Cordwainer Smith

Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (July 11, 1913 – August 6, 1966), better known by his pen-name Cordwainer Smith, was an American author known for his science fiction works.

Linebarger was a US Army officer, a noted East Asia scholar, and an expert in psychological warfare.

Although his career as a writer was shortened by his death at the age of 53, he is considered one of science fiction's more talented and influential authors.

Linebarger's father, Paul Myron Wentworth Linebarger, was a lawyer, working as a judge in the Philippines.

There he met Chinese nationalist Sun Yat-sen to whom he became an advisor.

Linebarger's father sent his wife to give birth in Milwaukee, Wisconsin so that their child would be eligible to become president of the United States.

Sun Yat-sen, who was considered the father of Chinese nationalism, became Linebarger's godfather.

His young life was unsettled as his father moved the family to a succession of places in Asia, Europe, and the United States.

He was sometimes sent to boarding schools for safety.

In all, Linebarger attended more than 30 schools.

In 1919, while at a boarding school in Hawaii, he was blinded in his right eye, which was replaced by a glass eye.

The vision in his remaining eye was impaired by infection.

Linebarger was familiar with English, German, and Chinese by adulthood.

At the age of 23, he received a PhD in political science from Johns Hopkins University.

In 1936, Linebarger married Margaret Snow.

From 1937 to 1946, Linebarger held a faculty appointment at Duke University, where he began producing highly regarded works on Far Eastern affairs.

While retaining his professorship at Duke after the beginning of World War II, Linebarger began serving as a second lieutenant of the United States Army, where he was involved in the creation of the Office of War Information and the Operation Planning and Intelligence Board.

He also helped organize the army's first psychological warfare section.

They had a daughter in 1942 and another in 1947.

In 1943, he was sent to China to coordinate military intelligence operations.

When he later pursued his interest in China, Linebarger became a close confidant of Chiang Kai-shek.

By the end of the war, he had risen to the rank of major.

In 1947, Linebarger moved to the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, where he served as Professor of Asiatic Studies.

He used his experiences in the war to write the book Psychological Warfare (1948), regarded by many in the field as a classic text.

He eventually rose to the rank of colonel in the reserves.

He was recalled to advise the British forces in the Malayan Emergency and the U.S. Eighth Army in the Korean War.

While he was known to call himself a "visitor to small wars", he refrained from becoming involved in the Vietnam War, but is known to have done work for the Central Intelligence Agency.

They divorced in 1949.

In 1950, Linebarger married again to Genevieve Collins; they had no children.

Linebarger is long rumored to have been "Kirk Allen", the fantasy-haunted subject of "The Jet-Propelled Couch," a chapter in psychologist Robert M. Lindner's best-selling 1954 collection The Fifty-Minute Hour. According to Cordwainer Smith scholar Alan C. Elms, this speculation first reached print in Brian Aldiss's 1973 history of science fiction, Billion Year Spree; Aldiss, in turn, claimed to have received the information from science fiction fan and scholar Leon Stover.

More recently, both Elms and librarian Lee Weinstein have gathered circumstantial evidence to support the case for Linebarger's being Allen, but both concede there is no direct proof that Linebarger was ever a patient of Lindner's or that he suffered from a disorder similar to that of Kirk Allen.

According to Frederik Pohl:

"In his stories, which were a wonderful and inimitable blend of a strange, raucous poetry and a detailed technological scene, we begin to read of human beings in worlds so far from our own in space in time that they were no longer quite Earth (even when they were the third planet out from Sol), and the people were no longer quite human, but something perhaps better, certainly different."

They remained married until his death from a heart attack in 1966, at Johns Hopkins University Medical Center in Baltimore, Maryland, at age 53.

Linebarger had expressed a wish to retire to Australia, which he had visited in his travels.

He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery, Section 35, Grave Number 4712.

In 1969 CIA officer Miles Copeland Jr.. wrote that Linebarger was "perhaps the leading practitioner of 'black' and 'gray' propaganda in the Western world".

According to Joseph Burkholder Smith, a former CIA operative, he conducted classes in psychological warfare for CIA agents at his home in Washington under cover of his position at the School of Advanced International Studies.

He traveled extensively and became a member of the Foreign Policy Association, and was called upon to advise President John F. Kennedy.

His widow, Genevieve Collins Linebarger, was interred with him on November 16, 1981.