The same statement applies to Cordwainer Smith: he makes you work, but he pays you back for the effort. During our long walk around the bucolic campus, she asked me if I had read Stevens and when I admitted that I avoided his poetry because it was said to be daunting, she told me something I have never forgotten: "He makes you work, but he pays you back for the work." I took her at her word, and have been reading Stevens since that time. I admit, this is not everyone's preference.īack in Autumn of 1978, when I was then an aspiring poet (all imagination and no production), a published poet visited our college campus, and I was privileged to give her a campus tour because she had arrived earlier than expected and the English department faculty did not know what to do with her. Dante gave us a Divine Comedy' Balzac gave us a human comedy and Cordwainer Smith has given us a cosmic comedy as valid, as profound, and as poetic as the previous two. Some have suggested that Smith's religious symbolism is heavy-handed, but that accusation was also leveled at Dante's Divine Comedy and the epithet "heavy handed" is often deployed by lightweights. The fact that the final word in the final sequential title is derived from a denomination of Christianity, the Coptic Church, suggests to me that the Instrumentality series would have been fully and wholly spiritualized-yes, totally Christianized-in a most satisfactory and enduring climax. Linebarger from us (and, as he and I both believe, took him to his eternal existence in Heaven), we do not know what the final sequence of the series, "The Robot, The Rat, and the Copt" would have been like. And, due to the unfortunate circumstances that took Dr. In my opinion, the Casher sequence is not a mere addendum to the main series, as so many have seemed to treat it, but it is a climax to the series. One sees the first budding in "Scanners Live In Vain." As the stories progress, and as Smith progressively spiritualizes them, the blossom opens, the fragrance begins to waft, and the nectar is made available to those whose palettes can receive and fully taste it.
No matter how many times I read it, Cordwainer Smith's work is always in the process of blossoming. So I am glad to see Cordwainer Smith's science fiction negatively criticized, because that means that he belongs to the appreciative and respectful elite, those who prefer Mallarme's faun to Dumas' Count of Monte Cristo. Similar people criticized the works of the Roman poet, Vergil, as he published them they berated and mocked the poems of Stephane Mallarme and, until recently (that is, within my lifetime, say during the early seventies), they treated the poetry of Wallace Stevens with the most grudging and least respectful criticism. I, for one, am very glad to see a bit of negative review of the great man's science fiction.
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