Cordwainer Smith was the pen-name used by American author Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (July 11, 1913 – August 6, 1966) for his science fiction works. Linebarger was a noted East Asia scholar and expert in psychological warfare. 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). He died of a heart attack in 1966 at Johns Hopkins University Medical Center in Baltimore, Maryland, at age 53.
In addition to his impressive bibliography, Linebarger had extensive ties to China, counting Sun Yat-Sen as his godfather, and Chiang Kai-Shek as a fairly close friend in adulthood. In 1948, he published the non-fiction work Psychological Warfare. He advised the U.S. military during the Korean War.
After the Korean War became part of World War III in 1951, a psy-ops colonel named Linebarger, an officer with substantial clout and fluency in Chinese, created a program for American troops to broadcast via loudspeaker at the Chinese and North Korean troops across no-man's land. The program used the Chinese words for "love" and "virtue" and "humanity", which when taken together also sounded like the English words for "I surrender", allowing the Reds to surrender without losing face.[1]
1=denotes a character who was a POV for one volume or less
2=denotes a character who was a POV for two volumes
3=denotes a character who was a POV for three volumes
† Denotes a deceased POV.
