The Probability Broach, chapter 1
It’s time to plunge into The Probability Broach. The opening narration tells us that it’s July 1987, in Denver, Colorado.
Every chapter opens with a fictitious quote setting the scene. Here’s how the first chapter begins:
…would cease operations early next month. In a joint press release, executives of the other networks regretted the passing of America’s oldest broadcasting corporation and pledged to use the assets awarded to them by the federal bankruptcy court to continue its tradition of operation “in the public interest.”
In a related story, TV schedules will be cut back by an additional two hours in eighty cities next week. Heads of the FCC and Department of Energy, officially unavailable for comment, unofficially denied rumors that broadcast cutbacks were related to recent media criticism of the President’s economic and energy policies.
—KOE Channel 4
Eyewitness News
Denver, July 6, 1987
As I mentioned earlier, Atlas Shrugged spends almost all its run time in the “regular” world, with just a brief sojourn in the capitalist utopia of Galt’s Gulch. The Probability Broach does the opposite. It starts out in the “regular” world, but spends only a short time there before switching tracks to its sci-fi libertarian utopia, the North American Confederacy, where it spends the rest of the story.
Both Ayn Rand and L. Neil Smith are trying to pull the same trick on their readers. They portray a dystopian world of repressive government and economic decay, and they want you to think it’s our world – either now, or in the very near future if we don’t adopt those authors’ politics.
In reality, these authors’ so-called regular worlds are just as fictional as their utopias. They’re not the product of any real or proposed set of progressive policies. Rather, they’re a pure conservative straw man about what would happen if liberals took power.
The narrative starts:
Another sweltering Denver summer. A faded poster was stapled crookedly to the plywood door of an abandoned fast-food joint at the corner of Colfax and York:
CLOSED BY ORDER OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT
The Secretary of Energy Has Determined That This Unit
Represents An Unjustifiable Expenditure of Our Nation’s
Precious And Dwindling Energy Reserves. DOE 568-90-3041
Smith’s protagonist is Lieutenant Edward W. Bear, known as Win, a detective for the Denver police force. Like a thousand other gumshoes from hardboiled crime fiction, he’s middle-aged, world-weary, bitter and cynical from a long career dealing with the worst of humanity. Also from the handbook of genre cliches, he’s the sole honest man in a world of pervasive corruption, betrayal and violence.
He’s sitting in his car, trying to eat lunch, sick to his stomach from a brutal murder scene he witnessed that morning. Win narrates:
Most of all I longed to take off my sodden jacket, but the public’s supposed to panic at the sight of a shoulder holster. I knew that sweat was eating at the worn, nonregulation Smith & Wesson .41 Magnum jammed into my left armpit. The leather harness was soaked, the dingy elastic cross-strap slowly rasping through the heat rash on the back of my neck.
If it were only—hell, make that five years ago. A man could enjoy a sanitary lunch in an air-conditioned booth. Now, CLOSED BY ORDER signs flapped on half the doors downtown; the other half, it seemed, had been shut by “economic readjustment.” And unlicensed air conditioning was a stiffer rap than hoarding silver.
Like Atlas, TPB begins with the world already in a state of decay, but never circles back to explain how things got to that low point. Like Rand, Smith assumed his intended audience would take this for granted and wouldn’t demand a deeper explanation. Still, it’s fun to pull at the threads of a fictional world and see how it holds up.
Why is there an energy crisis in this world? What’s changed from five years earlier?
Obviously, Smith’s description of energy shortages echoes the real-world 1973 OPEC oil embargo, where Arab states refused to sell petroleum to Western allies of Israel, and then the 1979 oil crisis after the Iranian revolution.
To people who read this book when it came out, those would be recent memories. Americans from that era remember long lines at the pump, skyrocketing prices for gas, painful inflation, and government plans for rationing. However, Smith never says if his timeline went through the same crisis, or if something else happened instead.
Is there an actual energy shortage? Did Smith’s world hit peak oil early and then fail to develop any alternatives to fossil fuel (solar and wind energy don’t exist in this book), resulting in permanent depression because energy really is scarce? Or is there plenty of energy, but no one can get it because the government is hoarding or mismanaging it?
Are the repressive laws a heavy-handed response to a real crisis, or did the government concoct a crisis as an excuse to pass repressive laws? Which answer a libertarian goes for says a lot about their politics. Do they believe socialism is a well-intentioned attempt to help people that inevitably goes bad, or was it only ever an excuse to seize power and impose tyrannical rule?
Smith doesn’t say, but his explanation seems to hew closer to the latter. He believes that government never has done or can do any good for anyone, that it’s always power-hungry tyrants imposing rules on people against their will. In his worldview, “government = evil” is the only thing you need to know. It accounts for everything, so no deeper cause-and-effect explanation is necessary.
It’s also misleading in that the oil shock was always a temporary problem. If oil was cut off entirely things would be terrible for a time then coal would take over for energy generation and transport. Heavy investment in hydroelectric and nuclear would eventually take care of the energy grid. The whole reason for the oil shock though is that those are not things you can fix in a month or even a couple of years.
The oil shock is the sort of problem that a government is good at fixing, even though nobody likes the process. Immediate limitations on use and rationing to keep the system going. Emergency building of immediate alternatives like coal for power. Long term investment in hydroelectric and nuclear. Accelerated development of wind and solar.
In a pure economic freedom not only would the oil be limited in availability to the rich but the rich are likely to rig the system to avoid switching. As long as they can control a limited resource they can make more money. Money they can use to keep people from investing in alternative systems.
People that believe in that sort of absolute free market state never really consider that the rich would use their power to block alternatives. Various games of this sort are common in some industries. In the medical industry companies that make generic drugs often cut deal with name brand manufacturers, taking money not to make certain products. The manufacturers bribe doctors to recommend their medication over alternative treatments. The big drug companies buy up companies that make alternative medication just to shut them down.
Hooray! New book review! Is it OK if I pass this link on to the Slacktiverse blog (not to be mistaken for the Slacktivist; Slacktiverse was a spinoff from the readers)? They do weekly roundups of book deconstructions. https://slacktiverse.wordpress.com/
By all means!
Why is there an energy crisis in this world? What’s changed from five years earlier?
More to the point: Does Smith ever mention the Great Depression? The New Deal? WW-II? The Marshall Plan?
He mentions World War II, but only to strongly imply that it was FDR’s fault.
Where do you even begin to deal with this sort of crap? This is not how it works. This is not how any of it works!
If there was an energy crisis going down that was severe enough to close down air-conditioned restaurants, people certainly wouldn’t be driving cars. And by five years into it, essential businesses would have shifted to operating in the small hours, when it was coolest, and people would be sleeping through the hot afternoon.
And even with 1987 tech, once cheap fossil fuels were out of the equation, renewable energy would have started looking increasingly attractive. You can view the building of a power plant as a single bulk purchase of all the energy it will ever produce, and divide the total cost (including any ongoing expenses for the expected lifetime) by the estimated lifetime output to get a price per kWh. If the price of energy from elsewhere exceeds that, then the investment is a worthwhile one. (That’s exactly the calculation I did 12 years ago when I invested in a solar PV system ….. Mains electricity is now nearly 1.5 times the payback rate, so I guess I won …..)
Not explaining “How the world got this way” can be an acceptable break from reality sometimes. If the details don’t matter to the kind of story you’re telling, because your focus is entirely on “what people might do, under such circumstances” or some sort of fantasy and/or wish fulfillment aspect about the whole thing, then it might not even matter if the entire situation is unrealistic and falls apart under close examination. So it’s not necessarily a problem, in itself. (Well, maybe to some of the readers who over-analyze everything, but that’s a them issue.)
That being said, if you can’t even get the basics about how existing societies work correct, then I’m not going to be very confident of your ability to realistically craft a fictional one. And if your story is an author treatise on how your fictional world works better than the inaccurate “real” one, then I’m going to be very unimpressed.
@Snowberry, #5: I think not explaining the backstory to a world can often be fine (as long as the world itself doesn’t seem too weirdly contradictory). The problem here is that the author has created a Crapsack World with the clear implication that this is where government gets us, and is using this as a fundamental part of the argument. As they’ve never justified the implied claim that this is where government gets us, it doesn’t stand up well as an argument.
See also: everything from the top shelf at the video store.
“The Probability Broach” (as well as Ayn Rand’s output) is, quite simply, anti-government porn.
@ ^ Bekenstein Bound :Wonder if Elon and his DOGEbags have read it and that’s what’s helped shape their mindsets?
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The book was first published in 1979 so that’s less than a decade – 8 years. I guess a lot can change quickly but still. Thinking of which :
Thinking of which in 1979 Jimmy Carter was POTUs and in 1987 Ronald Reagan was – serving his second term – in our reality. Iwodner who L. Neil Smith expected or thought would likely be the US President when his book was set given it was only two presidential terms away? Do they ever actually name the POTUS in the fictional “real” world of The Probability Broach?
There’s a passing reference to a “President Jackson”. Possibly he didn’t want the book to seem too dated too fast by naming a real person who might not be in office by the time it was published.
Oh my God! President Jesse Jackson… a DEI hire. It’s worse than I ever could’ve imagined!
SPOILERS WARNING I guess if that matters but FWIW just seen the wikipage for TPBés list of alternative Presidents in their Libertarian paradise ‘verse here :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Confederacy
Which, kinda, weird mix.
Thanks for the cite, and God’s death that’s gotta be one of the stoopidest “alternate history” fairytales I’ve ever seen. Jefferson PEACEFULLY abolishing slavery in 1820? If that was at all possible why didn’t he at least try it IRL?
And this bit just shows how stupid libertarians can be when they put their minds to it:
The absence of government interference creates a libertarian utopia where science and medicine advance at a pace significantly greater than in our baseline history.
Really? Where/When have science and medicine EVER advanced without “government interference?” Germany became an industrial/tech superpower in its time because of Otto von effing Bismark, not because of a gaggle of anarchists passing blunts around and thinking of things to invent. Japan got “Westernized” the same way. The English and French Enlightenment were largely spurred and guided by royal patronage. And laissez-faire America was BEHIND Germany and Japan until that horrible socialist FDR gave us the New Deal and the enormous buildup for WW-II, which included huge advances in air travel, rocketry, radio, radar, computers, medicine (penicillin’s first buyer was the US Army), and of course, nuclear weapons and power. (Oh, and it was that same tyrannical central government that actually abolished slavery.) Anyone who says government stifles innovation is engaging in flat-earther levels of denialism.
Whoever wrote the sci-fi dystopia we’re currently living in clearly has no idea whatever how anything works! I ask you, a failed businessman who plays a successful businessman on a TV talent show becomes POTUS, disastrously mishandles a pandemic, loses the next election and mounts a failed coup, and then comes back and wins the election after that!. Totally implausible.
Lessee here: sci-fi dystopia; ultra-capitalistic oligarchy with a prominent role for pharma giants; the computers and networking are great but no warp drive and barely any space exploration at all; no obvious indications of alien contact let alone invasion; the big advances recently have all been in crypto and AI, rather than physics or mechanical engineering or suchlike … clearly it’s cyberpunk and adding in the implausibility factor and the sheer shitshow the villains are creating it’s a good bet the author is William frigging Gibson. 🙂
Well, that’s good to know, I thought Gibson was getting kinda stale lately… :-/