Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, better known by his pen-name Cordwainer Smith, was an American author known for his science fiction works. Linebarger was a US Army officer, a noted East Asia scholar, and an expert in psychological warfare. Although his death shortened his career as a writer at 53, he is considered one of the more talented and influential science fiction authors.

"In his stories, which were a wonderful and inimitable blend of a strange, raucous poetry and a detailed technological scene, we begin to read of human beings in worlds so far from our own in space in time that they were no longer quite Earth (even when they were the third planet out from Sol), and the people were no longer quite human, but something perhaps better, certainly different." Frederik Pohl