Linebargers Black and White

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…

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Cordwainer Smith at the Movies

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…

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For decades, there has been discussion about whether Paul M. A. Linebarger, also known as Cordwainer Smith and some other names, was also Kirk Allen. No, he didn’t use that name. But Robert Lindner wrote a book titled The Fifty-Minute Hour, and ever since then, people have been speculating as to whether the Kirk Allen…

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The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award

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…

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Recently I got an email from a sharp-eyed employee of the Library of Congress who is also a Cordwainer Smith fan. He had come across this photo and thought it might be mislabeled. It said that it was of W.W. Linebarger; click on the image to see the LOC page about it. W.W. Linebarger was…

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A Few Notes on Collecting Cordwainer

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…

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Alan Elms Answers Some CS Queries

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…

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A Visit to the Arlington National Cemetery

Here are George C. Willick’s comments about visiting the grave of Paul M. A. Linebarger at Arlington National Cemetery, in 2002. These appeared originally in the ezine I ran for a while back then, and were on a long ezine page of the old website. Went ‘back east’ a couple weeks ago, primarily on a…

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Two Interesting Cordwainer Smith Articles

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:…

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A Bit Like My Father When I Travel

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…

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Do Cordwainer Smith Fans Read Clifford Simak?

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…

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Paul Linebarger Reflecting on Mexico

Here’s a letter from my father in Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico, dated 3 August 1964. He, my stepmother, my sister, my cousin, and another friend our age had made several trips to Saltillo’s Universidad Interamericana,  where they studied Spanish. I’m not sure who had gone on this particular trip. I had just graduated from Stanford and…

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