I guess some of my ancestors in the US South were slaveholders, because there are black Linebargers. Readers from other countries may not know that after slavery ended in the United States, after our Civil War, it was not uncommon for newly emancipated people to take the last name of the former slave-owners. I get…
Cordwainer Smith at the Movies
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 at
12:04 pm
by Steve Davidson – The Crotchety Old Fan Can’t you just see the marquee? THE BALLAD OF LOST C’MELL or THE GAME OF RAT AND DRAGON although, given Hollywood’s penchant for stepping on things, that story would probably be entitled The Rat Game by the time it finally made it to the theaters. Complaining about…
The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 at
6:00 am
by Steve Davidson – The Crotchety Old Fan A few short years ago, the Cordwainer Smith Foundation introduced the C.S. Rediscovery Award. It’s purpose is to honor a “science fiction or fantasy writer whose work displays unusual originality, embodies the spirit of Cordwainer Smith’s fiction, and deserves renewed attention or ‘Rediscovery.’” Since 2001, the award…
A Few Notes on Collecting Cordwainer
Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 at
9:15 am
Guest Blogger Steve Davidson blogs as The Crotchety Old Fan, maintains the Classic Science Fiction Channel website and is currently trying his hand at a science fiction novel, following a 20 year career in non-fiction. His latest non-fiction book, A Parent’s Guide to Paintball, will be released this coming April. I’ve been a Cordwainer Smith fan since I first…
Alan Elms Answers Some CS Queries
Saturday, January 10th, 2009 at
4:13 pm
Alan Elms has been working on a biography of CS / PMAL for years, and I often turn to him for answers to questions that readers send me… Here are some of these, reprinted from old ezines of mine. I think the questions are obvious from the answers: Paul Linebarger wrote a book manuscript called…
Two Interesting Cordwainer Smith Articles
Saturday, December 27th, 2008 at
2:37 pm
This must be old news to serious fans, but I am constantly amazed at all the articles that turn up about Cordwainer Smith. I discover some of them through using Google Alerts, but today’s post is about an ezine that one of the writers told me about. It’s a downloadable pdf, available at no cost:…
A Bit Like My Father When I Travel
Saturday, December 20th, 2008 at
8:40 pm
One thing I’ve noticed during my various trips to Mexico (where I now mostly live) is how much I have inherited my father’s outgoing curiosity about other people and what they are doing. Actually, sometimes I can be quite shy if I don’t feel that my mastery of the language is good enough to really…
Do Cordwainer Smith Fans Read Clifford Simak?
Saturday, December 13th, 2008 at
8:46 pm
Gnod.net is a website that is an “experiment in the field of artificial intelligence. It’s a self-adapting system, living on this server and ‘talking’ to everyone who comes along. It has a literature section, and you can see the Cordwainer Smith literary map here. According to the fellow who created it, “The closer two writers…
Check out the Science Fiction Book Club…