Cordwainer Smith: planoforming, Space² and Space³

The Instrumentality's starships drop a dimension and pick up another, skip light-years in a flash and are steered by telepaths who pay for it with their minds; from "The Game of Rat and Dragon" (1955) to "Drunkboat" (1963).

Kind: fiction · Loophole: L4 · Notability: N3 · Coherence: F3 · Causality: C-silent · Last reviewed: 2026-09-12

The drive as depicted

Planoforming is defined in "The Game of Rat and Dragon", published in Galaxy in October 1955 [HIGH] S3. The story opens, "Pinlighting is a hell of a way to earn a living," and then explains what pinlighting is for [HIGH] S1. A ship "lifting free above Earth disappeared somehow or other into two dimensions and appeared half a light-year or fifty light-years off"; the sensation is "like the twinge of a mild electric shock", and the traveller cannot tell subjectively whether it lasted "a second or a year" [HIGH] S1. The skip drops the ship into the Up-and-Out, the open space between the stars, where something lives "underneath space itself" that is alive, capricious and malevolent: the Dragons, which human telepaths perceive as dragons and their cat Partners perceive as rats [HIGH] S1. The Dragons kill or madden unprotected passengers; the story records early ships returning with "three hundred bodies ready for burial" and two or three hundred incurable lunatics [HIGH] S1. The defence is light. Telepaths wearing pin-sets, "telepathic amplifiers adapted to the mammal mind", are electronically geared to small dirigible light bombs, and their cat Partners, faster than any human, are thrown telepathically at the Dragons to detonate them: "Light did it. Light broke up the Dragons" [HIGH] S1. The numbers are the story's own: a Dragon can move a million miles in under two milliseconds, a human mind needs at least four hundred milliseconds to react, and a good Partner can pinlight two Rats forty-six million miles apart in a millisecond and a half [HIGH] S1. Planoforming is instantaneous for practical purposes and the whole story is about the fraction of a second in which the ship is exposed.

"The Burning of the Brain", published in If in October 1958, gives the navigation [HIGH] S1. A planoforming ship has a Go-Captain, who flies it through the jumps by a telepathic link to the instruments and is "subject to rare and overwhelming strains"; a Stop-Captain, who runs it in ordinary space; and pinlighters, who sit beside the Go-Captain in the planoforming room [HIGH] S1. Navigation is by locksheets, "laminated charts, one hundred thousand charts to the inch", prepared in advance for every contingency of the journey and showing the star pattern the ship should see after each jump [HIGH] S1. On the Wu-Feinstein the locksheet wall turns out to be duplicates of one sheet, the Emergency Return Sheet is missing, and the ship is lost; Go-Captain Magno Taliano brings it home by having a beam-electrode burn out his own brain, region by region, as the patterns in it steer the remaining jumps, and comes out with the amiable smile of an idiot [HIGH] S1. The cost of the drive is a human mind, and the story is about nothing else.

"Drunkboat", published in Amazing Stories in October 1963, adds the next layer [HIGH] S1. Planoform ships, the text says, "drop one of our familiar dimensions and pick up a new dimension", and the space they use is space-two (space², in Smith's notation); beyond it is space-three, which had been theorised and is now pierced, "universal and instantaneous, in relation to our universe", a space in which "everything was equally distant from everything else" [HIGH] S1. Lord Crudelta of the Instrumentality sends Artyr Rambo through it in an ancient rocket from a launching pad that is itself a ship, fourteen planoform devices operating in tandem for three or four seconds, from four jumps beyond an outpost on the galaxy's edge to a hospital lawn on Earth [HIGH] S1. Crudelta expects the transit to be instantaneous; Rambo experiences it as years and as the blink of an eye at once, arrives naked and burned and able to tear steel with his neurophysical system, and cannot say what happened [HIGH] S1. The trip is chosen to need "a man with tremendous rage": Space³ is crossed by will, not by machinery [HIGH] S1.

The older ships of the same future history are sublight vessels. "The Lady Who Sailed The Soul" (Galaxy, April 1960) has photonic sails, a voyage of forty years and passengers in cold sleep, and the series' chronology places the sailing ships before planoforming replaces them [MED] S3.

Origin and lineage

Cordwainer Smith was the pen name of Paul Linebarger (1913 to 1966), a political scientist and expert in psychological warfare who wrote the Instrumentality of Mankind stories from 1950 to his death; the stories are collected in The Rediscovery of Man (NESFA, 1993) [HIGH] S3. He read widely in Chinese literature and in psychology, and the planoforming stories are psychological before they are physical: the drive's only stated limit is what it does to the mind that steers it. No real proposal is named in any story and none fed them, and this dossier asserts no influence into Smith from physics. Influence out of Smith is a matter of dates rather than citations. His telepathic navigators of 1955 and 1958 precede Herbert's Guild Navigators of 1965, and "Drunkboat" is the earliest instance this catalogue has found of a story in which the crossing is made by a mind rather than a machine; neither Herbert nor anyone else has been found saying in print that Smith was the source, so no lineage page is proposed.

Which loophole, and why

L4, leave the manifold, on the work's own words: the ship drops one of the familiar dimensions and picks up a new one, and in the space it enters the ordinary distances no longer hold. Space² is a space adjacent to ours through which a skip covers light-years in a flash; Space³ is the limit of the idea, a space with no distance at all, and Smith treats them as a ladder of other spaces rather than as a fold or a tunnel in ours. The ship is not fast (L1), nothing moves space around it (L2) and no two points are joined by a structure (L3). The sailing ships of the earlier stories are L6 and are noted here as the class's sublight baseline.

The physics cousins are the extra-dimension dossiers. The Kaluza-Klein hyperspace reading is the negative finding for exactly this picture: the extra dimensions physics has are compact or warped, are not a place a ship can go and share our light cone; "dropping a dimension" has no counterpart, and the bill of the class is B-new. Brane-bulk shortcuts is the nearest real thing to Space²: a bent brane lets a bulk signal arrive before light along the brane, by one part in $10^{58}$, at a bill of B-new, B-mass and B-caus, and Space³'s "everything equally distant" would be a bulk in which the brane has been bent into a point. For the sailing ships the cousin is the relativistic rocket, the sublight alternative Smith kept in his future history. The register entry for the class is MAN-1.

The rules it keeps

The Coherence mark is F3, acknowledges, because the work states a limitation and applies it in every story it touches. The limitation is human: a planoforming ship needs a telepathic Go-Captain and pinlighters, the Up-and-Out kills or maddens the unprotected, navigation is by pre-computed locksheets and fails without them, and a jump made by mind alone costs the mind. "The Game of Rat and Dragon" ends with its pinlighter hospitalised and resentful of the human woman who is not his cat; "The Burning of the Brain" ends with its captain burned out; "Drunkboat" ends with its traveller altered beyond explanation. Smith never breaks these rules for convenience, and each story is built on the price. Alongside them sit stated quantities that hold across stories: skips of half a light-year to fifty, reaction times in milliseconds, twelve days of consecutive planoforming to reach the galaxy's edge. The stated limitation is not a real physical constraint, which keeps the mark below F4; the navigator's cost is a story rule, like Dune's, applied with unusual consistency.

The sublight baseline is kept too. The sailing ships take decades, the sailors age and their passengers sleep, and when planoforming arrives it is a new thing that the older stories did not have. Smith's future history is one of the few in which FTL is invented on the page and the world before it is remembered.

What it ignores

The register's physical questions are never asked. No story says what a planoform device does, what it costs in energy, what determines where a skip ends or how the Dragons, which live "underneath space", relate to the space the ship enters. The Up-and-Out is a hazard without a physics. Space³ is defined only by what it does to Rambo.

Causality is C-silent. Planoforming and Space³ deliver ships across the galaxy in milliseconds by every clock the stories mention, Earth's included, and no story asks in whose frame the skip is simultaneous or what a return skip does to the ordering of events. "Drunkboat" says Space³ is instantaneous "in relation to our universe", which implies a universal now without stating one, and the Instrumentality's history is told in a single galactic calendar; that is an unexamined preferred frame, not a rule, so the mark is silent rather than dodges. Last checked 2026-09-12 across the planoforming stories: the antitelephone never comes up.

Constraint scoring

Every entry in the register, one row each, verdict from the fiction vocabulary, with a note that says where in the work the engagement or rule occurs.

Sources

• S1 Smith, C., "The Game of Rat and Dragon", Galaxy Science Fiction, October 1955. Read in full at Project Gutenberg (ebook 29614).
• S1 Smith, C., "The Burning of the Brain", If, October 1958. Read in full at Project Gutenberg Canada.
• S1 Smith, C., "Drunkboat", Amazing Stories, October 1963. Read in full at Project Gutenberg Canada.
• S1 Smith, C., "The Lady Who Sailed The Soul", Galaxy, April 1960. From reading; not re-read for this pass.
• S2 Smith, C., The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith, ed. J. A. Mann (NESFA Press, 1993), for the chronology of the future history.
• S3 Wikipedia, "Drunkboat (short story)" and "Instrumentality of Mankind", for publication details and the Space²/Space³ summary.
• S3 Lewis, A. C., Concordance to Cordwainer Smith (NESFA), entries on planoforming and Space³, consulted via the NESFA site.