SPACE LORDS
by Cordwainer Smith
first published 1965
Though Cordwainer Smith's first published science fiction story appeared in 1928, the six stories in this collection belong to the Sixties, the Golden AGe Of Science Fiction, when, it seemed, you had to be able to write well CREATIVELY as well as SCIENTIFICALLY and TECHNICALLY (Buzz Aldrin please note!) to achieve best-seller status.
In the epilogue, he surprises us:
It's a mixed bag of goodies, beginning with the well-known `Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons', (the despair of the Spell-Check application) which introduced the planet of Norstralia, set up by the old North Australians grown unbelievably wealthy through the mining on their continent of santaclara, the drug that prolongs life. In later stories Smith was to continue the saga of the beautiful Norstralian people...tall, fit and fair, with nary an Asian eyelid or Greek beak to be seen....a race all but extinct now just thirty-six years later! But remember, theese stories were written when the Davis Cup was always a two-country competition....for AMATEURS!
Another planet we visit ,( `A Planet Named Shayol') is the prison-planet from Hell, or worse than Hell, where sentencees must endure a special hardening process before they can be sent there, where a strange species of loving warden presides, dispensing a drug so addictive that its name can never be mentioned! And where the prisoners are performing work of a grotesque, horrifying nature!
`The Dead Lady Of Clown Town' is, Smith says, a variation on `Joan Of Arc' but this is nothing at all like Shaws' version! Significant and timely, in the scientific climate of today, are the references to cloning and genetic programming, especially where a mistake is made in the Headquarters of The People Programmer. As in ~Brave New World', it is human error or inattention that sabotages science! In this story, too, Smith introduces the idea of an Underclass, bred by scientists genetically tinkering with people and animals. Here Smith, examinins the political implications of a species of sub-human citizens, implications which are being discussed in this week's newspapers!....Of course these works preceded the introduction ofthe morality of `Equal Opportunity'. Today these beings would be termed `differently-gifted', `genetically amended' or `purposefully procreated' citizens, the treatment meted out to them in this story long prohibited.
Which Lord Jestecost in `The Ballad Of Lost C'Mell' is determined to achieve. Yet even he, with all his amendments and introduction of constututional rights for Underpeople, cannot quite bring himself to marry a Cat-Woman, the love of his life! But when she dies, her people have become Citizens,(Reserved Grade).
Smith himself wrote the prologue and epilogue,(word-gems in their own right), in Canberra, Oz, in 1965, and they are reproduced verbatim in my 1984 Ace reissue. In the prologue he writes:
.."This is science fiction, yes. But it comes from your own time, from your own world, even from your own mind.
All I can do is work the symbols.
The magic and the beauty will come of your own past, your present, your hopes and your experience. This may look alien, but it is really as close to you as your very own fingers. Some people will like this very much. Many will not understand i t, and push it aside. That is their loss, reader, not yours, not mine.
We two, we have this story between us.
Read a bit and see how it goes.
At this instant, you are yourself the prologue. All I have done is to supply the makings."
....If you have enjoyed this collection, don't tell anyone. Keep it a secret. Go on, and enjoy it some more. I 'd rather be appreciated by a select few than enjoyed by the bawling millions.
You see, I have enjoyed these stories myself.
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