"Cordwainer Smith - The Best of Cordwainer Smith" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Cordwainer)

to which Communism appealed.
In Cordwainer Smith's epic of the future, the Instrumentality of Mankind has the hallmarks of both a
political elite and a priesthood. Its hegemony is that, not of the galactic empire so typical of less
imaginative SF, but of something far more subtle and pervasiveтАФat once political and spiritual. Its lords
see themselves not as mere governors or bureaucrats or politicians, but as instruments of human destiny
itself.
Linebarger's sense of religion infused his work in other ways, and not merely in references to the Old
Strong Religion and the Holy Insurgency of Norstrilia and other late works.
There is, for example, the emphasis on quasi-religious ritualтАФcompare, for instance, the Code of the
Scanners to the Saying of the Law in H. G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau. Furthermore, there is the
strong sense of vocation expressed by the scanners, sailors, pinlighters, Go-captains and the lords
themselvesтАФsomething very spiritual, even if not expressed in religious terms.
But Linebarger was no mere Christian apologist who used SF as a vehicle for orthodox religious
messages like those of, say, C. S. Lewis.
He was also a social and psychological thinker, whose experience with diverse cultures gave him
peculiar and seemingly contradictory ideas about human nature and morality.
He could, for example, admire the samurai values of fantasy, courage and honor, and he showed his
appreciation of Oriental art and literature in the furnishing of his home and his fiction. Yet he was so
horrified by the tradition-bound fatalism and indifference to human life he found in the Orient that he
became obsessed with the sanctity of life on any terms, as something too precious to sacrifice to any
concept of honor or moralityтАФOriental or Occidental.
While in Korea, Linebarger masterminded the surrender of thousands of Chinese troops who
considered it shameful to give up their arms. He drafted leaflets explaining how the soldiers could come
forward waving their guns and shouting Chinese words like "love," "virtue" and "humanity"тАФwords that
just happened, when pronounced in the right order, to sound like "I surrender" in English. He considered
this seemingly cynical act to be the single most worthwhile thing he had done in his life.
Linebarger's attitude is reflected in the apparently casual manner in which matters such as
brainwashing are treated in his SF. For the Hunter and Elaine at the end of "The Dead Lady of Clown
Town," that is a more humane, if less "honorable" fate than death. Throughout the Smith canon, life is
usually placed before honor, no matter how much the Oriental codes of honor and formality may
permeate the hybrid culture of the future.
Yet Linebarger felt there was a meaning to life beyond mere living. "The God he had faith in had to
do with the soul of man and with the unfolding of history and of the destiny of all living creatures," his
Australian friend Arthur Burns once remarked, and it is this exploration of humanтАФand more than
humanтАФdestiny that gives Smith's work its unity.
Behind the invented cultures, behind the intricacies of plot and the joy or suffering of characters,
there is Smith the philosopher, striving in a manner akin to that of Teilhard de Chardin (although there is
no evidence of any direct influence) to reconcile science and religion, to create a synthesis of Christianity
and evolution that will shed light on the nature of man and the meaning of history.
The stories in this volume, collected in their proper order for the first time, form part of a vast
historical cycle taking place over some fifteen thousand years. They are based on material from
Linebarger's original notebook and a second notebookтАФunfortunately lostтАФthat he began keeping in the
1950s as new problems began to concern him.
Mankind is still haunted by the Ancient Wars and the Dark Age that followed as this volume opens
with "Scanners Live in Vain." Other stories, one unpublished, hint at millennia of historical stasis, during
which the true men sought inhuman perfection behind the electronic pales of their cities, while leaving the
Wild to survivors of the Ancient WorldтАФthe Beasts, manshonyaggers and Unforgiven.
Into this future came the Vomacht sisters, daughters of a German scientist who placed them in
satellites in suspended animation at the close of World War II. Returning to Earth in the latter days of the
Dark Age, they bring the "gift of vitality"тАФa concept that seems to have meant to Smith what the "life