We were drunk with happiness in those early years. Everybody was, especially the young people. These were the first years of the Rediscovery of Man, when the Instrumentality dug deep in the treasury, reconstructing the old cultures, the old languages, and even the old troubles. The nightmare of perfection had taken our forefathers to the edge of suicide. Now under the leadership of the Lord Jestocost and the Lady Alice More, the ancient civilizations were rising like great land masses out of the sea of the past.

I myself was the first man to put a postage stamp on a letter, after fourteen thousand years. I took Virginia to hear the first piano recital. We watched at the eye-machine when cholera was released in Tasmania, and we saw the Tasmanians dancing in the streets, now that they did not have to be protected anymore. Everywhere, things became exciting. Everywhere, men and women worked with a wild will to build a more imperfect world

I myself went into a hospital and came out French…

Thus begins “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard”, the first story I ever read by the legendary Cordwainer Smith. I’m not using that term lightly. If you want legendary, this guy was the real deal.

I was in middle school at the time and found his story more or less at random. I didn’t much care for it. I had been looking for simpler fare, something more along the lines of Lileks’ “rockets and robots and ray guns.” Smith immersed me in a puzzling, repulsive, fascinating milieu. I found the story both disturbing and unpleasant. I also found that I couldn’t forget it.

Of course I remembered my early life; I remembered it, but it did not matter. Virginia was French, too, and we had the years of our future lying ahead of us like ripe fruit hanging in an orchard of perpetual summers. We had no idea when we would die. Formerly, I would be able to go to bed and think, “The government has given me four hundred years. Three hundred and seventy-four years from now, they will stop the stroon injections and I will then die.” Now I knew anything could happen. The safety devices had been turned off. The diseases ran free. With luck, and hope, and love, I might live a thousand years. Or I might die tomorrow. I was free.

We reveled in every moment of the day.

The irony is that our protagonist has no more freedom now than he ever did. The Lords and Ladies of the Instrumentality still call the shots.

Virginia and I bought the first French newspaper to appear since the Most Ancient World fell. We found delight in the news, even in the advertisements. Some parts of the culture were hard to reconstruct. It was difficult to talk about foods of which only the names survived, but the homunculi and the machines, working tirelessly in Downdeep-downdeep, kept the surface of the world filled with enough novelties to fill anyone’s heart with hope. We knew that all of this was make-believe, and yet it was not. We knew that when the diseases had killed the statistically correct number of people, they would be turned off; when the accident rate rose too high, it would stop without our knowing why. We knew that over us all, the Instrumentality watched. We had confidence that the Lord Jestocost and the Lady Alice More would play with us as friends and not use us as victims of a game.

Mustapha Mond would feel right at home.

A few weeks later I found “A Planet Named Shayol”, a prison story of sorts, but with a disturbing biological twist reminiscent of Prometheus and his liver. It too, was impossible to forget. Though it might not impress the kids today, back in the 60’s it had quite a punch. I was mightily impressed that a human being could conceive of such things. I wasn’t at all sure that they should.

“Fine,” said the doctor, “that’s a healthy attitude. The crime is past. Your future is ahead. Now. I can destroy your mind before you go down—if you want me to.”

“That’s against the law,” said Mercer.

Doctor Vomact smiled warmly and confidently. “Of course it is. A lot of things are against human law. But there are laws of science, too. Your body, down on Shayol, is going to serve science. It doesn’t matter to me whether the body has Mercer’s mind or the mind of a low-grade shellfish. I have to leave enough mind in you to keep the body going, but I can wipe out the historic you and give your body a better chance of being happy. It’s your choice, Mercer. Do you want to be you or not?”

Mercer shook his head back and forth, “I don’t know.”

…“Do you want me to take your eyes out before you go down? You’ll be much more comfortable without vision.”

Poor Mercer. Would any criminal deserve to become a perpetual organ donor? Depends on the crime, I suppose.

There was a flash on the ground, no brighter than the glitter of sunlight on a fragment of glass. Mercer felt a sting in the thigh, as though a sharp instrument had touched him lightly. He brushed the place with his hand.

It was as though the sky fell in.

A pain—it was more than a pain; it was a living throb—ran from his hip to his foot on the right side. The throb reached up to his chest, robbing him of breath. He fell and the ground hurt him. Nothing in the hospital-satellite had been like this. He lay in the open air trying not to breathe, but he did breathe anyhow… Since he could not stop breathing, he concentrated on taking air in the way that hurt him least. Gasps were too much work. Little tiny sips of air hurt him least.

The desert around him was empty. He could not turn his head to look at the cabin. Is this it? he thought. Is an eternity of this the punishment of Shayol?

There were voices near him.

Two faces, grotesquely pink, looked down at him. They might have been human. The man looked normal enough, except for having two noses side by side. The woman was a caricature beyond belief. She had grown a breast on each cheek and a cluster of naked baby-like fingers hung limp from her forehead.

“It’s a beauty,” said the woman, “a new one.”…

A woman—was it a woman?—crawled over to him on her hands and knees. Beside her ordinary hands, she was covered with hands all over her trunk and halfway down her thighs. Some of the hands looked old and withered. Others were as fresh and pink as the baby-fingers on his captress’ face….

”You can’t kill yourself,” said the man with the spike through his head.

To hear (ahem) certain social critics tell it, “Brave New World” is the alpha and omega of science fictional dystopias, the one that totally nails the role. I’ve got news for those people. There are plenty more where that came from. In fact, there’s a glut on the market. I don't think any of them hold a candle to Smith.

There was the Instrumentality, with its unceasing labor to keep man man. And there were the citizens who walked in the boulevards before the Rediscovery of Man. The citizens were happy. If they were found sad, they were calmed and drugged and changed until they were happy again.

Sound like anyone we know? That’s from “Under Old Earth”, Smith’s last work, and to my mind not his best, but it captures the Instrumentality of Mankind and its “ruthless benevolence” in a nutshell. It wasn’t your everyday galactic empire…

The Stop-captain waited for him. Outside on the world of Sherman the scented breezes of that pleasant planet blew in through the open windows of the ship.

Wu-Feinstein, finest ship of its class, had no need for metal walls. It was built to resemble an ancient, prehistoric estate named Mount Vernon, and when it sailed between the stars it was encased in its own rigid and self-renewing field of force.

The passengers went through a few pleasant hours of strolling on the grass, enjoying the spacious rooms, chatting beneath a marvelous simulacrum of an atmosphere-filled sky.

Only in the planoforming room did the Go-captain know what happened. The Go-captain, his pinlighters sitting beside him, took the ship from one compression to another, leaping hotly and frantically through space, sometimes one light-year, sometimes a hundred light-years, jump, jump, jump, jump until the ship, the light touches of the captains mind guiding it, passed the perils of millions upon millions of worlds, came out at its appointed destination and settled as lightly as one feather resting upon others, settled into an embroidered and decorated countryside where the passengers could move as easily away from their journey as if they had done nothing more than to pass an afternoon in a pleasant old house by the side of a river.

I had been looking for something a little sportier at the time, something with rakish airfoils, hot jets, and lots of blinking indicators. You know, a rocket? Instead I got a Georgian mansion in space. With a virtual reality hull, no less… Both bizarre and memorable, it’s from “The Burning Of The Brain”, written in 1955. In all fairness, this story could be considered one of the ancestors of cyberpunk.

Go-captain on the Wu-Feinstein, finest ship of its class, was Magno Taliano.

Of him it was said, “He could sail through hell with the muscles of his left eye alone. He could plow space with his living brain if the instruments failed…”

…his right hand depressed the golden ceremonial lever of the ship. This instrument alone was mechanical. All the other controls in the ship had long since been formed telepathically or electronically…From the wall facing him as he sat rigid in his Go-captain’s chair, Magno Taliano sensed the forming of a pattern which in three or four hundred milliseconds would tell him where he was and would give him the next clue as to how to move. He moved the ship with the impulses of his own brain, to which the wall was a superlative complement.

For 1955, this was trail-blazing stuff, amazing stuff. Smith was using cyberpunk tropes as incidental plot devices, while Bruce Sterling was still crowing in his diapers.

Wife to the Go-captain was Dolores Oh. The name was Japonical, from some notion of the ancient days. Dolores Oh had once been beautiful, so beautiful that she took men’s breath away, made wise men into fools, made young men into nightmares of lust and yearning. Wherever she went men had quarreled and fought over her.

But Dolores Oh was proud beyond all common limits of pride. She refused to go through the ordinary rejuvenescence. A terrible yearning a hundred or so years back must have come over her. Perhaps she said to herself, before that hope and terror which a mirror in a quiet room becomes to anyone:

“Surely I am me. There must be a me more than the beauty of my face, there must be something other than the delicacy of skin and the accidental lines of my jaw and my cheekbone.” “What have men loved if it wasn’t me? Can I ever find out who I am or what I am if I don’t let beauty perish and live on in whatever flesh age gives me?”…

Magno Taliano had a niece who in the modern style used a place instead of a name: she was called “Dita from the Great South House.”…

Magno Taliano came in. He saw his wife and niece together.

He must have been used to Dolores Oh. In Dita’s eyes Dolores was more frightening than a mud-caked reptile raising its wounded and venomous head with blind hunger and blind rage. To Magno Taliano the ghastly woman who stood like a witch beside him was somehow the beautiful girl he had wooed and had married one hundred sixty-four years before.

He kissed the withered cheek, he stroked the dried and stringy hair, he looked into the greedy terror-haunted eyes as though they were the eyes of a child he loved. He said, lightly and gently, “Be good to Dita, my dear.”…

Strange. It reads as a mirror-world inversion of Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark”.

There, a stunningly beautiful woman with a superficial flaw is pressured to perfect herself physically by her boorish, arrogant husband. Out of love for him, she consents to the experimental cosmetic procedure, which kills her. Though they do get rid of that birthmark…

Here, a stunningly beautiful woman with no superficial flaws at all, egotistically tests her husband’s love by relinquishing her physical beauty. Out of love for her, he consents to her unique anti-cosmetic procedure, and couldn’t care less when she ages into a hag. He successfully proves that he loves her for herself…

So you see, Dita, being beautiful the way you are is no answer to anything. A woman has got to be herself before she finds out what she is. I know that my lord and husband, the Go-captain, loves me because my beauty is gone, and with my beauty gone there is nothing but me to love, is there?”

It’s hard to decide which scenario is more repulsive, but it can be done.

It’s difficult for me to wholeheartedly recommend Smith to potential readers. He wrote some amazingly fine stuff, but he also had his share of out and out dogs. If you go to people who have read him, asking for their list of which is which, results will vary considerably. Some have compared him to C.S. Lewis crossed with Aldous Huxley. I wouldn’t have found that a selling point…

I’m reluctant to simply say that he was good. When I’ve seen a movie, and someone asks me if it’s any good, I’m often stumped. I can’t always tell if a movie is “good” or not. But I always know if I liked it.

Given that bit of weaseling on my part, he might be worth your while. People who like him tend to like him a lot, and you might be one of them. I never cared for his poetry, or anyone else’s for that matter, and his sing-song oriental cadences might seem annoying in the beginning. Still, within six years of reading “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard” I had hoovered up all the science fiction he had ever written and was sad there wouldn’t be more. He was one of a kind.

The little girl had grown up, had married, and now had a little girl of her own. The mother was unchanged, but the spieltier was very, very old. It had outlived all its marvelous tricks of adaptability, and for some years had stayed frozen in the role of a yellow-haired, blue-eyed girl doll. Out of sentimental sense of the fitness of things, she had dressed the spieltier in a bright blue jumper with matching panties. The little animal crept softly across the floor on its tiny human hands, using its knees for hind feet. The mock-human face looked up blindly and squeaked for milk.

The young mother said, “Mom, you ought to get rid of that thing. It’s all used up and it looks horrible with your nice period furniture.

“I thought you loved it,” said the older woman.

“Of course,” said the daughter. “It was cute, when I was a child. But I’m not a child any more, and it doesn’t even work.”

The spieltier had struggled to its feet and clutched its mistress’s ankle. The older woman took it away gently, and put down a saucer of milk and a cup the size of a thimble. The spieltier tried to curtsey, as it had been motivated to do at the beginning, slipped, fell, and whimpered. The mother righted it and the little old animal-toy began dipping milk with its thimble and sucking the milk into its tiny toothless old mouth.

Now that’s an imagination.