The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award is co-sponsored by the heirs of Paul M.A. Linebarger (who wrote as Cordwainer Smith) and Readercon. The award, chosen by a jury, recognizes a deceased genre writer whose work should be “rediscovered” by the readers of today. In addition, this newly rediscovered writer is a deceased guest of honor at next year’s Readercon.
This year’s recipient was named 6 July 2007 by Barry Malzberg and Gordon Van Gelder, speaking on behalf of themselves and the other two judges: Martin H. Greenberg and Mike Resnick. This year’s Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award recipient is Daniel F. Galouye.
Galouye was born 11 February 1920, and was a bomber pilot during World War II. He was severely injured in a crash landing, and those injuries eventually resulted in his early death on 7 September 1976.
Other than his service during the war, Galouye worked as a reporter for several newspapers. He sold his first science fiction story, “Rebirth,” to Imagination in 1952. He went on to write several dozen shorter stories, as well as five novels. The novels were Dark Universe (1961); Lords of the Psychon (1963), Simulachron-3 (also known as Counterfeit World, 1964), A Scourge of Screamers (also known as The Lost Perception, 1966), and The Infinite Man (1973). Two collections of his shorter work were published: The Last Leap and Other Stories (1964) and Project Barrier (1968).
Dark Universe was on the Hugo Award final ballot, but lost to Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.
Simulachron-3 served as the basis for a two-part West German tv movie called Welt am Draht (1973), as well as the 1999 movie The Thirteenth Floor.
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Warning: plot spoiler of Simulachron-3/The Thirteenth Floor follows
Simulachron-3 is one of the earliest instances of a story set in a computer simulated world where the inhabitants don’t realize they’re in a simulation. It predated The Matrix by more than 35 years.
End of spoiler
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