"Any refreshment can be bottomed up
from clear led crystal, or a bent tin cup.
Life, once oppressed, can be redeemed as hearty,
when cared for by the brave and vanguar Party."
Maxine Snorkley,
Red Shifts On Meister Lehrjahre's Planet
Author's Notes/Comments:
Maxine Snorkley's first novel, cited above, was published in East Berlin by Union Verlag in 1965. Said to have been edited and approved for publication by the Poet, Johannes Bobrowski, the novel is one of a network of several short stories and two brief novels, all part of a sequence entitled The Convictablity Of Man's Kindness. Certain scholars claim to have detected a similarity to, if not an outright imitation of, the American writer Cordwainer Smith's science fiction sequence, The Instrumentality Of Mankind. B. Clement Mosely, a scholar of early science fiction, has suggested that the novel, cited above, has been heavily influenced by the first three sections of Cordwainer Smith's composite novel, Quest Of The Three Worlds, a personal favorite of myself and of Clement Mosely.
