The Probability Broach

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Summary: The SF candidate for President
Review: The Author was on the ballot in Arizona, in November 2000 as their Libertain Party candidate for President {rather than Mr Browne}. This book shows you why he was their candidate.
It's a good yarn, a fun read, and a "think piece".
I've loved and quoted this book since it's original release.
If you liked Heinlein's politics, try this yarn.

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Summary: The Probability Broach By L. Neil Smith
Review: The Probability Broach By L. Neil Smith Reviewed by Jeff Elkins

Imagine an America where President George Washington was shot as a traitor after the successful Whiskey Rebellion and Alexander Hamilton flees to Europe. An America where tax and draft are curse words. An America where westward expansion was non-violent and land was purchased from Indian tribes for gold and silver. An America where the Shakespearean actor John Wilkes Booth was murdered by an obscure Illinois attorney. An America that in modern times has no taxes, no military, highly advanced science and where its residents (not citizens, another curse word) live like kings.

Now imagine its opposite. A drab, dreary America, gray with pollution and despair, where so-called citizens live under a crushing tax burden, oppressed by a dictatorial government and its federal police forces. An America where just about anything pleasurable is either illegal or taxed beyond the means of ordinary people to afford. An America where both owning a firearm and self-defense is a crime. An America that in many ways looks like where the United States, circa 2001 is headed.

Both Americas have been brought to vivid life by libertarian firebrand, presidential candidate and science fiction author, L. Neil Smith, in his Prometheus Award winning novel, "The Probability Broach."

Alternate history is a popular sub genre in the world of science fiction and Smith's SF romp is filled with amusing twists and "might have beens" for the reader to ponder. While largely geographically identical, the two worlds couldn't be more different politically and socially. Using the concept of a multiverse, Smith tells the tale of Edward W. Bear, AKA 'Win', a Denver homicide detective who while investigating the grisly murder of a physicist is thrown from 'our' world into what can fairly be called a libertarian paradise, the North American Confederacy, via a 'Probability Broach', a window from one universe into another, constructed by Confederacy scientists, one of whom is a talking dolphin.

Unfortunately, there are two serpents in this anarchocapitalist paradise, a home-grown one represented by the Hamiltonians, discredited advocates of the defunct federalist governing faction and also the minions of SecPol, an evil BATF clone from Win Bear's native America who follow him through the doorway between universes. Bear is tasked with saving the North American Confederacy from both and perhaps with injecting freedom into his own world as well.

Smith's story reads like a combination of Robert Heinlein and Dashiell Hammett, blending two distinct genres, hard-boiled detective fiction and action-packed science fiction. Not an easy job, but Smith manages to pull it off with style and humor. Better yet, Smith has delivered a book of ideas, important ideas about freedom and liberty in a book that both that teaches libertarian concepts and contrasts the differences between a truly free society and a dictatorial one. However, this is done in a whimsical fashion that never preaches or condescends to the reader. You won't find clunky political exposition interfering with the action.

First published in 1979, The Probability Broach was unfortunately out of print for several years, then republished by Tom Doherty Associates Inc. (TOR) only to recently fall out of print yet again. Luckily, TOR will be reintroducing Smith's novel in trade paperback format later this year; oddly enough it will be preceded in publication by its sequel, "The American Zone."

If you can get a copy of The Probability Broach via a used bookseller or if you're lucky enough to find one on the shelves at your local megabookmart, snatch it up. When the trade paperback is issued, buy a new copy and think about buying one for a friend or relative you want to introduce to libertarianism, as well.

If you enjoy science or detective fiction, you're sure to enjoy this fast-paced book.

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Summary: Good alternate history marred by echoes of the seventies.
Review: THE PROBABILITY BROACH is as close to a libertarian utopia as any realistic anarchist dares get. It's also a very detailed alternate history. Most writers of alternate history are content to detail when that history deviates from ours or set their stories in the resulting world with brief references to how things change. Smith gives us a detailed timeline of how things change when one extra word is added to the Declaration of Independence and George Washington is shot in the Whiskey Rebellion.

However, Smith unsuccessfully tries for a Heinlein style. His slang is awkward. The hero's romance reeks of bad Chandler imitations, and there is a little bit too much gun stuff even for me, a lifetime NRA member.

This book was originally published in 1980, and there are jarring elements of the seventies here which don't quite work like a tyrannical America justified by an energy crisis or the talking chimps and dolphins much loved in seventies' sf.

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Summary: very good libertarian novel
Review: The Probability Broach is the best book I have read about Libertarian ideas. L. Neil Smith sums up all the thoughts of Libertarian's and puts them into an easy to read, exciting book.

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Summary: Anarcho-captialist utopian novel in disguise
Review: There are layers of literary disguise in The Probability Broach. It's really an anarcho-capitalist utopian novel - but that's in disguise as a murder mystery, which is in turn masked as an alternate-universe science-fiction novel (the genre under which the book was marketed).

As a utopian novel, it is a great success - probably the best fictional case for anarcho-capitalism ever made. Like all utopian novels, it sometimes sacrifices plot and character development in order to deliver its message - but you'll forgive it, because you'll enjoy hearing the message.

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Summary: What being an American is all about!
Review: This is precisely one of the best books that ever existed, but it is especially important for our time period. Helping remind us of the power we have for individual responsibility.

I belive the better term would be instead of Anarchy, would be Total Self Responsibility..

This book is so awesome. It hits all the right spots, it tells us what liberty is really about, and how easy it is taken away. How Free and American are we really these days?

Viva American Revolution!

Long Live American Freedom!

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Summary: Anarcho-capitalist alternate history
Review: This novel is a goofy alternate-history adventure, in which a cop from a statist future America is teleported via the "probability broach" to a libertarian parallel America. The divergence between the two universes occurred when Jefferson chose to include *one* additional word in the Declaration of Independence: "government derives its just powers from the *unanimous* consent of the governed". Why this divergence? Because in the alternate universe, Jefferson "chose to think", which he apparently did not at this point in *our* universe. (Smith borrowed his theory of free-will as the choice to think or not to think from Ayn Rand, who by the way was president of the US in his parallel universe, though prior to the action of the novel.)

The "butterfly effect" has its fascination. But I personally doubt that Jefferson could have inserted the word "unanimous" at this place (let alone have been out of focus while writing *our* Declaration), since he was such a devoted reader of Locke, and certainly recognized with him that unanimity is practically impossible to reach in a representative government, where some form of majority rule must take its place. Locke writes for instance in the *Second Treatise on Civil Government* (Section 98) : "nothing but the consent of every individual can make any thing to be the act of the whole: but such a consent is next to impossible ever to be had..."

Perhaps more importantly, I found it very unfair of Smith to package-deal Madison with Hamilton as arch-enemies of freedom, just because Hamilton was the most statist of the Founders and Madison collaborated with him on *The Federalist*. Madison had a completely different psychology and political philosophy than Hamilton, and he was undeniably one of the greatest defenders of individual rights ever, perhaps even greater than Jefferson himself. As for the idea that the Constitution was a statist document, while the Articles of Confederation were more libertarian, it is a very biased opinion: anarcho-capitalists simply like the Articles better because they were much more decentralized and messy (and, come to think of it, because they required unanimity of the member colonies, thus virtually paralyzing legislation and approximating anarchy.)

Proselytizing for anarcho-capitalism, Smith claims that in his alternate America, the standard of living is about fifty times as high as in the real, statist America; that people live about four times as long; and that there are only a dozen violent deaths per decade due to the generalization of gun-ownership, from kindergarten on. But it is easy to assert anything in fiction. Much more telling as to what would happen in such a universe are the documented differences between North and South as far as the use of guns was concerned: the North accepted the English common law, which considered duels criminal and encouraged each individual to back out of conflictual situations rather than use guns ("in any dispute threatening violence, the threatened subject had a legal duty to retreat from the scene if possible, and failure to do so was culpable, if homicide followed", Paul Johnson, *History of the American People* p545); while the South, on the other hand, had a very strong tradition of dueling. The result, pace Smith, was much greater violence in the South.

Finally, I neither liked the style nor the basic ideas of "The Probability Broach". The narrator being an anti-hero a la Mike Hammer, who likes to parade his wit and his ability to generate "colourful metaphors", the novel tends to resemble a parody of detective fiction, using a lot of street slang and very impressionistic descriptions.

To be fair to Smith, though, I did like the first two Lando Calrissian adventures. But then, that was years ago.

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Summary: One of the classics! Thank goodness it's been republished.
Review: Very few writers have as much fun with the language as does L. Neil Smith. And in "The Probability Broach" he has written a classic, not only in science fiction, but in philosophy. I've re-read and re-read this one, and will again and again. It is great, a lot of fun.

Rating:
Summary: Nice alternate reality but
Review: Would it really be that different politically if a few words and events were changed or would some people have continued clamoring for power and getting the popular support they need to achieve it. I suspect it happened the way it did because those people were the way they were, and genuine pro-liberty folk are few an far between.

But it is sci-fiction. Weak characters, but fun ones - nice ways of presenting non-humans, but less than credible nowadays. Convenient simplistic ending but nice timeline included.

Worth a read, good presentation of government free world especially in how personal protection advances in a free society, and mass destruction advances in a controlled society - put it on your paperback list.