Free The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination by Ursula K. Le Guin Page B

“thousands of years.” Well, I don’t believe it. No sane child would sing that for five minutes. I think Cordwainer Smith had that stupid aoudad/how dad rhyme in his head and couldn’t get it out, and it overcame his better reason and forced itself into the story.
    When you let words take you over, as Rimbaud and Smith did, you relinquish control to a sometimes dangerous extent. You can’t keep thestupidities and inconsequentialities out, the way a tight-control writer can; you’re on a wild ride and you have to take what comes. What comes may be treasure and may be junk. I find much of “Drunkboat” overwritten, straining for effect, starting with its rather pompous claims to fame: “Perhaps it is the saddest, maddest, wildest story in the whole long history of space.” . . . “We know his name now. And our children and their children will know it for always.” And the story is full of obsessive jingles, “Baiter Gator” and “ochre joker” and so on, which weaken what should be a stunning effect when Rambo/Rimbaud bursts into a wild flood of rhyming speech. There are too many one-sentence paragraphs, italics, and other heavy devices to show significance. And yet, and yet . . . what a wonderful image, the man swimming, swimming slowly through spacetime, reaching through the walls, seeking his Elizabeth. . . . And the recurrent characters, Sir-and-Doctor Vomact, the Lord Crudelta (whose Italian name means what Lord Jestocost’s means in Russian), the Instrumentality itself. “Drunkboat” is a wild jungle of language, grotesque, deformed, obstructive, energetic, vividly alive.
    T HE M OUSE
    I seem to be impelled to discuss stories that I don’t particularly like, instead of the ones I love, such as “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard,” “The Dead Lady of Clown Town,” “Mark Elf,” “A Planet Named Shayol.”
    A Smith story that I have always resisted, kept my distance from, is “Think Blue, Count Two.” When I reread it some while ago for consideration for the Norton Book of Science Fiction I saw again what I’d disliked—a pretty girl, blue-eyed, called “doll” and “kitten,” a plot that teases by threatening sadism but dodges the threat by rather implausible means, and a sentimental ending where the doll-kitten goes off with the deformed sadist, now miraculously cured and tamed. A very very romantic story, plunging (as romanticism will) from sappy sweetness to sick cruelty, with not much actual humanity in between. When it came to choosing for the Norton Book , I wanted “AlphaRalpha Boulevard,” which uses these characteristic Smithian themes in a story that is not excessively, but magnificently, romantic—a beautiful, powerful story. When my coeditors argued for other choices, I whined. I wanted “Alpha Ralpha” in that book the way I wanted Fritz Leiber’s “The Winter Flies” in it—passionately—because to me they are uniquely valuable, unsurpassed explorations of regions of fiction that are still unfamiliar, still New Found Lands.
    Well, so, then I reread “Think Blue” again for this paper. I did so looking for evidence, as it were, of what I don’t like in Smith. Served me right.
    What I found was that I had misread and underestimated the story shamefully. Indeed the heroine-doll-kitten seems the typical malefantasy girl, virginal, beautiful, defenseless, with “no skill, no learning, no trained capacities,” no threat to nobody, no sir. She’s being used to hold the crew together during a long voyage; she has “Daughter Potential,” that is, every man will want to protect her, she will keep everybody alive “for her sake.” However, in case things get really bad, she has another protection aboard, in the form of one of Smith’s unforgettable inventions, a cube of laminated mouse brain.
     
We stiffened it with celluprime and then we veneered it down, about seven thousand layers. Each one has plastic of at least two molecular thicknesses. This mouse can’t spoil. As