Quest of the Three Worlds by Cordwainer Smith

After that date he published fiction only as Cordwainer Smith, his first story under this name, 'Scanners Live in Vain' (January 1950 Fantasy Book #6), being one of his finest works. Before beginning to write that mature work, however, Smith served with the US Army Intelligence Corps in India and China during World War Two and published three non-sf novels: Ria ( 1947) and Carola ( 1948), both as by Felix C Forrest, and Atomsk: A Novel of Suspense ( 1949) as by Carmichael Smith. The tale, plus other unpublished early work, bore some relationship to the Instrumentality of Mankind Universe or Future History into which almost all his mature work fitted. 81-Q' as by Karolman Junghar for The Adjutant – the yearbook of the Washington, District of Columbia, Cadet Corps – in 1928 some other early pseudonyms have not been identified. Right-wing in politics, he played an active role in propping up the Chiang Kai-shek regime in China (one of his father's causes) before the communist takeover, writing frequently on Chinese politics, his second book in his own right being Government in Republican China ( 1938). Smith was a devout High Anglican, deeply interested in psychoanalysis and expert in 'brainwashing' techniques, on which he wrote an early text, Psychological Warfare ( 19).

He remained interested in Hubbard for many years, composing a never-published book-length study, «Ethical Dianetics», around 1950, which did not espouse (he claimed) 'a closed cult' like Hubbard's own Dianetics. In America from about 1931, Smith studied at George Washington University, where he served as editor of the Literary Review, a supplement to The Hatchet, the college paper, and in this role published his fellow undergraduate L Ron Hubbard's first story (not sf), 'Tah' (9 February 1932 The Hatchet: Literary Review Supplement). His interest in China was profound – he had studied there, and edited his father's The Gospel of Chung Shan According to Paul Linebarger ( 1932) and The Ocean Men: An Allegory of the Sun Yat-Sen Revolutions ( 1937 chap), the latter being an allegorical play in a quasi-Chinese manner the style of some of his later stories reflects his attempts to translate a Chinese narrative and structural style into his sf writing, not perhaps with complete success, as the fabulist's voice he assumed (see Fabulation) could verge upon the garrulous when opened out into English prose. A polyglot, he spent much of his early life before 1931 in Europe, Japan and China, his father, Paul Myron Wentworth Linebarger (1871-1939), being a peripatetic sinologist, author, and propagandist for Sun Yat-sen.

The most famous pseudonym of Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (1913-1966), US author, political scientist, academic, military adviser in Korea and Malaya (though not Vietnam).

Quest of the Three Worlds by Cordwainer Smith