Rescuing Fiction | Rescuing the Future| Mark Elf | my choice for the most unforgettable paragraph ever written

One of my projects that’s been ongoing, on and off, for some time, has been a post about the “10 of the Best Fiction Paragraphs ever written”.

Because this isn’t going to be finished anytime soon, and because there is one paragraph among my candidates that stands out dramatically from the others, I’ve decided to do a post on it alone.

This is from the 1957 story “Mark Elf”, by Cordwainer Smith (Paul Linebarger in his daily life). To let you appreciate the paragraph, here is some of the lead-up to it.

In 1945 as Germany is being over-run by armies from the east and west, a Nazi scientist/general involved in the secret rocket program, puts his beautiful teenage daughter Carlotta into a hibernation capsule that he sends up into orbit, to protect her from the Russian soldiers who will soon be there. Instead of coming down in twenty years or so when it’s safe, she’s left up there by mistake for thousands of years. Why her capsule finally comes down is ultimately important to understand the full story, but not to appreciate this paragraph.

So she lands back in what was once Germany, now mostly covered by forest, and meets a man who says he is a Moron, and who tells her of some other humans called the “True Men”. But when they hear a mechanical whirring sound approaching through the forest, he runs away. Then a big robot/tank-like machine appears, with a name on it – Mark Elf. It asks her who she is – she replies, in German, that she is a German, then it says:

You are German. It has been long since there has been any German anywhere. I have gone around the world two thousand, three hundred and twenty-eight times. I have killed seventeen thousand, four hundred and sixty-nine enemies of the Sixth German Reich for sure, and I have probably killed forty-two thousand and seven additional ones. I have been back to the automatic restoration center eleven times. The enemies who call themselves the True Men always elude me. One of them I have not killed for three thousand years. The ordinary men whom some call the Unforgiven are the ones I kill most of all, but frequently I catch Morons and kill them too. I am fighting for Germany, but I cannot find Germans anywhere. I accept orders from no one but a German. Yet there have been no Germans anywhere, no Germans anywhere……….

Carlotta gradually comes to an understanding with the tank, which then disappears into the forest and she continues her own odyssey into this future she has arrived in.

That for me is the most startling, most creative, and most unforgettable paragraph I have ever read.

The phenomenal loyalty of this machine to those who created it thousands of years ago, fighting on for Germany though Germany is long gone leaves me intellectually breathless. Doesn’t it say something important about the AI machines we are about to create soon?

If you want to read the story though, you’ll have to track it down. I don’t know where I found the copy that I read. It’s not in The Best of Cordwainer Smith, 1975 edition, that I have, nor am I sure which of the collections offered on Amazon it’s in, but get your hands on any book of Smith’s and read any of his stories, and you won’t be disappointed.