What struck Dr. Linebarger most about Australia however, was its relative escape from the hedonism he believed was afflicting most of the Western World. He talked a great deal about the "Pleasure Revolution'' and its consequences. "He felt that this did inevitably produce ~ certain slackening of the human drive and dynamism," Burns noted. He became obsessed with the idea of a decadent and aimless society he saw as the logical end-product of the Pleasure Revolution.

So important was this new thematic concern that Dr. Linebarger began in 1957 the compiling of an entire new notebook of story ideas and future history. Virtually all his new stories from 1957 on were to be based on material in this notebook, as opposed to that in the books dating from the %930's that had served for both science fiction and non-science fiction story ideas up to that time.

Unfortunately, this last notebook of

Dr. Linebarger was lost to posterity when he carelessly left it on a dockside restaurant table in Rhodes while on a world tour with his wife in i965. James M. Bready of the Baltimore Sun described the incident later that year in the only Cordwainer Smith interview ever published - but he somehow gained the impression that the notebook covered only 3,000 years.

· Dr. Linebarger, in a letter to Pohl, Nov.

9, 1965 -,he had heard that the MIT Science

Fiction Society was interested in his future

history scheme - indicated otherwise :

"I think the people at MIT had a fine idea about an Instrumentality chronologyI but t lost my Cordwainder Smith notebook in the Aegean and I'm having to re-do 9j000 years of history from memory or published notes, I have my 'pre-1957 notebooks, but the last book contained a tremendous amount of material only about 2/3 used."

He had only just begun the task of reproducing the notebook when he died a year later (the pre-1957 notebooks are still squirreled away in the Linebarger attic, according to Mrs Linebarger, who currently · Js going through his accumulation of material there in connection with a commission to do another updated edition of PSYCHOLIGAL WARFARE)

That it existed, however, is proof (were any needed; that he did have a broad conceptual scheme in mind for his later Instrumentality S.F., one not touched upon in his published explanations (in the collection, SPACE LORDS of 1965) of how he borrowed plots from the classics.

Actually, the change in the orientation of Dr. Linebarger's work that began in Australia was in two stages - the first sociological, the second explicitly religious.

The first stage lasted only three years, during which 'Golden the Shop Was, Oh, Oh, Oh', 'When the People Fell', 'Angerhelm', 'The Nancy Routine' and 'The Lady Who Sailed the Soul' were written.

One of these, Mrs Linebarger remembers,

was dictated to her in Australia - but she isn't sure which. It cannot have been, however, either 'Golden' or 'Lady' - for these were the first two stories on which she herself collaborated. In each case, Dr. Linebarger had hit a writing block, and she carried on the story until he was able to pick it up again. When they were done, neither could tell who had written what - just as in the case of Henry and Catherine Kuttner.

The extent of Mrs Linebarger's contribution, however, can be Judged by the fact 'that, on the title page of the manuscript of 'The

Lady Who Sailed the Soul", her husband insisted on crediting the tale : "By Genevieve Linebarger and P.M.A." A few years later, she helped him write "Drunkboat'.

The "outsider" types who were the heroes of previous Cordwainer Smith stories still figure in the 1957-9 stories - but in a different context. One gets a clearer view of the larger society they inhabit - one becoming increasingly decadent through the ultimate impact of the Pleasure Revolution.

In 'When the People Fell' the mass media want none of the story Dobyns Bennett has to tell of the Chinesian conquest of Venus - "It wasn't the right kind of story for entertainment, and the public would not appreciate it any more." The Lords of the Instrumentality appear in an active role for the first time in 'Golden in Ship Was, Oh, Oh, Oh' - a portrait of human society become decadent indeed, but still able to rise to a challenge when necessary. The Go Captain Tedesco, a current addict at the start of the story, forsakes his wire after he learns there is more pleasure in real accomplishment.

But without question the best of the stories in this period is 'The Lady Who Sailed the Soul'. At once a compelling love story and a story of vocation, it brilliantly develops the contrast between the romantic age of the sailors as personified in Helen America and the cynical decadence of a later age represented in the girl who comes to scorn her mother's stories and her worn-out spieltier with the same contempt.

Those who read the story in the April 1960 Galaxy may have wondered about the religious references and epilog that were in the version later reprinted in YOU WILL NEVER BE TF~ SAP~ but missing in the Galaxy version. These parts were in the original manuscript - but Gold cut them out. Even in the uncut version,

-12

Document scaning and conversion provided by Peter Barker

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