Old North Australia is an arid planet where the sky and earth are gray. The sun is never very hot, the grass gray-blue, and the mountains low and eroded. Water is so scarce that canals have roofs to prevent evaporation.
Norstrilia was colonized in the Second Space Age when a group of Australian pioneers believed they had reencountered their homeland, which had been “broad, dry, open, beautiful.” They dreamed of establishing “another Australia among the stars” and keeping the spirit of Old Earth alive.
When they discovered the planet, the pioneers had recently suffered a painful collective experience in “the hell-world of Paradise VII, where the mountains ate people, the volcanoes poisoned sheep, the delirious oxygen made men rave with bliss as they pranced into their own deaths.”
For them, Norstrilia was the Promised Land. They brought their original animals with them, among which the merino sheep and kookaburra bird survive. The new ecosystem causes whimsical mutations: there are giant sparrows and lice but also miniature elephants. The sheep have mutated; they are so humongous and sedentary now that they are fed mechanically. Lawnmowers are used for shearing them. When an unknown plague threatens to kill them off, the Norstrilians discover that regular consumption of the drug (stroon or santaclara) that the sheep exude as a result of the illness grants them immortality.
The sheep do not produce stroon outside of Norstrilia. Yet before the rulers of other worlds think better of it and agree not to seize the ovine creatures, the collective greed of the entire Galaxy descends hostilely upon the Norstrilians.
Half their men die fighting against the Empire in the Fourth Battle of New Alice.38 The Cat Scandal threatens to cut the stroon supply to Earth, and the dictator Raumsong declares war on Norstrilia for this same reason.39 The Instrumentality, which normally “left them alone” and “defended them without letting the Norstrilians know they had been defended,”40 here intervenes.
As the sole producer of stroon, Norstrilia monopolizes commercialization of the drug but remains in a state of absolute isolation in order to preserve its lifestyle. Despite being fabulously rich, Norstrilians continue to live as austerely as their ancestors.
In Norstrilia, it is easy to recognize the Australia that Linebarger came to know. Farms are called “stations”, like in Australia. Cities have names such as New Canberra, New Melbourne and “New Alice” (Alice Springs). Lake Menzies immortalizes the Australian prime minister at the time.
Among the patriarchal families of Norstrilia are the MacArthurs, the same MacArthurs that introduced merino sheep into Australia. From them descends Rod MacBan, the 151st family member to bear that name.
Linebarger was attracted to Australia and thought about settling there, seeing it as an alternative to the consumerism of the United States. He could not have imagined that Australia would become the first country to embrace the principles of the Instrumentality. Thirty years later, the Northern Territory was the first place in the world to legalize euthanasia.
Within the larger Cordwainerian narrative, the utopia of the Instrumentality represents the culmination of a process that began in the 20th century, the so-called Pleasure Revolution. “One of the things that interested him about Australia when he was here, in contrast with the U.S.A., was that the Pleasure Revolution had not yet struck this country [...] On his first visit he said that in Australia people were still accustomed to doing without, whereas in America affluence had got to a point where it really was perfectly possible to avoid discomforts —or rather, use drugs to avoid discomforts— and use their affluence to get what they wanted.”41
In the Cordwainerian universe, Norstrilia is the figure that most approximates a utopia, or better yet the caricature of one.
Like all utopias, Norstrilia is closed off from the world and nearly impossible to enter. Like all utopias, it refers to a historically situated model. Here it is an idealization of Australia, although in general utopians of the past followed an inverse path, proceeding from the theoretical to the practical. It will suffice to recall Plato and Sicily, Rousseau and Corsica, Harrington and America, Morris and Iceland.
Norstrilia also has a literary reference. Erewhon (1872) by Samuel Butler, the last utopia with a geographic location, was written precisely in these lands. Erewhon was “behind the mountains” of New Zealand, still pioneer territory in Butler’s time. Without a doubt, the most peculiar thing about Erewhon is that it offered itself as a model. It was merely an “alternative” society that, like Norstrilia, practiced a primitive form of anti-mechanization.
The economy of Norstrilia revolves around the export of stroon. It is at the center of all the intrigues of the universe and its citizens are prepared to take up arms at any time, although “they know neither militarism nor misery.” Their farms are reminiscent of Israeli kibbutzim, both agriculture establishments and military bases at the same time. Its defense system (“Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons”) is nearly perfect, having kept anyone that ever attempted to invade the planet at bay.
Determined to avoid the corruption that usually goes hand and hand with immense wealth, the immortal Norstrilians adopt drastic measures to remain cut off from the world, hoping to cultivate the virtues of “privacy, simplicity and frugality” in isolation.
In the planet’s most recent political crisis, the Clean Sweep, the last of the underpeople, considered luxury items, are expelled and the State confiscates all luxury goods. Owners of these goods are allowed to repurchase them, yet at a price twenty thousand times their original value. “It was the final effort to keep the Norstrilians simple, healthy and well. Every citizen had to swear that he had turned in every single item, and the oath had been taken with thousands of telepaths watching.”
Norstrilia levies imports on machinery and consumption goods with 20,000,000% taxes and demands impossible prices (“2 billion megacredits per day”) for authorizing the permanent stay of tourists.
With its basic hierarchy of Owners, Misters, Citizens and Freemen, it preserves the values of a pioneer bourgeoisie.
By taking an oath, any Norstrilian can renounce his privileges and become an Official Pauper, which gives him or her the right to be a tramp or live from occasional jobs.
Others become Renunciants, recluses that leave Norstrilia to go off and die in other worlds. Murray Madigan, the owner of Henriada, and Perinö, the hermit of Pontoppidan, are both Renunciants. The pilot John Joy Tree was also born on Norstrilia. Few Norstrilians (save Lady Arabella Underwood), however, are within the ranks of the Instrumentality.
To maintain their austere lifestyle, Norstrilians adopt a spartan method. In a bloodless procedure that causes victims to “laugh” to death, they eliminate all youth that, starting at a certain age, cannot emit or receive telepathic messages.
Ever since renouncing all non-business relations with the outside world, Norstrilians have considered themselves “Her Absent Majesty, the Queen of England”. Their government acts on behalf of the “Temporary Commonwealth”, a name that has no meaning as Great Britain and its empire ceased to exist thousands of years ago. Nonetheless, they insist on granting a definitively British style to everything they do. For them, the word “un-British” means “something very bad indeed”42, and thanks must be given “to the Queen” for their daily bread.
All of their institutions are “temporary”, despite not having changed for millenniums. The Vice President of the Council is in charge of the government (there is no president), and one of the most important figures is the Onseck, that is, the Hon. Sec. or Honorable Secretary.
Norstrilian education is limited to “the seven liberal arts, the six practical sciences and the five collections of police and defense studies.” All their knowledge is contained in the Book of Rhetoric and the Book of Sheep and Numbers, which together form a peculiar Bible.
Norstrilians live in the “the toughest, brightest, simplest world in the Galaxy.
” Humor is a “pleasurable corrigible dysfunction.” They are “the tyrants of all mankind. They hold the Wealth. They have the santaclara, and other people live or die depending upon the commerce they have with the Norstrilians.”43
Norstrilia has settled the central problem of its age, tedium and futility, through voluntary archaism. By avoiding contact with the underpeople, they remain indifferent to their reformist push.
As can be seen, the world of Old Earth, the Instrumentality and Norstrilia is neither a utopia nor a dystopia but possesses something of both. If this world seems plausible, it is because it is just as complex, contradictory and unjust as our own.
One of the possible keys to this fictional universe lies in the cyclical vision of history that Cordwainer Smith adopted from Chinese thought and the philosophy of Spengler and Toynbee.
Spengler’s The Decline of the West was one of the most popular books in the thirties. It is unlikely that many science fiction writers read it, yet its ideas dominated the genre throughout the interwar period. Its influence on Voyage of the Space Beagle (1939-1950) by A. E. Van Vogt, the series Okie (1950-1970) by James Bush, and even the Empire and Foundation stories of Isaac Asimov is undeniable.
The latter are commonly associated with the thinking of Arnold J. Toynbee, even if Asimov himself acknowledged Gibbon as a source of inspiration. Less popular than Spengler, Toynbee exerted little influence on science fiction, although Charles L. Harness imagined, in Flight into Yesterday (1953), a future in which Toynbee’s philosophy would be an exact science.
It would not be inaccurate to say that Cordwainer Smith was one of the few writers that appropriated Toynbee’s ideas, for the world of the Instrumentality, Norstrilia and the underpeople embodies some of the British historian’s basic themes:
• The theory of the collapse of civilizations due to repetitiousness, leading to the depletion of creativity. Such is the fate of the Jwindz, the Scanners, the Empire and the Instrumentality.
• The concentration of power in the hands of an elite: the Instrumentality.
• Attempts at archaic recovery: Norstrilia and the Rediscovery.
• Salvation through a universal religion embodied in a domestic proletariat: the underpeople and its religious message.
• The loss and recovery of “vitality” (élan vital). This theme, which Toynbee inherited from Bergson, inspires both the story of the Vom Acht sisters, the founders of the Instrumentality, and the underpeople, who call the Instrumentality into question.
The underpeople
The society governed by the Instrumentality and sustained by the Norstrilian drug stroon is opulent and egalitarian. The currency is backed by stroon, and everyone is rigorously provided with the opportunities they have been programmed for.
It is a “happy world” à la Huxley whose injustice lies not simply in the absence of freedom, but in that its perfection is dependent upon the oppression of the underpeople.
Technology has reduced work to it lowest common denominator, though people are still needed to operate machinery and carry out disagreeable tasks. The underpeople44 are thus charged with “the heavy and the weary work which remained as the caput mortuum of a really perfected economy.”45 Earthport, the capital of Old Earth, symbolizes the polarity of the world of the 160th century. An indestructible building-city, it is the masterpiece of Daimoni architects: an immense tower in the shape of a cocktail glass. Earthport emerges out of the Caribbean Sea twenty-five kilometers into the sky, with Martinique, California (Sunset Coast) and the Pacific (Sunset Ocean) visible from the top.
Crowned by the cosmodrome, the access door to outer space, the headquarters of the Instrumentality and administrative centers are located in the stem. Deep underground are the catacombs (Downdeep) where the underpeople live.
The underpeople have always lived below the ground. The catacomb of Clown Town, the starting point of D’joan’s crusade, is the Brown and Yellow Corridor, “brown” and “yellow” representing people of color.
Power is unequivocally polarized. While Instrumentality headquarters are found in the highest levels of Earthport, E’telekeli reigns in the subterranean city of Downdeep. The Holy Insurgency, which ultimately consolidates enough power to confront the Instrumentality, is born there.
In the political-religious process of their emancipation, the underpeople evolve from the status of pariahs to a proletariat, finally gaining a kind of conditional citizenship.
The underpeople are an original creation of Cordwainer Smith. In science fiction literature, other stories of persecuted people exist. Slan by A. E. Van Vogt and Pilgrimage: The Book of the People by Zenna Henderson, for example, both were understood as parables of racism. But these people were communities of misunderstood supermen persecuted for being different. The case of Cordwainer’s underpeople, however, is the only one in which an “inferior” and scorned people, because they are the more human of the two, ultimately redeem their oppressors.
Analogies between the underpeople and Afro-Americans are easy to find. According to Burns, the underpeople can be seen as “a sort of social allegory for the American Negro.”46 Elms calls attention to the fact that Paul had witnessed at a tender age the subjugation of the Chinese by their Manchu oppressors. It is possible that he superimposed this youthful substratum onto the civil rights movement of the sixties when creating the figure of the underpeople.
“Underdog” (which Webster’s defines as “a victim of social injustice or of ruthless persecution”) was a derogatory term applied to blacks. “Underground” is used universally to mean “hidden” or “secret”.
The story of D’joan is set in the ancient city of Kalma, which could be Selma (Alabama), where Martin Luther King was active. In the same story, a place named Waterrock is mentioned. This could be the equivalent of Little Rock (Arkansas47), which in 1957 was the site a civil rights battle for racial integration. A poem speaks of a meeting “under the dark skies of Waterrock”:
“We met and we loved
and vainly we plotted
To rescue beauty
from a smothering war.
Time had no time for us,
The minutes, no mercy.
We have loved and lost
And the world goes on..48
And yet, in spite of the author’s clear sympathy, there is some ambivalence implicit in the figure of the underpeople.
Their “animal” origin and the accentuation of their most disagreeable features almost seem to justify their discrimination. The heterogeneous group that follows D’joan and the assembly that congregates around E’telekeli49 rival a “Cour des miracles” in grotesqueries.
At times it seems that Cordwainer Smith resists abandoning the point of view of the Instrumentality –or at least of the gifted politician Jestocost. He is confident that a decadent society can be renewed through the action of a “domestic proletariat” à la Toynbee. At the same time, the implication is that he will only fully accept people of color if they are “integrated” into white society, and without their own idiosyncrasies.
Still, in Carola we see how far Linebarger was from being a racist. Living among different races and cultures from an early age –to the point of doubting his own identity– seems to have spared him from ethnocentric prejudice. He had had a Jewish friend, a Chinese one, and even a Russian lover with a bad reputation. In something he wrote in 1961, he expresses pride over the fact that his university did not discriminate against students and praises the American melting pot, though without ignoring its limitations.
Arthur Burns recalls how Linebarger’s Southern ancestry and experience in China granted him “this punctilio found only in traditional societies, and a sharp perception of racial and cultural differences. But these actually furthered his capacities for coming to know all kinds of men and women and to enter sympathetically into t
he hearts and minds of subject races, as readers of the Old Norstrilian stories will recognize in his treatment of the part-animal underpeople.”50
During the war, he had many Nisei (Japanese-American) friends, because “he never tried to make them anything that they weren’t, but he admired qualities that they had.”51
To a large extent Linebarger felt Chinese. His personal greeting card was written in English and Chinese. In all of his work, his admiration for Chinese civilization is clearly apparent, not to mention his almost Oriental approach to understanding history.
Chinese abound in his stories: Prince Lovaduck, Lady Ch’ao, Chang the Observer and the Jwindz Jo sect, to name a few. One of the last powers of the Age of Nations is Goonhogo, the Chinese nation. The Chinese establish Aojou-Nanbien, the great post-atomic civilization of Australia. Their physiognomy is the oddest of all groups of people, and it is impossible to imitate them: “China has been hard. The Chinesians survived longer than any nation [...] so that we have found it impossible to reconstruct China before the age of space. We can’t modify people into being Ancient Chinese.”52
Personifying animals in an allegory of human affairs is as old as Aesop. Among utopians, Margaret Cavendish employed this strategy in her Description of a New World, Named the Burning World (1688), in which birdmen and fish-men appear. A more recent antecedent is The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) by H. G. Wells, in which a character named M’ling calls the underpeople to mind. Elms locates other sources in War with the Newts by Karel Capek and in a story by Edmond Hamilton.53
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