1964 was a banner year for classics of weird SF, among the list: PKD's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, J.G. Ballard's The Burning World, the Strugatsky brothers' Monday Begins on Saturday - and The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal by Cordwainer Smith.
True, this is a Cordwainer short-story but there's so much quality weirdness packed into the tale, it surely deserves to be included on the list. And, as John Clute has observed, Cordwainer's fiction is "magnificently weird".
Prior to the tale's first chapter, The Beginning, the narrator provides what could be taken as a warning for readers in the distant future who are familiar with the events surrounding Commander Suzdad -
"Do not read this story; turn the page quickly. The story may upset you. Anyhow, you probably know it already. It is a very disturbing story. Everyone knows it. The glory and the crime of Commander Suzdal have been told in a thousand different ways. Don't let yourself realize that the story really is the truth.
It isn't. Not at all. There's not a bit of truth to it. There is no such planet as Arachosia, no such people as klopts, no such world as Catland. These are all just imaginary, they didn't happen, forget about it, go away and read something else."
Should we also take this as a warning and cautionary tale? Considering all the global challenges we face here in 2023, challenges from the environmental as well as from our fellow humans, I think the answer is an emphatic "yes".
The narrator proceeds with his story: Commander Suzdal readies to set off on his one-man mission to explore the outer reaches of the Milky Way. Other than the slow moving, slow thinking turtle-men who will assist with navigation, Suzdal asks only for two security officers to be kept in deep freeze in case he needs them. When asked about women (not real women but a futuristic virtual reality version of women), Suzdal almost spits in disgust. He's told: “Sometimes we think it good to have a female companion on the ship with the commander, even if she is imaginary. If you ever found anything among the stars which took on female form, you'd be mighty vulnerable to it." Suzdal, a man who comes across as something of a crusty 1950s door-to-door salesman-type, can only scoff at such an idea.
Cordwainer injects a bit of foreshadowing here as Suzdal will find out the hard way just how vulnerable he is traveling without the presence of a female. Sidebar: If I was on such a one-man mission, I'd ask for a whole bunch of female companions to spice up my voyage!
Deep into his zooming around the galaxy, with echoes of Odysseus and the Sirens, Suzdal comes upon the siren capsule, from which, in a alluring female voice, he hears the tragic story of Arachosia, a story of how a race of people came to be something much different than people. The female voice lures Suzdal into traveling to Arachosia to provide the needed help. Much too late, Suzdal realizes he's been tricked.
And to think Suzdal was chosen for this mission since he was good-natured, intelligent and brave. Too bad those who did the choosing didn't consider someone who was skeptical, wise and cautious along with possessing a measure of cleverness like clever Odysseus.
Regarding what happened to the Arachosians, the narrator provides a detailed account of how the true story was strange and very, very ugly. All females died off from various forms of cancer and one scientist turned all women into men. The consequence: a race of men and menwomen that, in less than four hundred years, turned themselves into groups of fighting clans. “Their science, their art and their music moved forward with strange lurches of inspired neurotic genius, because they lacked the fundamentals in the human personality itself, the balance of male and female, the family, the operations of love, of hope, of reproduction. They survived, but they themselves had become monsters and did not know it.” The grotesque mission of these male monsters: destroy all females and everything relating to the female throughout the universe.
Now we can see just how colossal was Commander Suzdal's blunder. And Commander Suzdal committed a second blunder. In order to save his own skin, he concocted a plan involving cats, genetic coding and a diabolical manipulation of time.
Which brings us to Cordwainer Smith's philosophic observations on the devastation, havoc and destruction wrought in the balance of nature when male energies devalue and attempt to destroy the Yin, the female qualities so vital in maintaining life. The author also alludes to the Instrumentality, a ruthless organization overseeing the universe and not shy in exerting its power.
What a tale. You can read The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal via this link: https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/smithcord...
American author Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger aka Cordwainer Smith, 1913-1966
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