People who want to contact us regarding the rights to publishing Cordwainer Smith stories, making films or other media, etc. — we now have a new email address for one of our agents. I never handle this sort of thing myself.
You can find it at:
http://www.cordwainer-smith.com/contact.htm
Please don’t contact me; I just forward thing anyway.
For the first time, the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award has gone to a living writer. You can see her chatting on youtube!
See the page on my main site: Katherine MacLean to find out more.
A few days ago Stefan Manske wrote to me. As Random House (Heyne-Verlag) published all IoM-Stories as \”Was aus den Menschen wurde\” in Germany, he was going to do a blog post on the the homepage of the Science Fiction Club Germany, founded in 1955. He asked if he could use an illustration from here. I said sure, and the result is:
http://www.sfcd.eu/1744/cordwainer-smith-was-aus-den-menschen-wurde-science-fiction/
See:
http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/2010/12/cordwainer-smith-the-ballad-of-lost-linebarger-part-1/
and
http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/2010/12/cordwainer-smith-the-ballad-of-lost-linebarger-part-2/
And while I’m here, here is a link to another good CS article:
Thanks to CS scholar for this find… scroll down a ways:
A while back, I had some correspondance with Damien Broderick, often called the dean of Australian science fiction, and he is kindly allowing me to post this article which includes interesting CS comments. You can read The Ruined Queen of Harvest World online here. — Rosana
It’s as if I’d always lived part of my dream life—these memories of the future—in the strange, terrible universe of the Instrumentality of Man, with its animal-derived Underpeople and laminated robot brains, its enigmatic Lords and Ladies, ancient Daimoni, planoforming ships crossing the terrors of the Up and Out, Viola Siderea, the vast mushroom tower of Earthport rising from fabled Meeya Meefla… I seem to recall these gorgeous, wistful, alarming worlds of the imagination from childhood, alongside Homer and the Grimm Brothers. Yet few of those memorable tales were published until the early 1960s, when I was already 15 or 16, or older, coming into manhood, writing my own first stories. Those extraordinary titles (maybe of them provided by editor Fred Pohl, but drawn from the tales themselves)! “The Game of Rat and Dragon,” “The Lady Who Sailed The Soul,” “The Ballad of Lost C’mell,” “Golden the Ship Was—Oh, Oh, Oh!” They twined into me, pressed tendrils into my brain and heart. And best of all, for this gauche Australian living on the edge of the rind of the world, they uttered a vast future where my homeland was not marginal, not ignored, not forgotten, but transfigured and central. Read the rest of this entry »
The annual Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award went to A. Merritt this year. The link takes you to the page where I describe what the award is. It is given every summer at Readercon.
Don’t know much about A. Merritt? Or like me, know nothing of him?
Ah, that’s probably part of why our panel of judges — Mike Resnick, Barry Malzberg, Martin H. Greenberg, and Robert J. Sawyer — felt that he needed rediscovery. The most important part being that his works are worth reading and keeping alive.
To find out more about Merritt, you can start at wikipedia, and don’t miss the external links at the end of the page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._Merritt
Readers, your thoughts are most welcome.
Here’s how I keep up with Cordwainer Smith blogging and other news: I have google alerts that come into my email, one set for Cordwainer Smith and another set for Paul Linebarger.
Much of what I get this way isn’t very interesting, but there are often fascinating bits. Sometimes I in turn blog about those here, but not usually.
You can sign up for Google Alerts here, and here is their FAQ page.
Since I haven’t posted for a while, I just wanted to let my regular readers know that I’m fine, just very busy with some other websites, not to mention life.
I expect to write less often here. But I’ve got some good tidbits on my to-do list.
Rosana
There is an ebook edition of Cordwainer Smith’s stories and the publisher (with our agent’s permission) put several of the stories online where you can read them free. If you have never read Cordwainer Smith, this is an easy way to get started. If you are a fan already, you might like to refresh your memory. If you want to get the ebook, I expect you can get to it from the stories.
Here they are:
Sometimes my Google Alerts show me places where Cordwainer Smith or his works are on some sort of “best” science fiction list. I’m putting down the ones I know of, and hope that readers will add to this over time.
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Here’s one where Norstrilia is #46 on a list of the best 100 science fiction books from 1949 to 1984. UPDATE: I had said it was ranked #46 but Damien Broderick pointed out that they are by publication date.
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Gardner Dozois has a long list of recommended novels and short stories on his “Recommended Reading List” page at sfwa.org, the Science Fiction Writers of America site. He says its cutoff date is roughly the early 80s and he comments that the list “was devised to point younger readers toward older stuff that they might not have heard of, or long out-of-print writers whose work they might be unfamiliar with.” He lists Norstrilia in the novels, and here’s his list of anthologies for the short stories:
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More? Please add if you see something.
I stay in email and phone contact with my cousin Helen, daughter of my father’s brother Wentworth. She wrote me this: