Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (July 11, 1913 – August 6, 1966) — known by his pen-name Cordwainer Smith — was an American author of science fiction.

Linebarger's father sent his wife to give birth in Milwaukee, Wisconsin so that their child would be eligible to become president of the United States.

[2] His young life was unsettled as his father moved the family to a succession of places in Asia, Europe, and the United States.

[2] From 1937 to 1946, Linebarger held a faculty appointment at Duke University,[4] where he began producing highly regarded works on Far Eastern affairs.

They remained married until his death from a heart attack in 1966, at Johns Hopkins University Medical Center in Baltimore, Maryland, at age 53.

[8] Linebarger is long rumored to have been "Kirk Allen", the fantasy-haunted subject of "The Jet-Propelled Couch," a chapter in psychologist Robert M. Lindner's best-selling 1954 collection The Fifty-Minute Hour.

[2][9] According to Cordwainer Smith scholar Alan C. Elms,[10] this speculation first reached print in Brian Aldiss's 1973 history of science fiction, Billion Year Spree; Aldiss, in turn, claimed to have received the information from science fiction fan and scholar Leon Stover.

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).

Smith's works consist of one novel, originally published in two volumes in edited form as The Planet Buyer, also known as The Boy Who Bought Old Earth (1964), and The Underpeople (1968), and later restored to its original form as Norstrilia (1975); and 32 short stories (collected in The Rediscovery of Man (1993), including two versions of the short story "War No.

Linebarger's cultural links to China are partially expressed in the pseudonym "Felix C. Forrest", which he used in addition to "Cordwainer Smith".

[18] After the Ancient Wars devastate Earth, humans, ruled by the Instrumentality of Mankind, rebuild and expand to the stars in the Second Age of Space around 6000 AD.

Towards the end of this period, the Instrumentality attempts to revive old cultures and languages in a process known as the Rediscovery of Man, where humans emerge from their mundane utopia and Underpeople are freed from slavery.

But while in a small boat in a lake or bay in the mid 60s, he leaned over the side, and his notebook fell out of his breast pocket into the water, where it was lost forever.

The settings range from a postapocalyptic landscape with walled cities, defended by agents of the Instrumentality, to a state of sterile utopia, in which freedom can be found only deep below the surface, in long-forgotten and buried anthropogenic strata.

These features may place Smith's works within the Dying Earth subgenre of science fiction, but they are ultimately more optimistic and distinctive.