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L. Neil Smith - Libertarian |
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The Probability Broach was his first novel. It pictures a parallel libertarian earth, and wonderfully combines humor, action, suspense and libertarian ideology. The libertarian society in the book, and some of its characters, are further explored in sequels. Smith has written around twenty science fiction novels, many explicitly libertarian. He served on the Platform Committee of the Libertarian Party in the mid-70's, and in 1978 ran for state legislator as a Libertarian Party candidate, gaining 15% of the vote with a total expenditure of $44.00. L. Neil Smith is also an outspoken gun rights activist. He is founder and International Coordinator of the Libertarian Second Amendment Caucus, and is an NRA Life Member. Following is a list of some of his novels, along with brief
summaries. The Novels of L. Neil Smith Winner of the 1994 Prometheus Award. Forge of The Elders: Contact and Commune (Warner Books, 1990) Henry Martyn (Tor Books, 1989) The Wardove (Berkley/Ace, 1986) The Probability Broach (Del Rey Books, 1980) (See also "The Spirit of Exmas Sideways", Alternatives, edited by Robert and Pamela Crippen Adams, Baen Books, 1989. Trying to make a place for himself in the stateless North American Confederacy, Win Bear discovers the many joys and difficulties of absolute self-ownership.) |
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Quotable In responding to a preposterous charge of racism, Smith posted the
following to the libertarian newsgroup Libernet. It provides a nice
overview of his work and thought: "The brave protagonist of my third novel, Their Majesties' Bucketeers, is a meter-high, hairy, nine-legged, crab-like firefighting detective whose species has three genders. "The viewpoint character of my fourth novel, The Nagasaki Vector, is Jewish, although he doesn't keep kosher as far as I know (I never asked him) and he speaks with a decidedly West Texican accent. He's followed constantly by three tiny aliens who think he's God, and his flying saucer has fallen in love with him. "YD-038, the hero of my fifth novel, Tom Paine Maru, is an escapee from the kind of world that liberals have spent the last 60 years trying to build for us. "With The Gallatin Divergence, my sixth novel, we're back to the Ute Indian again, who gets time-traveled to the 18th century by a physicist who also happens to be a Tursiops truncatus -- a porpoise. "Somewhere in there, I also wrote three books -- recently combined and reprinted as The Lando Calrissian Adventures -- about the guy in Star Wars who owned the Millenium Falcon before Han Solo did. "Now in my tenth novel, The Wardove, we have a rock band in the distant future, one of whose girl singers is having an affair with an alien who looks like a cross between a helium balloon and an umbrella. "The hero of The Crystal Empire, my eleventh novel, is a white guy, I confess, and he's even an unabashed sort of Nordicoid semi-Viking, make what you will of that. The three loves of his life are a voluptuous blonde, a beautiful Indian, and finally a Moslem princess (it's a long book) who helps him battle an alliance of Renaissance Aztecs and Ming-plus Dynasty Chinese. "I never did decide what race the hero of my twelfth novel, Brightsuit Macbear was, although he's the great-grandson of that Ute who started the whole thing, way back when. His best friend is one of those nine-legged crabs. "Lucky thirteen, Taflak Lysandra, concerns a young lady of Australian Aboriginal extraction and her father, the American coyote with a cybernetically augmented brain who adopted her. She starts off being unhappy (like many adolescents are) because she doesn't have blue eyes, freckles, or a turned-up nose, but learns to be happy with her looks because, as she discovers in the end, compared to the kind of person she is inside, they're basically unimportant. "Except for an occasional alien, everyone in my fourteenth novel, Henry Martyn, is white. They're descended (900 years removed) from the last remaining guilt-ridden middle-class liberals in the Solar System, who were exiled to a faraway star cluster when everybody else finally got thoroughly fed up with them. "Otherhandwise, in numbers fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen -- Contact and Commune, Converse and Conflict, and Concert and Cosmos, respectively -- hardly anybody's white, because of an especially nasty kind of "affirmative action" carried out by the American Soviet Socialist Republic. I do have talking molluscs, though. These books, by the way, collectively known (by their proud author) as the "Forge of the Elders Trilogy", proved so politically incorrect that the publisher canceled the third volume! "Which brings us to my eighteenth novel, Pallas -- available now on fine paperback racks everywhere -- in which a little half-Cambodian, half-Vietnamese boy refugees out of a UN agricultural commune. Over the course of his long, productive life, he loves three white women (one, for complicated reasons, with a Sikh surname) while battling a White American Male former US Senator you may even recognize, although the resemblance is purely coincidental. "The hero of Lever Action, my nineteenth book, is me (it's a collection of two decades' worth of essays and speeches). "Finally, my twentieth novel, Bretta Martyn, will take us back
to the strange universe of Throwaway White Liberals I mentioned
earlier." |
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L. Neil Smith has
twice won the Prometheus Award, given by the Libertarian Futurist
Society for outstanding science fiction with libertarian themes. His
Prometheus Award-winning novels were The Probability Broach (1982) and
Pallas (1994).