When the People Fell

by Cordwainer Smith

A sweeping saga of the centuries to come, from the new dark age that followed a global war, to the new civilization that arose from the ashes to colonize the stars. At first, the colonists use ships with gigantic sails, cruising on the waves of starlight, their captains having to become something part human and part machine; then later moving by planoforming ships which travel faster than light, but must defend themselves against the malevolent, mind-devouring creatures lurking in the dark between the stars. Then came the reign of the all-powerful Lords of the Instrumentality, who ruled Earth and its colony worlds with ruthless benevolence, suffocating the human spirit for millennia—until the time of the Rediscovery of Man, when the strange, lost concept of freedom was reborn. . . . An extraordinary vision of a future unique in science fiction, praised by readers, critics, and major writers in the field.

“Read this. Cordwainer Smith is timeless.” — Terry Pratchett

“. . . a truly unforgettable writer...” — David Brin


“. . . a sophisticated, often poetic writer . . . these stories rank among the finest of all time. . . .”— Publishers Weekly

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Fiction, Anthologies, Space Opera, Fantasy, Science Fiction Fantasy

624 pages, Paperback

Published September 4, 2007

About the author

Pseudonym of:
Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger

Linebarger also employed the literary pseudonyms "Carmichael Smith" (for his political thriller Atomsk), "Anthony Bearden" (for his poetry) and "Felix C. Forrest" (for the novels Ria and Carola).

Linebarger was also a noted East Asia scholar and expert in psychological warfare.

Reviews

[Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Haunting tales of the future dark age. I mean, seriously, 18 billion chinese sacrificed in a skydrop to take over Venus? Holy crap. I'm not reading stories found in other editions, since a lot of them are duplicates, but damn... these stories are FINE. Really FINE stuff.

[Jim Davis · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have been a big fan of the unique writing style of Cordwainer Smith for many, many years (I was born in 1947). I reread the short story "When the People Fell" again when I cam across it in an anthology called Perilous Planets edited by Brian Aldiss. I realize this is intended for the collection with the same name but there isn't a separate entry for just the short story. I read many of the reviews but few people mentioned the title story.

The story contains the familiar and wonderful use of language that is unique to Paul Linebarger, his real name. But it really had me thinking about what he was saying. Linebarger was an East Asia expert and also an expert in psychological warfare which he taught at the CIA. The story occurs about 7000 Ad, fairly early in the time of the Instrumentality.

The story on the surface deals with a Chinese solution to a problem on Venus that the Instrumentality wasn't able to handle. But underneath we see an extrapolate of Chinese socity at a family level and the current, 1959 when the story was written, authoritarian, all for the state, Chinese government. The problem is resolved by the average Chinese person being used in mass without concern for their welfare to deal with Venus. At the same time the Chinese people seem to willingly accept death and hardship to fulfill the job they were given although they express grief and suffering to what is happening to their families and friends. The carnage among the Chinese people dropped on Venus seems horrible to the people of the Instrumentality, the future extension of western power although more humane attempts by the Instrumentality failed completely.

There is also a love story between two high ranking people of the Instrumentality and shows the impact on the man and especially the woman involved. The story was actually told to a reporter hundreds of years after the event by the man involved. It seems that the event had been conveniently pushed under the table as far as the Instrumentality was concerned. While I'm sure Linebarger didn't favor Chinese Communism in 1959 it seems like it was a way to allow people understand more about a cultural mindset that isn't known by the usual American. Linebarger would have the knowledge to be able to juxtapose the horror of chine Communist authoritarian methods and the resilience of the Chinese people themselves.

"Any time later, when I said to her, 'You're not such a bad girl!' she was able to admit the truth and tell me she was not. That night in the rain of people would test anybody's soul and it tested hers. She had met a big test and passed it. She used to say to me, 'I saw it once. I saw the people fell, and I never want to see another person suffer again. Keep me with you, Dobyns, keep me with you forever.'

[Ed Erwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cordwainer Smith's writing is unique and often wonderful. Not every story is a 5, but add them all together and it is an easy 5.

On my first trip through this book I stopped halfway, just to make sure I'd have some more of his stories to read later.

Finishing this, I've now read all his short stories, which is bittersweet. I still have the novel Norstrilia to look forward to.

[Alex Sarll]

In his day job, Paul Linebarger was a diplomat and academic who literally wrote the book on psychological warfare. You can see traces of his experiences of Asia in the books he wrote as Cordwainer Smith; his future is define by the Instrumentality of Mankind, a rigorous, ruthless yet noble bureaucracy which recalls the great Eastern civil services more than any Western organisation. But in many ways it would be easier to believe these peculiar tales were the work of some reclusive aesthete or acid-fried counterculturalist. Here are realms "Where crazy lanterns stared with idiot eyes. Where the waves washed back and forth with the dead of all the ages. Where the stars become a pool and I swam in it. Where blue turns to liquor, stronger than alcohol, wilder than music, fermented with the red red reds of love. I saw all the things that men have ever thought they saw, but it was me who really saw them."
And right there, I think, you can see one of the reasons that Smith's future history has not become a playground for other writers the way so many contemporary settings (Known Space, Saberhagen's Berserker universe) have; who else could write that way without lapsing into pastiche, like some sorry spacefaring August Derleth? But the other is that, as a future history, it doesn't really hold together. There's always a timeline in the back of the collections, but you can tell that - had Smith not died early, his work incomplete - he had a lot of revisions to do. Maybe even some excisions; 'The Colonel Came Back From The Nothing-At-All' is clearly either a sketch for, or a distillation of, 'Drunkboat'; saying they're separate stories set millennia apart won't wash at all. And yet, each has its separate strengths, so one can in many ways be glad that no such tidying occurred.

Some of the later stories mesh less well with what I've previously read of Smith - even in their titles, the Casher O'Neill stories 'On the Gem Planet', 'On the Storm Planet' and 'On the Sand Planet' seem to be seeking an accommodation with more mainstream, heroic SF. And yet, whether by design or simple intransigence of the muse, they veer back towards a very Smith strangeness; in particular, there is the central figure of T'ruth, an irresistibly attractive 12-year-old girl. Who is also a thousand-year-old-turtle. And if that somehow doesn't creep you out, just wait for the scene where she wanks off her comatose father-figure!

That's not the only awkward moment; while one of the big themes in the stories is the stupidity and injustice of racism, a casual but firm male chauvinism seems to be fine. And it's frustrating how, compared to the genuine strangeness of the people in some stories, in others (often ones later in the timeline, which makes it particularly odd) they do very much come across as fifties Americans with spaceships. Then too there's the didactic tendencies, especially once the Old Strong Religion (yeah, that annoying one with the fish and the cross) is rediscovered. But nobody ever quite imagined a future free from their own age's preconceptions, and the poetry and strangeness are almost always enough to carry the stories through these hiccups.

Curiously, two of the leads in stories here (and I do mean 'leads'; unlike many SF writers of the supposed golden age, Smith didn't really deal in 'heroes') are named Rambo and Dredd. One wonders if their creators - or indeed their shared enactor, Sly Stallone - ever happened across these stories. Elsewhere, and half a century ahead, incidental details anticipate both the two-headed war elephants of Adventure Time, and Sharknado.

The volume is filled out (not that it needs it, having already hit 700 pages by that point) with a few non-Instrumentality SF stories of Smith's (though some of them, especially the terribly sad 'Nancy', could easily slot into its early years). Like the Casher O'Neill stories, some of these are a little more conventional, but only a little - though I could see the comedic 'Western Science Is So Wonderful' clicking with a lot of people who didn't fall for the more rarefied charms of the Instrumentality stuff.

[MB Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finished reading When the People Fell (2007) by Cordwainer Smith the other night. This is another collection of his short SF work, with 28 stories. Between this and The Rediscovery of Man (1975) I think I’ve now read all his SF stories.

When the People Fell did not impress me as much as did The Rediscovery of Man. Part of the problem may have been the 7 stories that are in both collections. I skipped over this when reading this one and so I probably missed some of the impact. Still a good collection, even if it started a little slow.

The first two stories, “No, No, Not Rogov!” (1958) and “War No. 81-Q (rewritten version)” (1993) left me a little flat. “No, No, Not Rogov!” was pretty clever in its way, but not what I was looking for. Most of Smith’s Instrumentality stories take place in the distant future (6,000 to 14,000 years from now), “No, No, Not Rogov!” on the other hand takes place in the present.

“War No. 81-Q (rewritten version)” was even more of a disappointment. The original version (included later in the collection) was a 4 page story Smith wrote when he was a teenager. This version was better, but still nothing great.

The next two stories, “Mark Elf” (1957) & “The Queen of the Afternoon” (1978), were better; but by then I was starting to get depressed. In my review of The Rediscovery of Man I’d gushed about what a great writer Smith was, and I’m just not feeling it.

The next two stories were in the other collection so I skipped them. (Both excellent, but since I didn’t read them, they didn’t improve my mood.)

Then I get to the seventh story, “When the People Fell” (1959). This was more like it. Not Smith’s best work perhaps, but still unique and interesting.

But the eighth story, “Think Blue, Count Two” (1962) Just amazing. It’s about the dangers of long distance space travel and its effects on the human psyche. A topic Smith addressed in two other stories in the collection: “Nancy” (1959) and “The Good Friends” (1963).

After that the book was pretty much smooth sailing, except for the strange similarities between “The Colonel Came Back from Nothing-at-All” (1979) and “Drunkboat” (1963).

The collection is broken up into two sections: Instrumentality (22 stories) and Miscellaneous (6 stories). The Instrumentality section is ordered by future history time-line; I think I was have preferred to have read them in the order they were written. The stories do a fair amount of referencing event in other stories and it’d be interesting to see how close in time the stories were written. I’d also have preferred a little more bibliographical information. Linebarger (Smith’s real name) died in 1966, so I’m a little curious about the provenance of the five stories with later dates. Are these stories he finished but didn’t publish (why not?) or fragments finished by others (his wife Geneviere, an occasional co-author, perhaps)?

When the People Fell is a good (if somewhat uneven) collection of stories. Now I’m on to Nostrilia (1975), Smith’s only SF novel with its own convoluted publishing history…

[Nebogipfel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of a lot of Smith's Instrumentality stories. Together with The Rediscovery of Man (1999 Gollancz) they contain all of his Instrumentality stories plus a few other SF stories. While I was reading this book, I also re-read the ones present in the other book.

The stories seem to be set in the same universe, in a roughly chronological order. They span a period from the Cold War to more than 16,000 years into the future. Since they were not written in chronological order, there are some discrepancies and minor contradictions. For example, in Mark Elf, the author states that 16000 years has passed from WWII, but other parts of the story indicate that no more than 3000-4000 years has passed. Then, the status of Underpeople is unclear. At one point they seem to be on the verge of attaining freedom, but after more than 2000 years it seems like they still haven't. Finally, Smith was fascinated by Christianity and Christian motifs appear in a few stories, but to me it seems they take away from the stories, rather than add to them.

Smith's writing style and imagery is unique and bizare. While it is often obvious his stories were written in the sixties, when the space exploration was just beginning, he takes that 'lack of space knowledge' and extrapolates such fantastic situations and technologies, that cannot be found anywhere else in science fiction.

Having all this in mind, Cordwainer Smith certainly does not deserve the current status of a neglected and forgotten writter.

[David Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

We the Underpeople and associated anthology When the People Fell collect Cordwainer Smith's stories and his single novel dealing with the dystopic Instrumentality of Mankind. This is compelling, thought-provoking science-fiction at it's best. Humanity has overcome poverty and suffering through it's reliance on an underclass of workers, the underpeople. Because these underpeople are derived from animal stock, their exploitation need not be recognized as such, and thus they form the perfect permanently impoverished pool of surplus labor that capital requires. "People never loved the underpeople. They used them like chairs or doorhandles. Since when did a doorhandle demand the Charter of Ancient Rights?" ("The Dead Lady of Clown Town") The thematic core of this series of stories is aptly summarized by the bird-man E'duard in the story "Down to a Sunless Sea" as "the right of an entity to exist, to exist on its own terms provided they do not violate the rights of others, to come to its own terms with life, and to make its own decisions." While the best work is in We the Underpeople (including the stories "The Dead Lady of Clown Town" and "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell", as well as the novel Norstrilia), there are many fine stories in When the People Fell as well, such as "Scanners Love in Vain" and the story of the punishment planet, "A Planet Named Shayol", as well as the previously mentioned "Down to a Sunless Sea." When the People Fell also includes the few stories Cordwainer Smith wrote that were not part of the Instrumentality of Mankind cycle. In the best of these, "Angerhelm", a man receives a message from beyond the grave from his dead son which was somehow captured by recording device on a Soviet space satellite. This eerie tale would have made a great Twilight Zone episode, while also being a great satire on the intelligence agencies on both sides during the Cold War. Both books are highly recommended.

[Rob Hopwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

When the People Fell by Cordwainer Smith
(A review of only the short story with this title)

This story about how the Chinesian government colonized Venus first appeared in Galaxy Magazine in April 1959. The events related occur not long after Scanners Live in Vain, just as human lifespans are being lengthened from around a century and a half to four hundred years (through the use of the santaclara drug, stroon). Three hundred years later, an aged Dobyns Bennett is trying to recount his eyewitness experience of the Chinesian invasion of Venus to a rather reluctant reporter. The reader should remember that this story was written more than 60 years ago, and before the Venera landers and probes had shown the extremes of temperature and atmospheric pressure which exist on our sister planet. Nevertheless, When the People Fell shows humans needing suits and breathing apparatus to walk out on the surface of this world.

When Dobyns Bennett was a young man, he was at Experimental Area A, a base established on Venus by the Instrumentality. Dobyns was with Senior Scanner Vomact and his daughter Terza Vomact. The Senior Scanner Vomact in Scanners Live in Vain was made Chief for Space after Scanners become obsolete, and the Senior Scanner in When the People Fell describes himself as being already aged (probably around one hundred years old) and too old to benefit from the santaclara drug. I am not entirely sure whether they are one and the same person, although I rather think not. There seems to be a gap of a few centuries implied as existing between the two stories, so possibly by that time “Senior Scanner” had simply become a courtesy title. Indeed, the Vomacts are described as “a great family of scanners”. Terza is obviously the latest descendant of the Vom Acht Sisters who appear in the stories Mark Elf and The Queen of the Afternoon which are set some three millennia before her time.

The original Chinesian Jwindz government which had ruled all True Men had been brought down by the Vom Acht Sisters and their allies, but the Chinesian culture lived on for another three thousand years and by AD7000 there were seventeen billion people living on earth under the Goonhogo, the supreme leader of which was the Waywonjong.

This is still the Second Age of Space, and The Instrumentality apparently wishes to colonize Venus, but is stymied by native creatures known as Loudies. They float around just above the surface of the planet and reproduce at a prodigious rate. They are harmless under normal circumstances, but destroying even one of them results in dire consequences. The Experimental Area has not found a workable solution to the problem.

The situation changes abruptly and unexpectedly when the Waywonjong orders a massive invasion and colonization of Venus. The representatives of the Instrumentality cannot see how colonization can be achieved due to the large numbers of Loudies, but the Goonhogo employs a crude but extremely effective solution to this difficulty, despite the fact that this method takes a heavy toll in human lives.

When the People Fell is perhaps the Cordwainer Smith story with most overt references to China, Chinese history, and the plight of the common people through the ages, especially in the first half of the twentieth century. The terms used in the narrative are obviously Anglicized renderings of certain Chinese words, and they are explained by Dobyns Bennett for the benefit of the journalist who does not understand them. Here is a list of those terms:

Loudies = 老者 Ancient Ones
Nondies = 男子 men
Needies = 女子 women
Showhices = 小孩子 children
Goonhogo = 共和國 republic
Waywonjong = ???? Supreme Ruler of the Goonhogo
(Waywonjong in the book The Rediscovery of Man is spelled Waywanjong in the original Galaxy Magazine version of the story).
(I really cannot think of how Waywonjong should be rendered in Chinese, but I am pretty sure that the author had something specific in mind. Characters like 威 wei、萬 wan、將 jiang /總 zong most naturally spring to mind, but they do not fit together in a meaningful way. If anyone has any other ideas, please do let me know).

Modern readers may take the descriptions in this story as derogatory or even racist references to the Chinese people. However, after learning how familiar the author was with China and its culture and history, and about the years he invested in the country and its welfare, it is difficult to maintain such a viewpoint. More likely, Paul Linebarger as Cordwainer Smith is showing us how the Chinese people, although frequently ravaged by war, famine and poverty, through their sheer numbers and tenacity overcome problems deemed unsolvable by others. “It was crazy and impossible, but they won!” Says the aged Bennett.

The key to this interpretation is provided by a short but memorable scene which occurs near to the end of the story. A nondie is building some sort of shelter with his bare hands. When he is asked what it is for, Vomact is astonished at the reply. But pondering on that response enlightens us as to what the Chinese people may have needed most at the time when the author penned this tale.

The narrative structure of When the People Fell is similar to The Lady Who Sailed the Soul in that it is a recollection of former times by someone in a future era. Other comparable points are how the impression the title gives changes before and after you read the story, and the fact that it ends on a poignantly romantic note. Having said that, I must also add that of the stories by Cordwainer Smith I have read so far, this one contains the most graphically disturbing imagery.

Overall, When the People Fell is a fascinating tale which increases our knowledge of the relatively early history of the Instrumentality, and how and when the last of the separate earthly governments began its decline into oblivion.

[Neal · Rating 3 out of 5]

This rating/review is for the 2007 Baen-published anthology of Cordwainer Smith’s short stories titled “When the People Fell.” This collection is somewhat baffling; it contains the majority of Cordwainer Smith’s stories but omits five of the best and most important entries in his Instrumentality chronology (The Dead Lady of Clown Town, Under Old Earth, Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons, Alpha Ralpha Boulevard, and The Ballad of Lost C’mell).

I love Smith’s work. A number of his stories rank among the best sci-fi I’ve read. They are strange and intriguing and lyrical and captivating. I also think that a number of them are relatively uninteresting or problematic duds. And when those duds are collected in a book that includes some of the greats, but not all of them, and therefore not a totally coherent chronology, I don’t think that this anthology is worth reading (unless, you supplement it as I did with another Smith anthology, such as “The Best of Cordwainer Smith,” a five-star book in my opinion).

I have not read “The Rediscovery of Man,” but it is supposedly a complete anthology of Cordwainer Smith’s short stories. I am not sure why that book and the book I’m writing this review for are listed as different editions of the same thing in Goodreads... my rating of Smith’s entire chronology would certainly be higher than this rating.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating is tentative, as I'm reading through this bit by bit...This and We the Underpeople helpfully include a "timeline" of sorts, and I've been reading the Instrumentality stories in that order. This'll probably be on my "currently reading" list for a while, as I tend to drop series midway through and then come back to them several months later.

Favorite stories so far:Scanners Live in Vain, The Lady Who Sailed the Soul, Game of Rat and Dragon, and From Gustible's Planet (Or Why Smell-O-Vision Is a Bad Idea)

Don't even think about reading any of his stuff if you have a low tolerance for weirdness. Of course, I like weird, which is why I gave it four stars.

[Timothy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Scanners Live in Vain (1950)
A Planet Named Shayol (1961)
On the Storm Planet (1965)
No, No, Not Rogov! (1959)
The Lady Who Sailed the Soul (1960)
The Game of Rat and Dragon (1955)
The Burning of the Brain (1958)
Drunkboat (1963)
The Queen of the Afternoon (1978)
Angerhelm (1959)
The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All (1979)
The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal (1964)
The Fife of Bodidharma (1959)
From Gustible's Planet (1962)
Golden the Ship Was—Oh! Oh! Oh! (1959)
The Good Friends (1963)
Himself in Anachron (1993)
Mark Elf (1957)
Nancy (1959)
On the Gem Planet (1963)
On the Sand Planet (1965)
Think Blue, Count Two (1963)
Three to a Given Star (1965)
Western Science Is So Wonderful (1958)
When the People Fell (1959)
War No. 81-Q (1928)
War No. 81-Q (rewritten version) (1993)
Down to a Sunless Sea (1975)

[Robert Hudder · Rating 4 out of 5]

How to discuss this book of collected works? Let's start with the fact that I loved anthology magazines for a while; both mystery and sci-fi/fantasy. There were often gems of stories that made each one worth the whole read.

Sometimes there would be a story that you would think about for quite a while. Sometimes there would be connected stories or smaller stories that would later be ramped up into a book. This could be a testing ground for a world or just a moment of creation.

This collection contains more hits than most and many of these stories will stick. I will read the other collected works because there are some genuine gems here.

[Daniel C. · Rating 3 out of 5]

One-line review:
Given the (otherwise) breath-taking reach of Smith's imagination and the lyricism of his writing, it's sad that this treasury falters on the typical Golden-Age-of-SciFi blundering around sex and gender issues, and almost physically painfully to realize that I'll likely remember this collection primarily for containing perhaps the most rabidly homophobic piece of fiction writing I've ever read.

[Melanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cordwainer Smith has such a crazy imagination. His sense of humor sort of reminds me of Douglas Adams and Roger Zelazny ... but ... perhaps not quite as prominent. These short stories don't all take place before the stories in "We the Underpeople," as I thought. Some of the stories are pretty strange, but I liked them all. Most of them are really very thought-provoking.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is classic Sci-Fi at its best. Through a series of short stories this collection covers a wide swath of the future. It has technologies, strange cultures and evolved people in the far future. Even though the backdrop, by today's standards, is pretty standard, the stories are innovative, fresh and surprising. This books is well recommended to any lover of Sci-Fi.

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm glad to have read this and seen more of Cordwainer Smith's work. That being said, only a few stories in this collection (War No. 81-Q, for one) came close to his more widely reproduced works (Scanners Live in Vain and The Game of Rat and Dragon). Worth reading.

[Josh Hanagarne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily the strangest science fiction I have ever read.

[Eugene · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best short story writer of science fiction in the 1900s

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cordwainer Smith has a very unique style. It is easy to find some of his stories ridiculous or his narrative childish, but they are definitely one of a kind.

[Jim Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, imaginative, panoramic. Sounds like a cliched rave, but I stand by each of those adjectives in reference to this book, which is old-style sci-fi with an inventiveness all its own.

[Scott Golden · Rating 5 out of 5]

This man's imagination is breathtaking to behold. No one but science fiction aficionados knows who he was -- and that's a shame.

[JT · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unique. Old school without being rusty. There's hints of Smith (not his real name) in Bear and Baxter, but he had a style and sense of humor that were inimitable. Well worth the time.

[Vitaliy Hristyuk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. Master of words and imagination. Although it was written in 60s, it's not dated at all. Anyone who loves SciFi, IMO should give it a try.