The Probability Broach, chapter 24
In the final chapter of TPB, L. Neil Smith tries to wrap up some loose ends. He seems to recognize, belatedly, that it made his alleged utopia look bad for them to be utterly helpless in the face of an invasion. In an attempt to make up for this, Win narrates that the Continental Congress reconvened after he departed and swung into action after all:
I don’t know why I expected that stubborn congregation to sit on their hands with the world collapsing around their ears. Too used to the U.S. Congress, I guess.
But… they did!
That’s indisputable. The Continental Congress had the threat explained to them in detail. They heard firsthand testimony and video evidence. The villain confessed his entire plan. And in the face of all that proof, they voted to adjourn without taking any action, because doing anything to thwart the bad guys would have violated their rights.
This is a retcon on Smith’s part. In the earlier chapters, he made a big deal about how difficult it was to get Congress to assemble in the first place, because it requires the active participation of at least 90% of the population of North America, and because it meets in an unappealing remote area as an intentional obstacle. It normally meets only once every few decades, if that, and this one took weeks of work by the protagonists to persuade enough influential people to make it happen.
Once they voted to adjourn, that should have been it. Most people would have lost interest and gone home. The idea that Congress could easily be called back into session very shortly afterward flies in the face of what the author tells us about how this society works.
The explosions in Saint Charles and Auraria didn’t really change anything—maybe relaxed the timetable a little—because the Confederacy has decided to strike back. Not against the Hamiltonians, who were never regarded as a significant threat, but against SecPol and the culture that allows such an abomination to exist. And not with Confederate A-bombs or troops, but in the same way that Sequoyah won the Mexican War: with ideas.
There’s a lot of fundraising and enlistment going on in the Confederacy now. We’re preparing to change a world, an entire universe, and drag the United States of America, kicking and screaming, through two centuries of peace and freedom it managed to miss by letting Alexander Hamilton screw things up back in 1789.
Win narrates that the Propertarian Party in his world, as well as a few other politically amenable organizations, are about to receive funding and support from the North American Confederacy. It’s at this point that we find out that this whole story is a manuscript he wrote that’s being sent to them:
You can’t draft anybody or raise war taxes here, but you can ask folks to chip in, and try to explain why it’s important. And you can try to explain to the Propertarian Party why the first copy of this manuscript and an initial seventy-five pounds of 999 fine have suddenly materialized in the middle of their conference table.
This sounds like an anarchist-friendly plan: voluntary and peaceful, changing people’s minds with words and ideas rather than with force. Too bad that under the circumstances, it would have been much too little, too late.
As TPB spent most of its length reminding us, the Hamiltonians from this world and SecPol from Win’s world were prepared to conquer the North American Confederacy with overwhelming force. They were going to drop nuclear bombs to destroy any potential centers of resistance, then march armies through the Probability Broach portal to subjugate the survivors. And they would have succeeded, if not for a last-minute technological deus ex machina combined with Win’s completely accidental meddling.
This isn’t the kind of threat that can be countered with political tracts about the virtues of anarcho-capitalism. The NAC’s peaceful evangelism would have been utterly futile in the face of an organized enemy willing to use violence and terror to get their way.
The “persuade everyone to be an anarchist” plan would only have a chance of succeeding in a tolerant society with free speech—but Smith has insisted all along that Win doesn’t live in that kind of world. He lives in a dystopia where government black helicopters blast unauthorized radio stations, and jackbooted secret police haul people off to reeducation camps or even murder them outright to suppress the slightest whisper of dissent.
Ironically, if you think armed resistance against such an oppressive regime would be a better plan, then it would appear the nonhuman sapients of the NAC are smarter than the humans:
The simians are preparing a small army of volunteers to travel across the Broach. They have a tough job ahead of them, taking their borrowed culture to relatives who have, as yet, no culture at all. I’d love to see the first CIA reports of well-dressed, heavily armed “infrahumans” roaming the African countryside.
Ooloorie haughtily assures me that her own people will have no such difficulties. Cetacean civilization, she claims, was already ancient when H. sapiens was discovering the useful properties of obsidian. I’ve spent a lot of Telecom time with her while I’m recovering, listening to fascinating stories: how porpoises first discovered the forgotten world above the sea; how they decided to observe and protect man until he was fit company for civilized beings; how the finny folk met in a roving, decades-long convention, deciding at last to let the Confederacy join them.
So watch out, tuna fishermen! As I’ve had reason to learn, lasers are nasty weapons.
Smith continues his bizarre insistence that apes and cetaceans didn’t need to be uplifted to intelligence, but that they were intelligent all along—in Win’s world (the “real world”) as well as in the North American Confederacy.
If cetacean civilization is as ancient and as advanced as Smith says, it makes no sense that Win’s world wouldn’t have found out about it. How could it be possible that we’ve been hunting whales or drowning dolphins in fishing nets without suffering retributive attacks from cetacean armies with frickin’ laser beams?
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And how do dolphins build laser beams? It would seem they’d need human hands and tech for that.
2)This has a lot in common with the evangelical fantasy of encountering someone who’s never heard “the good news about Jesus” (“Christianity — isn’t that some sort of religion?” as one tract I stumbled across put it) — they have no prior religious views so simply telling them “God is real, Jesus saves us and if you don’t accept him you burn in hell” produces instant converstion (I’m Christian and I think that’s ridiculous). Somehow just reading that embracing anarcho-capitalism will make you rich and end racism will miraculously convince everyone to course-correct.
Plus of course, who’s going to believe the Propertarians when they insist this is not a dream, not a hoax, not an imaginary story but a true account of life under anarchism? No, they didn’t just write it!
The problem is that Chick-style evangelical Christians have spent generations convincing themselves that their interpretation of the Bible (which nobody ever used before mid-19th century ‘Second Great Awakening’ America) is, in fact, not just an interpretation built around a serious conspiracy-theorist reading of the Bible, but is the ‘plain text’ reading of the Bible and ‘obvious’ to anybody who looks at it. Once you convince yourself that their convoluted prophecy planning charts and the like are ‘obvious’ ‘Truth’, then that really divides everybody into one of three camps:
– Those who know The Truth and believe and proselytize it;
– Those who know The Truth and deny it because they want to continue sinning;
– Those who don’t know The Truth yet.
The idea that there may be a fourth category of people who have heard all the arguments and have good-faith disagreements on that ‘Truth’ is something they cannot allow themselves to think, because that would deny how ‘obvious’ The Truth is. This all is, essentially, a cult that outlived its original leaders and became self-propagating where everybody is constantly rededicating themselves out of fear that any doubts are the results of the last Altar Call not taking properly.
“We just found this story on our conference table one day. It’s totally true that in an alternate universe, I’m the President, and apes are talking. Put away that straitjacket!”
Dark interpretation of the cetacean civilization. All the dolphins and whales killed in Win’s world are cetacean criminals, sent to be executed by unknowing humans.
For someone who claims that mere words were enough to have convinced the U. S. state governments to surrender their sovereignty, and the slavers and slaveowners to free their slaves, Smith sure was reluctant to show us these supposed famous and stirring speeches by Gallatin, and Jefferson, and whoever else.
That’s actually probably a good thing. As Fred Clark pointed out when dissecting Left Behind, when the author keeps making a big deal about how absolutely amazing this writer/speaker is, any actual attempts at including examples by the clearly inferior actual author tend to be rather underwhelming.
There are a few additional things that the North American Confederacy can do for the Propertarian Party and other resistance groups — provide a place to retreat to, help steal the dystopian governments weapons, and supply weapons to the Propertarians.
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Another possibility that occurs to me is that they can temporarily kidnap (“borrow”) individual soldiers and officers of the dystopian government, and provide propaganda/reeducation on an individual basis. Could they convert the enemy to friends, a few mooks at a time? Just kicking the idea out there.
No kidding. I mentioned before how the Broach could be the ultimate terrorist weapon: but as you say, it’s also an amazing theft tool. The end in the other universe can be moved within some limits, and you can see through without being noticed as long as the people on the other side aren’t actively running their own Broach, so all you really need to do is set up the Broach equipment in the rough area you’re interested in, start it up, peer around, and then pull stuff from out of secure and sealed locations on the other side.
A perfect locked-room mystery, because a sealed container is still only sealed in three dimensions.
The simians are preparing a small army of volunteers to travel across the Broach…I’d love to see the first CIA reports of well-dressed, heavily armed “infrahumans” roaming the African countryside.
Why not send well-dressed AFRICAN HUMANS to the African countryside? Like, maybe descendants of those Black slaves Jefferson freed with nothing but his silver tongue? I’m sure they’d make a pretty good case for the NAC as a better form of government. But apparently Smith didn’t think of that because he was so desperate to erase Black people from his fantasy-history and replace them with sentient apes. I’m really missing the realism and plausibility of Marvel’s “Black Panther” stories.
Smith was deranged, stupid, AND racist. That’s no way to go through either real or fantasy life. I hope his real life wasn’t as blatant a self-parody as his fiction.
If Smith hadn’t been so focused on making an action-hero plot, he would have been forced to make his world actually work, instead of making it not-work so that his heroes can save the day. And then suddenly remember that this is supposed to be an author tract which shows that his world does too totally work, forcing him to try to save face in the epilogue.
You know what? Maybe that *is* how it actually works. Stuff which isn’t very plausible in the real world happens anyway because it’s full of action heroes who keep saving the day. Now granted I don’t know how heroes manage to action large-scale utility and transportation systems into existence, or keep them maintained by punching bad guys, but clearly we need a better author to take a crack at it to show how Ancaps how it’s *really* done. /snark
…Great, now I’m imagining a demented superhero version of this, where Barrier Man punches
annoyed commutersevil cars which try to get past him so Cement Lady can save the day by filling potholes.…only to find some heathen collectivist named Mamdani had got ’em filled before her.
(I wonder where Smith would have located alt-verse Mamdani if he’d been alive to see him become a big-city mayor…?)
I don’t believe for a minute that we’d have seen less handwaving and absurdity without the action plot. Smith seems guaranteed to screw ti up either way.
Dolphins with lasers? Let’s say they can get full & precise co-operation of octopi & squid, to work around the no-hands problem – how do they ever even develop electrical instruments, underwater? Hell, how do they even develop copper wire, without fire to smelt it?
I have long opined that most extraterrestrial intelligence has evolved in marine habitats, where the large-brains issue causes relatively little maternal trouble. Large-brains-on-land worlds must be quite rare, and hardware-technology civilizations (as opposed to acoustic & semiotic ones) even more so.