Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger

Born in Milwaukee in 1913, Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger grew up in an unusual international world and spent part of his childhood in China. He became a scholar of East Asia, earned a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University, and built a career as a political scientist and adviser. During World War II he also worked in psychological warfare, experience that fed into his nonfiction as well as the wide historical imagination of his fiction.

Under the name Cordwainer Smith, Linebarger created the far-future science-fiction setting often called the Instrumentality of Mankind. Stories such as Scanners Live in Vain and the novel Norstrilia helped make him a cult favorite, admired for his dreamlike voice, unusual structure, and emotional power. His fiction often blends myth, politics, religion, and compassion for outsiders, giving it a tone that still feels distinctive decades later.

Linebarger died in Baltimore in 1966. Though he published far less fiction than many of his peers, his work left a lasting mark on science fiction, and readers continue to return to it for its originality, ambition, and haunting sense of the far future.