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 communicate. But when that is going okay, I get very nosy in a friendly way, and I can practically feel my father inside my skull. Read More »
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 are, the more likely someone will like both of them.” Read More »
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 was about to begin a PhD program in Anthropology at Berkeley. (I only lasted a year before running off to Spain with my boyfriend, but that’s a different story).
My father wrote,
In a way, I’m sorry that you’ve not been able to share these last three visits to Mexico with us. This is a culture fully as alien to the norteamericana as is, for example, the French. Read More »
Do you have favorite quotes from Cordwainer Smith / Paul Linebarger? If so, do post them and where they are from, in the comments.
When I was designing some t-shirts for the site, I re-read The Dead Lady of Clown Town online, and the link takes you to where you can do that at no cost… it’s part of the Baen ebook website. I found a lot of quotes that I liked, though only a few (the ones in bold) ended up on shirts so far.
Here are some:
- Bright brains serve madness as well as they serve sanity—namely, very well indeed.
- I’m a machine, but I used to be a person, long, long ago. Read More »
I do this website in the hopes of bringing the Cordwainer Smith work to more people. With the holidays soon to be upon us, here are three ways that you too can spread the word, while shopping or without spending anything. Of course you can do these at any time of year!
1. Give a Cordwainer Smith book as a gift. There’s an Amazon display on the right of the screen, or here’s a page on my site with links to several online booksellers’ Cordwainer Smith offerings.
2. Tell people where they can read Cordwainer Smith online for free. Read More »
Here’s an email I received this week from Cordwainer Smith artist Corby Waste, reprinted with his permission:
Well, well, well, here’s something REALLY amazing – it seems that the Hubble Space Telescope has taken it’s first picture of a planet orbiting another star. Out of all the stars in the universe it happened to photograph a planet orbiting the fairly well-known star called Fomalhaut.
Who among us already knew that such a planet existed around Fomalhaut? Raise your hand if you know the answer!
The first photos of any extrasolar planet Read More »
I had never given a thought to my father’s effect on archaeology until I received this email from Dr. Alasdair Brooks, an archaeologist working in Australia [a.brooksATlatrobe.edu.au AFTER YOU REPLACE AT WITH @]. He wrote:
You might be interested in an academic paper that I’ve written about your father’s work…The premise of the paper is that your father, while obviously primarily concerned with other themes, was very sensitive to many of the issues that are relevant to modern archaeological interpretation, particularly as concerns the near-mythic power of representations of the past. As such, much of his work can be used as an allegory within which these issues can be discussed. Read More »
On July 11 of this year, I was deep into the total makeover of cordwainer-smith.com and it wasn’t till well into the morning that I did a bit of math and realized that since my father was born in 1913, that was 95 years ago. Since he died so young, in his 50s, Read More »
What can already be said about the place of Cordwainer Smith in the history of science fiction? How will he be remembered as a science fiction author?
Your opinions are welcomed. Me, I really don’t know, but Read More »
Cordwainer Smith science fiction has been published in many languages. For years, every now and then I would get a package of books in some language I couldn’t read, sent to me by Cordwainer Smith’s literary agent. I could tell pretty much what stories were in them, but beyond that I just tossed them on a the top of bottom shelf of a bookcase somewhere. As a former librarian, I’m too much of a pack rat to throw them out. Read More »
I’ve alread blogged about some comments about my father from his close friend, Australian Arthur Burns, in an interview with John Foyster. Here are some bits from an article Arthur wrote after my father died–they sure brought back memories for me, especially the physical description. Thanks to John Foyster for the right to use this material, which appeared initially in Australian SF Review.
He was above medium height, terribly gaunt, bald, high-nosed, narrowing in the chin; he wore severe excellently-cut suits; his favourite hat was Read More »
Arthur Burns was an Australian friend of my father’s. I remember him and his wife Netta, and their children, particularly from 1961, when I was a college student in France and I stayed with them in London around Christmas; they were living there for the year.
One evening as we discussed plans for the next morning, Arthur said to me with a twinkle in his eye, “Shall I knock you up around seven?” He knew perfectly well what the American meaning of that term was, and I still remember blushing while Read More »
