Ironically, my copy came used from a public library
[Previous: Atlas Shrugged; The Fountainhead]
It’s time I reviewed another work of libertarian fiction. I’ve picked a good one: the 1980 novel The Probability Broach, by L. Neil Smith. For readers who enjoyed my reviews of Ayn Rand, you’re in for a treat.
Since you may not be familiar with this novel, here’s a brief summary. The protagonist is a detective from a corrupt, authoritarian socialist dystopia. In the course of a murder investigation, he stumbles through a dimensional portal into a parallel universe that’s a super-advanced libertarian utopia. He learns how much better it is, then has to fight to defend it from invaders from his own universe.
As opposed to Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, which strove for a more realistic tone, The Probability Broach is straight sci-fi. It’s a shorter book, with a brisker pace of storytelling. Its more recent publication makes it feel less dated, as opposed to Atlas which treats railroads and radio as the height of high-tech. Smith also occasionally has a sense of humor, whereas Rand had none.
You might wonder what the point is of reviewing another libertarian novel, especially since The Probability Broach is an obscure book with nowhere near the popularity of Ayn Rand. I have three reasons for wanting to write about it.
First, Rand was what’s called a minarchist. She believed in a minimal state whose only purpose was to protect people from crime and enforce contracts. Smith was a true anarchist; he didn’t believe there should be any state at all. The contrast between these brands of libertarianism offers a wealth of opportunity to explore why the state exists and what its rightful powers should be.
The second reason is that TPB says more about how the author believed his politics would work in practice.
Atlas Shrugged is frustratingly light on detail about Rand’s preferred alternative. Most of it takes place in the “outside” world, which has been taken over by scheming socialists. It has only a few chapters in Galt’s Gulch, the mountain retreat where the world’s greatest capitalists hide out to live free. Many crucial details about how Rand thought such a society would function were missing.
By contrast, almost all of TPB is set in Smith’s utopia, the North American Confederacy. It doesn’t have the doorstopper monologues Ayn Rand is famous for, but he does try to explain how his society resolves disputes, handles crime, defends against invasion, and so on. (That’s not to say his answers are good ones, as we’ll see; but at least he acknowledges that these issues deserve to be addressed.) This gives insight into the world libertarians want: what it would look like, how it would function, and how everyday life would be different.
The third reason is that it’s just plain fun to write about. TPB is bonkers in the way only a true believer can be.
Ayn Rand wrote as if her only audience was herself. She took the stance that the truth is so obvious, it doesn’t need to be defended. It only needs to be proclaimed, so the faithful can bow their heads in agreement while the heretics go shrieking into the shadows. She had the dogmatic confidence of a religious sect that believes in predestination.
TPB wants to evangelize. It doesn’t start with the conviction that everyone already agrees with the author. It wants to appear reasonable, to paint an appealing picture. It tries to convey the message: “Look how much sense this makes!”
But that earnest insistence is undercut by a parade of wild absurdities that leap out from almost every page. (Here’s a foretaste: kindergarteners with guns.)
Possibly the best part of all is the climax, which accidentally offers a perfect demonstration of why libertarianism doesn’t work. It’s a self-refutation so enormous, it’s hard to believe the author overlooked it.
The contrast between the dead-serious message and the ludicrous plot is deeply hilarious, and it furnishes plenty of entertaining material for a review. It’s going to be a great ride!
New posts in this series will appear on Fridays. They’ll be published first on my Patreon page, so if you’d like to get early access and maybe a few bonuses, consider subscribing!
sounds delicious
I once saw a libertarian comic-book called Amazing Liberty, which was handed out for free at an SF convention many years ago. It was only episode/book 1, but there was more than enough obvious nonsense to fill a whole series. Has anyone else here heard of this?
I also remember a short story called “Came the Revolution,” back in the early ’70s, where everyone was totally fed up with all manner of cumbersome and contradictory regs that someone shot a liberal incumbent Congressman who defended regulation. And I guess he had to be shot because voters were too stupid to understand that regulation was bad, because they were all too busy benefiting from regulations.
Two sci-fi authors have written what might well have been rebuttals to it, given that they have very similar premises except with the roles of the capitalist and socialist worlds reversed. On the one hand, there is Ken Macleod’s The Cassini Division, with a single ancap world in an otherwise-socialist solar system. The ancap world is less a villain than it is the comic relief, with visitors there getting barraged with spam and overcharged for everything. Then there is Greg Egan’s The Book of All Skies, which is a straight inversion, complete with a portal between a capitalist world and an anarcho-socialist one. It’s the capitalist world that’s scared, trying to suppress all knowledge of the portal and the other world by methods up to and including murder, but they are portrayed as the villains, and the socialist world as the nicer place to live.
As for libertarian fic that’s lampoonable, the only one I’ve personally come across was a Vernor Vinge short story (included in his book The Peace War) that featured invaders being bloodied for every inch of an anarcho-capitalist future US, with some homesteaders even setting off satchel nukes when their land was about to be overrun. In the real world, given the choice between self-immolation, a retreat to homeless destitution in the anarcho-capitalist areas not yet overrun, or having a job and basic subsistence in the attacker’s society, my guess is most people would pick the latter, and therefore the attacker only needed to credibly guarantee a basic standard of living to its new citizens to get most of those libertarians to defect. Plus every libertarian I’ve ever gained much knowledge of proved to be a coward.
Meanwhile, “Came the Revolution” sounds like it’s been inverted by the nonexistent author of Life Imitates Art, what with the whole Luigi thing.
When I was a lot younger – technically still a teenager, but legally an adult – I was fairly sympathetic to supposed Libertarian ideals, which I heard were all about personal freedom and personal responsibility. What I imagined that meant did not line up with reality. I read Atlas Shrugged, which made me wonder why this unrealistic, sociopathic trash was seen as a classic novel or why anyone would take it seriously. Then when I met some actual Libertarians, and I understood. These people had a very shaky grasp of ethics and complex systems, and were convinced of their own general superiority despite apparently being stuck in Middle School in some ways, with a heavy dose of Dunning-Kruger (not that I would have described it as “Dunning-Kruger” at the time, as this was the early 1990s and the term didn’t exist yet, I called it “arrogantly stupid” instead). Since then I have met a couple of self-described “Libertarians” who seem to be less ignorant and more morally mature, but their actual beliefs seemed to be closer to Anarcho-Communism than what an American would call “Libertarianism”, and I’m still kind of dubious their ideas would work in the real world. Everyone else I’ve met is not someone who I would trust to be manager of Burger King, let alone a government.
These days I rarely have the patience or the desire to read works like that, as it’s an unpleasant slog. But it might be fun to read a summary and a takedown of the stupider parts.
Your brutally honest take on things is very refreshing Snowberry and very much appreciated (by me at least). Personally, I wanted to believe (in) them; H#!l, I wanted to become one of them but too much of their analysis left me scratching my head first in doubt, then in shame. So when you write: “These people had a very shaky grasp of ethics and complex systems…” I get it!
And that “general superiority” which is so often buoyed by an unmistakable foundation of say ethnocentrism? …makes me acutely aware of how insular and coded they always seem to be around me (as I am not white). Even when I openly present myself as a passing visitor merely seeking enlightenment, they regard my inquiries with a sticky suspicion and so are loath to answer forthrightly. Sadly, many of them are not well versed on political history but simply want to do away with all the checks and balances of our system. “Laissez faire!!!” They chant.
Hey, maybe we’re all just dreamers in the end with our own jaded versions of the perfect society. I gotta tell ya though, it sure feels good to read a reply like yours every once in a while. It let’s me know I’m in good company. As an aside, I came across this book thru Smith’s contribution to the Star Wars universe via the Lando Calrissian books he wrote. Good Stuff.
I haven’t read entire books, but during my libertarian phase I’d read some anthologies of sci fi advocating this. All were light on details of how this would function, the outright anarchist ones in particular. Providing more details serves to highlight any problems, which is likely why it’s avoided. Who knows, but assuming this one is interesting enough I may give it a read, for amusement if nothing else.
Vinge had a perfect defense against atomic bombs available to the humblest freeholder which changed the calculus a bit on invasion.
Looking forward to the discussion of Broach though – did you know that gorillas would be able to speak if itt weren’t for taxes?
I see you’ve read this one already!
Many years ago. Also read F. Paul Wilson’s libertarian SF
I also remember reading The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin — but in that novel, it was an Earth-type planet full of humans divided into sometimes-warring nations, mostly capitalist with powerful states; and a somewhat smaller moon with fewer humans living in a sort-of-anarcho-communist society that seems like a utopia, at least when compared to the capitalist planet, but also shows signs of the sort of petty quarrelling and back-stabbing one finds in tight-knit religious communities. All of which seems a lot more realistic than the libertarians’ utopian drivel — although there is the question of how well the anarcho-communist society would stand up against an invasion by the capitalist world.
From what I recall, the capitalist state doesn’t invade since they get ore from the anarchists and it suits them that way so long as the supply keeps flowing.
I’m not sure why the capitalist states didn’t invade; but I do remember a lot of panic among the anarchist folks at the prospect of one, then two, then four, then thousands of people coming to colonize their world and overwhelm them with sheer power, numbers and money. IIRC there was little or no travel or communication between the worlds, which is why the protagonist’s suggestion of anyone going in either direction sparked such fear and outrage (and at least one explicit threat of violence).
I don’t remember anything about any interplanetary trade in anything. But I read it a LONG time ago, so there’s a lot I could have forgotten.
Also, what’s a “Probability Broach?” Did they mean “Breach?” Or “Branch?” Is that the right way to spell the word for a piece of jewelry or personal ornament?
It’s the novel’s word for the sci-fi magic tech that lets people travel from one parallel universe to another.
A magic brooch?
A broach is a clockmaker’s tool for enlarging small holes, or changing the shape of a round hole.
So it’s a tool for making bigger holes in the fabric of reality? Sounds like something every libertarian would have in his toolkit…
I’ve never read this, but I used to be active on a website devoted to alternate history, where I saw it discussed several times. The general consensus seemed to be that it was absurd in terms of plausibility, and a classic example of alternate history written to try to show how wonderful everything would be if everyone followed the author’s political ideas.
I went to the Wiki page and it sounds truly awful. There was one fun detail though:
“The Probability Broach won the 1982 Prometheus Award, which L. Neil Smith himself had created, and which is awarded by the Libertarian Futurist Society.”
@#10
I get the impression the Libertarian Futurist Society could fit into a booth at IHOP with plenty of room to spare.
————–
I would have preferred if this review had gone ahead and given us all the spoilers. I am certainly never going to read it, but I would enjoy reading how a hardcore Libertarian “solves” certain social problems.
There’ll be spoilers aplenty when I get to the later parts of the book! I’m going to go over it chapter by chapter.
Actually it was a running joke for a while that the LFS ended up nominating socialist Scottish SF authors for their awards pretty often (Stross and MacLeod)
So some of you are thinking of a brooch, this is a broach, it is a metal cutting tool used for cutting keyways and other internal shapes. L. Neil Smith also wrote a Lando Calrissian trilogy that was well written and I liked, so he was capable of writing better books than this. SF writers seem to be especialy prone to this kind of soapboxing.
Looking forward to this!
Hit post rather than preview – going to add I did catch the start of that Probability Broach cartoon many years ago. It did have the virtue of being somewhat readable and humerous.
@12. tmcinroy : ” SF writers seem to be especialy prone to this kind of soapboxing.”
Exhiobit A & also often Liberatarian Robert Heinlein.