens in-story yet, or things Rambo would not have known about at the time.) So there’s a problem. Rambo is comatose and yet seems to have powers beyond human understanding; he’s able to do things by some external force, which will eventually spark the story’s climax. (But aren’t I getting ahead of myself again?) A lot of damage could’ve been prevented had Rambo stayed conscious and been able to tell the doctors what he wanted. “Not till much later did people understand what Rambo had been trying to do—crossing sixty mere meters to reach his Elizabeth when he had already jumped an un-count of light-years to return to her.” Rambo, unbeknownst to everyone at the hospital, was a guinea pig for Crudelta, one of the Lords of the Instrumentality, and he was a test subject for discovering “space-three”—a test that proved to be, if anything, too successful. Space-three (it’s written a few different ways, but I’m calling it that for consistency’s sake) is a word that comes up in several Instrumentality stories, but here we actually get something like an explanation.

You may think this is all a bit confusing. It is. Smith crams a lot of his future history into this novelette, such that it feels longer than it is, if only by virtue of feeling overstuffed. We’re told, mostly in a casual way, that this is a distant future where humanity has spread across many planets, being ruled by the Instrumentality which is a technocratic aristocracy (or an aristocratic technocracy), complete with computers and robots. The underpeople, a coalition of half-human half-animal genetically engineered humanoids made for slave labor, are only mentioned in passing in “Drunkboat,” and if you were to read just this story you wouldn’t know that the underpeople are arguably the most important factor in Smith’s future history. You wouldn’t even know what the underpeople are just from reading “Drunkboat.” On the one hand this makes Smith’s writing hard to make sense of at times, and is a problem not unique to this story but rather something that makes the barrier of entry for Smith’s writing a rather high one; but then I love how there are details on the margins of the story that hint as a much larger universe—so large that a couple dozen short stories and novellas, plus a novel, Smith couldn’t “finish” the future history. He gives the impression of something impossibly distant in our future, yet something so old in his future that Rambo’s story is told like one of Homer’s epics. It doesn’t work totally here, but you have to admire the ambition.

Reading “Drunkboat,” the only example in SF it reminded me of that would’ve predated the story is one of the most influential and experimental of all ’50s SF novels: Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination. Granted that Rambo is not a snarling brute like Bester’s Gully Foyle, but still he causes a lot of damage (including a dozen people killed “irrevocably,” their bodies being vaporized and so irretrievable) in the name of a rather self-centered goal: getting back with Elizabeth. There’s also the question of jaunting, Bester’s word for teleporting across space in his novel that I’ll use here; Smith has a different word for it, but it’s basically the same thing. I’m not sure if Smith had read Bester’s novel, but he likely did, and who can blame him? Bester’s novel and the Instrumentality future history do share a fair bit in common: they see humanity using spaceships (and later teleporting) to conquer the stars, and yet the aristocracy is maybe more powerful than ever before. Corruption is everywhere. Human life is treated callously. In Smith’s world slavery has come back in a big way. Both robots and the underpeople are treated as expendable. There’s a pessimism (but also a Christian-coded hope of liberation) in Smith’s world that might’ve been off-putting in the ’50s (hence him struggling to find outlets then), but which anticipated the New Wave. I’m a lot more interested in the world of the story than the story itself. Maybe the story is not really the point.

There Be Spoilers Here

If “Drunkboat” had a fatal flaw, other than being cluttered, it’s that it switches gears abruptly a couple times, such that I’m not sure what I would classify it as other than SF generally. I said before it starts as a hospital drama, but then suddenly (and I think unconvincingly) it turns into proto-military SF before finally turning into sort of a courtroom drama. I would have less of a problem with this trajectory if the story was longer, possibly novella-length, but as is it’s a jumble wherein the components are easy to lose track of. It doesn’t help either that Rambo, the protagonist, is unconscious for most of the story. Granted, Frankenstein’s monster didn’t talk much either. Crudelta is a curious villain (if you can call him that), but he only really gets a chance to shine in the last stretch. Elizabeth barely even qualifies as a character, and when she gets a case of killed-and-then-revived amnesia (in-story a person getting killed and then brought back may as well be a different person since they get amnesia and are likely to form a different personality) it’s more like something inconvenient that Rambo has to get used to rather than tragic. (After reading a fair bit of Smith I do have to wonder if he was only capable of writing women as either shrewish, aloof, or submissive.) It’s implied that Crudelta will not face punishment for his inhuman treatment of Rambo, but that’s not really a criticism. After all, Rambo doesn’t have too much to complain about, for he has come back a demigod who can start a literal war with just his manipulation of space-three.

A Step Farther Out

The problem I encountered with “Drunkboat” was I found it a lot more fun to think about than to read. This is less a functioning self-contained story and more a neat bit of world-building that happens to have a really tangled plot at its center. If this is your first Instrumentality story then there are small details here that Smith doesn’t elaborate on and which will probably not make any sense to you. Even after having read a decent portion of Smith’s fiction (there isn’t a whole lot of it), my brain still ached a bit by the end. And yet I have to recommend “Drunkboat” as a curiosity. For both better and worse, nobody in the pre-New Wave days wrote like Cordwainer Smith, such that even his failures are worth it.

See you next time.