The Probability Broach, chapter 7
Win and Ed Bear, twin selves from different parallel realities, are comparing biographies. They’re trying to determine how the two of them can be so similar—”We look alike, have the same name, pursue much the same vocation. In some sense we might be the same person”—when their respective worlds are so radically different.
Win asks Ed if he knows about Chicago:
Ed grinned. “I’ll say I do. It’s the biggest city in the world!”
…He removed an object from the bookcase, fourteen inches long, maybe ten wide, half an inch thick. Sort of an overweight clipboard with a screen and keyboard. At the foot of my bed, the mountain glade disappeared, replaced by a map of North America.
I’ll give L. Neil Smith a point for this one: he pretty accurately predicted iPads and other tablet-style computers. (Then again, so did Star Trek.)
On Ed’s big-screen map, the geography of the continent is the same, but its political organization is entirely different:
All of North America, from the Isthmus to the Arctic, seemed to be one country: the North American Confederacy—no state or provincial boundaries, Chicago was indeed the biggest apple, rivaled closely by Los Angeles and Mexico City. There wasn’t any Washington, D.C., and Manhattan, in tiny, barely visible letters, seemed nothing more than a sleepy Indian village.
Ed and Win determine that they were born in the same place – although in Win’s world (“our” world), it’s the city of Denver, and at the same spot in the NAC, there’s only a tiny rural town.
Win’s parents are deceased, but Ed’s parents are living and retired to the Pacific Northwest. In both realities, both their parents are Ute Indians. Win points out that this is where the name “Utah” comes from:
“I hadn’t made the connection. But you’re right, they’re from Indian stock. Doesn’t mean very much, does it?”
“It never did to me,” I said, “but to some…” I thought about Watts and of the Arab-Vietnamese gang rumbles on my own beat. “Where I come from, people kill each other about it, sometimes.”
“Another difference between our histories?”
“Or between our people.”
This is as close as Smith ever comes to broaching the topic of racism – by implying that it doesn’t exist in the North American Confederacy. Ed Bear doesn’t think ethnic distinctions should matter, and he’s puzzled why anyone else would.
That would be commendably tolerant, except that the next thing Smith writes blows this out of the water:
“Win, why should we… I mean, why should both our worlds, if they diverged so long ago, have produced—”
“A pair of identical gumshoes? I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe because we’re both Indians.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well, I never set much store in being ‘Native American’—neolithically ignorant while the rest of the world was out inventing the wheel, gunpowder, carbon steel. Hell, if our esteemed ancestors had been able to get along with one another thirty days running, they could have thrown Pizarro and Cortez out on their hairy asses and developed a real civilization.”
This is another running theme with libertarians, going back to at least when Ayn Rand referred to Native Americans as “savages” who deserved to be wiped out because they didn’t have capitalism. Libertarian ideology has to come up with some explanation for why it was morally permissible for white settlers to displace and massacre the original inhabitants of the New World.
Smith carries on this tradition by calling the indigenous Americans “neolithically ignorant” and saying that they lacked “real civilization”. As more recent scholarship has shown, nothing could be further from the truth. Indigenous Americans had civilizations that were at least as large and complex as the Europeans of their era – in some cases, more so.
His implication is that the Native Americans deserved to be conquered because they were too primitive and fractious to unite against European invaders. But wait a minute – I thought Smith was against government!
If the Native Americans didn’t have a unified civilization, doesn’t that mean they were an anarchy? And aren’t anarchies supposed to be naturally superior to invaders operating on behalf of a tyrannical ruler, like a king?
In fact, the conquistadors didn’t take over because of their superior weapons (though that certainly played a part), but mostly because they carried diseases the Indians had no resistance against. Those germs annihilated whole civilizations before Europeans ever set eyes on them. If not for that fluke, history might have turned out very differently.
Be that as it may, Win suggests, the fact that they both have indigenous ancestry explains why they’re the same when so much else is different:
“I don’t know exactly where our histories diverged… But those histories are mostly white people’s histories, right? I mean, George Washington got killed in the Whiskey Rebellion, that’s what Clarissa tells me… [but] whatever the White-Eyes were up to back East, that wouldn’t affect what our ancestors were doing!”
He nodded. “Not until much later, and by that time—”
“By that time our heredity—in each world—would be pretty much unaltered!”
It’s a clever hypothesis – and, to be fair, the book never presents it as anything more than Win’s speculation – but we know it can’t be right, because plenty of white people are essentially the same in both worlds. Richard Nixon makes an appearance later in the book. Also, Ayn Rand, H.L. Mencken, John Wilkes Booth, Robert A. Heinlein, and other familiar historical figures are mentioned in the appendix, which presents an abbreviated timeline of the NAC’s history.
Let’s revisit the topic of race one more time. On one occasion, when responding to what he called a “preposterous charge” of racism, Smith said this:
“The hero of my first novel, The Probability Broach, and my second, The Venus Belt, is a full-blooded Ute Indian whose wife is a freckled strawberry blonde and whose best friend is the 137-year-old Mexican widow of a Russian prince. These are the books that also introduced sapient chimpanzees, gorillas, porpoises and killer whales to science fiction…”
He writes as if having a Native American protagonist automatically disproves accusations of racism, even though said protagonist has no personal or cultural connection to his people and demeans his own ancestral civilization as primitive.
More relevant is this: as far as I know, there are no Black people in TPB. There are no Asian people. It’s said that Mexico has joined the North American Confederacy, but we never meet any Hispanic people. (Lucy, who we met briefly, is described as Mexican, but apparently only in the sense of being white with Spanish ancestry, like Francisco d’Anconia in Atlas Shrugged.)
Smith thinks that having sentient non-human characters displays his open-mindedness. Actually, it emphasizes the point about his bias. Like some other science-fiction writers, he evidently found it easier to conceive of talking chimpanzees, gorillas, dolphins, robots and aliens than human beings whose skin isn’t white. It seems he’s willing to countenance one or two token minorities, but only as long as their ethnicity means nothing and has no role in their characters or the plot.
In fact, Smith also missed an opportunity to argue for his own beliefs. He could have shown how much better everyday life was for people of color in a utopia of freedom where slavery was peacefully abolished. Instead, unnervingly, it seems as if minorities have simply disappeared.
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Denver not existing is meant to be another way to show that the NAC is superior, since the book claims earlier that it was “the second worst place to build a city.” But the government didn’t make people settle there! They decided to do so on their own. I’d rather have this just be a butterfly effect than another claim to superiority.
I’m dumbfounded at the stupidity of his explanation for how both Bears could be born in their own worlds. The biggest thing that would matter is how things were just before their birth, and by then history has fully changed. If Indian Removal didn’t happen, then his parents and their parents and probably two or three generations beyond that would have had more choices for romantic partner.
Only some Native American nations were anarchies. There was nothing anarchic about the Aztecs, for instance. I assumed (though you show no dialogue tags) that it’s Win who wishes the conquistadors had been driven out, because if Ed had said it then indigenous Americans would still have gotten the short end of the stick in the NAC. What Smith doesn’t explain (because it makes no sense) is how the same historical figures who, in our world, I guess “chose” to be racist and sexist, “chose” not to be in his world, even though none of them questioned those things before the revolution and the only difference is the Whiskey Rebellion succeeding. Thomas Jefferson is still in charge in both and we know that he didn’t see his hypocrisy as a problem. These people in OTL thought only WASPs deserved rights, so what happened in the NAC to convince them they were wrong and actually change their ways? Because this is still a “white man’s history” in the sense that they still seem to be disproportionately in charge.
Chicago is the biggest city? But racists hate cities–and in particular, they hate Chicago because they were carefully taught to hate Chicago.
Also calling foul on tablets in 1987, because they came out of the computer revolution, which wouldn’t have happened without massive government funding.
The Whiskey Rebellion could plausibly result in Washington DC being abandoned (by the standards of plausibility in this book) but what accounts for the destruction of NYC – which was already a very important city by the time of the Whiskey Rebellion, vital, dynamic, and full of the freedoms that libertarians honor (full even then of people from different cultures and religions). Ayn Rand lived in NYC for decades, after all.
Washington, DC only exists as a compromise between the component states… so really it’s less plausible that the city was abandoned in this world since they reinstated the Articles of Confederation! (Why they didn’t just make a third constitution that lacked the flaws of the first two and instead returned to what they KNEW was unworkable is beyond me.) Sure, if Washington is disgraced I can guess they’d change the name, but there should be something there. Maybe people moved away over time as the state withered away? I got nothing else.
Well, Washington DC wasn’t established till the 1790s, so in a world where the 1787 Constitution was rejected I can understand it not existing. I can see New York City being less important in a different world, but I doubt very much that it would be that small and insignificant since it was already a significant city in the late 18th century and it has an excellent harbor.
I think that a lot of anarcho-capitalists and libertarians think that racism would magically disappear without the hated strong government. In this they are ironically similar to the more doctrinaire marxists who think that racism would magically disappear without capitalism!
This isn’t a world where the Constitutional Convention didn’t happen. The Constitution was in effect for seven years till the Whiskey Rebellion.
Another reason why NYC should exist is that it already existed in 1794. Sure, it didn’t cover all of Manhattan, but there was a city there. It was even the de facto capital and the place where Washington was sworn in as president.
I’ll let you in on a secret: I’ve been working on an alternate history scenario myself in which a point of divergence in the Revolutionary War causes the USA to avoid a lot of the mistakes it historically made—and I thought long and hard about exactly what would need to happen for there to even be a chance that it would be halfway likely for a significant minority of the Founding Fathers to reject white supremacy and patriarchy, and act on it. Otherwise, even if they did abolish slavery at the beginning (over SEVERE opposition from the southern colonies) there would just be Jim Crow and Indian Removal (and coverture) anyway, probably until the mid-20th century like OTL. Even then, my original idea was unworkable so I have to rewrite the whole story from scratch and change the POD significantly, and add more detail to things I glossed over. Somehow I doubt Smith did any of those things.
I stand corrected – I hadn’t realized that the whiskey rebellion was actually after the choice of the site of Washington DC. Still, if in this timeline the majority in the USA ended up violently rejecting the federal government set up under the 1787 constitution, it wouldn’t be surprising if the plans for Washington DC were abandoned.
I once tried my hand at writing a timeline and story set in an alternate history where Washington died right after the US war of independence and the states couldn’t agree on a new constitution, so the USA broke into 3 smaller countries. North America ended up with 8 or 10 countries of various sizes, some of which were parts of the British Empire/Commonwealth, others unaffiliated. North America ended up a bit more like Europe in that no one nation was completely dominant.
NYC is too ideally located to be “a sleepy Indian village”. Adam–who lives there–can fill in the details, but off the top of my head, I can think of multiple advantages for a society to live there: 4 balanced seasons (not hot & swampy like DC, not frigid Hoth-like wind-swept snowscape like Chicago), abundant food sources from a combination of fresh, estuary, and salt water with all the variety of sea life that implies, plus wildlife on the island (deer, squirrels, foxes, etc.) with a history of big farms (the Bronx started out as Bronck’s Farm), and as noted above, a wonderful port for local and overseas trade.
Smith’s biases come through so clearly in this book.
Libertarians tend to be isolationist, to a ridiculous and irrational degree; and to that lot, the East Coast cities represent everything they hate about real-world-America: international business, contact with Old Europe, grubby immigrants and their grubby Old Europe customs, and of course, evil collectivist city-slickers sneering down at the down-home bedrock people of “Real America” and not leaving anyone alone. So maybe, in the Smith-verse, those East Coast cities wither away because the happy anarchists of the NAC became self-sufficient and turned their backs on the rest of the world. This could be why Chicago becomes more prominent: it’s a Heartland city, and a crossroads of nothing but American roads.
(BTW, does Smith say anything about Philadelphia? It was the center of the formation of the US Government, and might have been its capital as well. Did it also just wither away when the need for government just magically vanished? What about Pittsburgh? And while I’m at it, are there still States with capitals, such as Harrisburg, Albany, Richmond, etc.?)
I’d like to see why he thought Canada would become part of this North American Confederacy. Also why this NAC would stay united as an entity if it had no government, and many parts wouldn’t be taken by the British, Spanish etc. From what’s said, the Utes and other indigenous peoples would have had a better chance for independence. Like you said, this makes such identical outcomes for both Win and Ed far more unlikely. Smith isn’t just ignorant how you describe too-the Utes were not conquered by Spaniards, but the Americans. Of course, the entire story is pretty ludicrous already. So far, libertarians (and anarcho-capitalists) are white men by a vast majority from all I’ve seen. It’s easy to see why from this, even when a lot of indigenous peoples were what you might find them idealize.
I’d like to see why he thought Canada would become part of this North American Confederacy.
What a silly question — Canadians would immediately see how wonderful America is after its government is overthrown, and immediately dump the English monarchy to join our happy anarchist utopia! And besides, it’s Manifest Destiny for Canada to be America’s backyard — American anarcho-capitalism is the source of all innovation, and Canadians never had any ideas of their own. /s
This is not the explanation for the alt-history duplicates I was expecting. I mean, I don’t know what I was expecting, but this definitely isn’t it. If this was a Futurama-esque comedy, I’d laugh at the characters for their idiocy, but unless this is a setup for “actually they’re kinda dumb” this feels out of place in what is supposed to be a serious work.
Since a few people asked, this is Smith’s explanation for why New York City doesn’t exist in the NAC. It comes later in the book, when Win asks why rival private security companies don’t fight each other:
So NYC was destroyed in a war between private security firms, which was a lesson to all of them to settle disputes peacefully.
The book doesn’t explain why the city was completely depopulated, or why it was never rebuilt. The reason there’s a city there is because it’s an excellent natural harbor, which should matter in any world with maritime traffic.
“Little village off the East Coast?” That’s ridiculous. Manhattan is an island, yes, but it’s mostly surrounded by other land masses, not “off” the East Coast like, say, New Shoreham or Nantucket.
Also, why would “private security firms” fight any sort of war, let alone destroy a whole town and “nearly wipe each other out,” over territory, if their paying clients hadn’t asked them to? Did they all just go rogue and become criminal gangs?
Also, it’s not at all plausible to think any lessons learned from such a war would keep everyone in line for more than three generations at most, AND all over the continent. Look how quickly we’re forgetting the lessons of Nazi Germany.
And she was echoing Thomas Jefferson (or whoever added this to the DoI):
To be fair, Jefferson was talking about Native American tribes who were actually fighting against White settlers in his time, and of King George’s (real or alleged) use of them against uppity colonial folks. Native Americans posed no such threat in Ayn Rand’s day, and Ayn Rand never had any excuse to “echo” the rhetoric of two centuries ago.
Because I noticed this criticism also in a review of the webcomic of the book, I looked for counterexamples on the pages of the webcomic. There are a few side characters who are people of color — someone who looks to have historical African ancestry; someone who looks far east Asian — but these are very few, and could be considered being the result of tokenism, added precisely because of the racial criticism of the original novel.
There’s a dark-skinned woman on the cover of the graphic novel edition:
https://www.bigheadpress.com/disppage2?story=TPB&file=/simages/TPB/TPBp000.jpg
It’s unclear who this person could be; she can’t be any of the main characters. I’ve read the whole comic book and I don’t believe she appears in any page beyond the cover. Hard to avoid the conclusion that she’s only there for the sake of tokenism.
Looks like the black woman (armed) is there to be sexy, just like the apparent lesbian couple (both armed). It’s cover-art, which may or may not have any connection to anything in the book, and is often sexed-up to get more interest. (Not sure what that monkey or chimp is doing there, or why it’s wearing lederhosen and cowboy boots, or why it’s also armed…?)
Raging Bee: Later in the book, we’ll learn that free of government influence, gorillas (and other primates?) will be revealed to be intelligent. The one on the cover is probably supposed to be the President (or maybe the VP) of the Confederacy
Right…okay…I guess that makes about as much sense as anything else in this book, right?
Dude’s been dead for years, and the noise in his head is still bothering me…
““Little village off the East Coast – one gang decided they’d try running things, four or five other companies objected.”
So without government, the most populous city at the time was completely destroyed, while in our universe it grew much much bigger, with a murder rate about 10% of the USA murder rate in 1790. Whose side was Smith on?