Alpha Ralpha Boulevard

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"Alpha Ralpha Boulevard"
Author	Cordwainer Smith
Country	USA
Language	English
Series	Instrumentality of Mankind
Genre(s)	Science fiction short story
Published in	The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
Publication type	Print (Magazine, Hardback & Paperback)
Publisher	Mercury Press
Publication date	June 1961
Preceded by	Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons
Followed by	A Planet Named Shayol

1 Background
2 Plot summary
3 Footnotes
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Background

Alpha Ralpha Boulevard is a science fiction story by Cordwainer Smith, set in his Instrumentality of Mankind universe, concerning the opening days of a sudden radical shift from a controlling, benevolent, but sterile society, to one with individuality, danger and excitement. The story has been reprinted a number of times, including in The Rediscovery of Man^[1] collection.

In an interview, Ursula Le Guin said about it:

To me encountering his works was like a door opening. There is one story of his called "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard" that was as important to me as reading Pasternak for the first time. ^[2]

The story is one of many set in a far future of mankind, with a wealth of history and social detail which remain hinted at or unwritten. Like J.R.R. Tolkien, Smith worked on this universe over years, and other stories were planned at the time of his death. The reader often has an uneasy sense that actual events underlie aspects of Smith's writing. Alpha Ralpha Boulevard was inspired in part by a painting from his childhood The Storm by Pierre-Auguste Cot, of two young lovers fleeing along a darkening path. According to his widow and second wife, it was also partly about his first wife's attraction to another man. ^[3]^[4]

[edit] Plot summary

There was dancing in the streets when the all-powerful Instrumentality government, which in its overprotectiveness has driven the purpose from human existence, decides to turn back the clock to a less sheltered historical human era, 14,000 years before. (I.e., our era.) Virginia and Paul are enjoying the first moments of the recreations of the old human language, French, reading their first newspapers, and going to their first cafe, where the bugs in process are not resolved to the point of understanding how to use money.

With the restoration of cultural differences and new individuality, old friends Paul and Virginia have fallen in love. Not everything from the Instrumentality era has vanished, not the complex urban environment, nor the subclass of people bred with animals such as dogs, cats, and bulls to provide manual labor. Paul is accosted by a provocative dog-girl, then by a drunk bull-man, who attacks them. Another cat-girl, C'mell, rescues them from physical danger. She directs them to a cafe where Virginia begins to have qualms about the artificial aspects of the personality she's been given, and wonders whether her love for Paul is real or synthesized. She then meets another man she also finds attractive, Macht. Macht tells her of a computer, never understood by the Instrumentality, which has reached the status of a God, able to foretell the future. It can only be reached walking a ruined processional highway leading into the clouds: Alpha Ralpha Boulevard.

The rest of the story deals with their interactions with Macht and C'mell, and the death and awakening caused by their choices along the road closed to mankind for 10,000 years.

[edit] Footnotes

^ Mann, James A. (ed.), The Rediscovery of Man, NESFA Press, 1993.
^ MacCaffery, Larry and Gregory, Sinda, Alive and Writing: Interviews with American Authors of the 1980s, p. 177, University of Illinois Press, 1987.
^ Hellekson, Karen, The Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith, p. 107, McFarland & Company, 2001.
^ Elms, Alan C., Uncovering Lives: The Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psychology, p. 26, University of Oxford Press, 1994.