Before I begin my review of The Probability Broach, let’s discuss its author: L. Neil Smith (or Lester Neil Smith III, to be more precise).
Smith was born in 1946 in Denver. He died in 2021, but his personal website is still up. I assume a fan or like-minded fellow traveler is paying the hosting bill.
His account of his life mentions:
Neil’s boyhood favorites were Arthur Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, Isaac Asimov, Richard Wilson, Robert Scheckley, and of course, Robert Heinlein. It was through his interest in science fiction that he encountered the works of Ayn Rand in 1961, when he read Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged and knew he had found the worldview that would guide him the rest of his life. He also recognized the unique way the ideas of Rand and Heinlein compliment each other, and it was this direction he began to take philosophically and politically.
It goes on to detail his involvement in politics:
Neil joined the Libertarian Party in 1972 (serving on the national platform committee in 1977 and 1979) and became a life member of the NRA in 1974. It was in 1972 that he met the great libertarian teacher Robert LeFevre. In 1977, frustrated by the course American politics was taking, Neil began work on a highly polemic science fiction novel, originally titled The Constitution Conspiracy, which he hoped would do the same thing for libertarianism that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for Abolitionism or Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and the works of H.G. Wells did for socialism.
That book, of course, became The Probability Broach. Smith’s website says it’s “widely considered the definitive libertarian novel”, although it suspiciously neglects to mention who’s doing the considering. It’s also amusing to note that the book won the Prometheus Award, an award for libertarian fiction that was created by… L. Neil Smith.
Even among libertarians, Smith never ascended to the heights of mass popularity. According to his Wikipedia page:
In 1999, Smith announced that he would run for president in 2000 as an independent if his supporters would gather 1,000,000 online petition signatures asking him to run. After failing to achieve even 1,500 signatures, his independent campaign quietly died.
The experience appears to have soured him on politics, as he recounts:
I’ll say it up front: I will no longer be available to anybody as a candidate for any political office.
…the Libertarian Party, which I once regarded as our last, best hope for freedom, now seems irrevocably broken. At best, it wastes the time and energy of thousands of wonderful people. At worst, it’s become a gruesome pit of vermin whose personal psychological and emotional problems drive them to attack anyone who actually does something, instead of arguing purposelessly and endlessly with them about it.
What, you might be wondering, left him so disillusioned and embittered? Well, he tells us: he was ticked off at another Libertarian Party member who accused him of initiating force (a big no-no in libertarian circles), just because he said that politicians who lie to the public should be executed by hanging.
As this interaction hints, Smith spent a great deal of time engaging in that most cherished libertarian pastime: arguing with other libertarians. He said that the Second Amendment should be the Libertarian Party’s “principal – even their only – election issue”. He sneeringly derided libertarians who care about any other issue, or who care about this issue less than he judged they should, as “Nerf libertarians”.
That brings us to the other thing you should know about L. Neil Smith. He was a gun nut – no, a serious gun nut. An essay on the front page of his website says:
If a politician isn’t perfectly comfortable with the idea of his average constituent, any man, woman, or responsible child, walking into a hardware store and paying cash—for any rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything—without producing ID or signing one scrap of paper, he isn’t your friend no matter what he tells you.
Smith’s political philosophy can be summed up as: guns everywhere, for everyone, all the time. His ideal world is one where everyone carries deadly weapons at all times. That includes children, as soon as they’re old enough to physically hold one. (This is depicted in The Probability Broach.)
This horrifying fantasy flows from Smith’s anarcho-libertarian ideology. He believes that the state shouldn’t exist; therefore, it’s up to each individual person to protect themselves from evildoers. Or, possibly, the causality goes the other way: he fetishized guns because they made him feel manly, and because of this, he adopted an ideology that gives him an excuse for wanting to carry one around all the time.
Most of Smith’s books were published before the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School that arguably began the modern era of gun massacres. However, he’s certainly old enough to have lived through earlier gun slaughters, like the 1966 University of Texas clock tower massacre.
None of those atrocities dissuaded him from his conviction that guns, guns and more guns are the solution to literally every problem. He can’t appear to perceive any possible downside to selling a machine gun, for cash, to anyone who wants one, with no ID, no background checks, without even asking what they plan to use it for. If mass killings and random shootings were a concern to him, he took pains not to say so.
Smith’s website also features reverent pictures of his personal gun collection, including this incredible line:
I get this piece out first thing in the morning, when I go to the kitchen to make coffee, because most of my other weapons are so cold they hurt my arthritic hands. Guess I could use the Glock for that, as well, but this one just feels good.
Does… he think guns are somehow required for making coffee?
Now you know L. Neil Smith. Next week, we’ll see the anarcho-libertarian literary vision that sprang from his mind, as we dive into The Probability Broach.
…another Libertarian Party member who accused him of initiating force (a big no-no in libertarian circles)…
Ah yes, the Sacred Non-Aggression Principle. This is how libertarians appeal to pacifists, anti-interventionists, anti-militarists, and conflict-averse people in general, by offering a principle that pretends to be about peaceful interaction, but very quickly (and obviously) becomes the bully’s logic. We can all agree that it’s wrong for me to pick your pocket, but if I do so, that’s not an “aggressive” or “forceful” act in itself — so if you grab my hand or give me a punch to stop me, then YOU’RE the one who’s violated the Sacred Non-Aggression Principle, so you’re the bad guy.
The Sacred Non-Aggression Principle is especially useful to the richest and most powerful of any country, since they have all manner of peaceful, legal means to take whatever they want, and can call the rest of us “aggressors” the minute we engage in any sort of physical resistance when they’ve taken away all other means of resistance. It’s the logic of conquerors and colonizers everywhere: “We were legally bulldozing this land to build our homes and businesses, and those savages who happened to be there first physically blocked us! THEY’RE THE AGGRESSORS AND WE HAVE TO DEFEND OURSELVES!!!”
The non-aggression principle is one of those ideas that sounds good until you find out that libertarians use it as a term of art. They only believe certain very specific kinds of harm count as such. On the other hand, they automatically treat some things that harm no one as aggression – say, taxes passed by a democratically elected government.
For an example, Ayn Rand said that only people who believe in her exact version of capitalism are entitled to not be aggressed against. As for everyone else, you can kill them and take their stuff. Smith’s characters display a similar moral flexibility.
In 1977, frustrated by the course American politics was taking…
What course was that, exactly, that made the poor guy so frustrated? Does anyone specify what terrible thing was happening in 1977 that drove this author to write a loony libertarian screed?
1977: Roots premiered on TV. Of course that fried a white supremacist.
ROOTS?! Of course!! OMG how could I have forgotten the beginning of Wokeness??!!!
“Columbine High School […] arguably began the modern era of gun massacres”
Flatters the US with the implication that this nonsense started so recently. Wikipedia places the start of the modern era of mass shootings in the US in *1949*.
“Going Postal” was a common slang phrase before the Columbine shooters were out of kindergarten.
raging – i did not know this about libertarians. interesting.
re: the boy and his guns – the phrase gun-fondler was invented for guys like this.
I myself would have adduced “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” by Robert A. Heinlein, but this rather obscure work I suppose might qualify. I’m a bit old to bother reading it, of course.
I’ve thought about reviewing that one. The problem is, Heinlein was a good writer – there wouldn’t be as much to make fun of!
I started reading that book, but gave up about halfway through. Not sure why — might have been the lame character development, a flaw depressingly common to everything by Heinlein I ever read. Maybe it was because some big computer, which inexplicably became self-aware and started complaining about how stupid humans were, seemed to have more personality than some of the human characters.
It may also have been because the political scenario — specifically, who supports this supposedly 1776-style “revolution,” who opposes it, and why — didn’t ring true. But maybe that’s part of the story and would have been a credible twist later on…?
Hello Adam. I am so glad you have uploaded your blog Archives. That stuff is gold! I will probably be making youtube videos based of them in the future. I’m waiting to have 1k subs (already halfway there!) so I can put links in descriptions and give you your so much deserved credit
Neil’s boyhood favorites were …, Robert Scheckley…
Not favorite enough to bother to learn how to spell “Sheckley”, alas.
It was through his interest in science fiction that he encountered … The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged …
Which are not science fiction, but clearly fantasy (or more specifically, phantasy).
… the unique way the ideas of Rand and Heinlein compliment each other…
Neither, sfaicr, said anything about each other. Their stories fit together mostly by having the same holes.
“gruesome pit of vermin” would be a good name (for several bands already working under other names).
If our esteemed host enjoys vivisecting libertarian fiction, I encourage him to take a scalpel (or hatchet) to the opi of Terry Goodkind.
Broach? I checked Wiktionary, a Wikipedia-style online dictionary. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/broach
Etymology 1: Noun: a variety of kinds of spikes, like a lock pin, an awl, a cooking spit, a chisel point, … Verb:
(transitive) To make a hole in, especially a cask of liquor, and put in a tap in order to draw the liquid.
(transitive) To open, to make an opening into; to pierce.
(transitive, figuratively) To begin discussion about (something).