A zest for life, a sense of humor, a taste for rollicking adventure, curiosity, mystery, imagination, ingeniously varied aliens, heroic and villainous humans, a passion for justice, individual rights and other libertarian themes mark the novels and legacy of L. Neil Smith.
Smith was born May 12, 1946, and died at 75 in 2021 at his longtime home in Fort Collins, Colorado. Arguably one of the most significant libertarian novelists of the past generation or so, Neil was a writer that libertarian SF fans should remember (and consider rereading) on his birthday.
For one thing, Smith is one of only a handful of writers (most notably, along with Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Vernor Vinge and F. Paul Wilson) to win five Prometheus Awards – or more.
Smith also was one of only four authors to become a three-time winner in the Best Novel category. (The others, all still writing, are Cory Doctorow, Victor Koman and Ken MacLeod.)
THE PROBABILITY BROACH
His first win came in 1982 for The Probability Broach, an influential bestseller during the early emergence of the modern libertarian movement in the 1970s and 1980s.
Smith’s imaginative sci-fi multiverse adventure imagines alternate time lines accessible through the probability broach, a portal to many worlds.
Set in a near-future United States where the economy and technology have stagnated and society has decayed because of increasing government control by an arrogant federal bureaucracy and the intrusive Federal Security Police, the story kicks into gear when middle-aged Denver detective Win Bear, investigating the murder of a University physicist, accidentally discovers the alternate-worlds portal.
The gun-toting detective accidentally is sent into the alternative world, while chased by murderous criminals and Federalists who aim to rule.
In that other world, the detective discovers that American history developed in a drastically different and more libertarian direction: Public services are run (and run far better) by private businesses, “tax” and “draft” are curse words, poverty is virtually abolished and government barely exists.
The Probability Broach was the first of many novels Smith wrote within this multi-time-line universe.
Quite a few were recognized within the Prometheus Awards. Among those that became Best Novel finalists: The Nagasaki Vector, Thom Paine Maru, The Gallatin Divergence and The American Zone, which brought the series home and to a satisfying close.
PALLAS
Smith won the Prometheus Award for Best Novel in 1994 for Pallas.
Set in the 22nd century on the terra-formed and colonized asteroid of Pallas, Smith’s Heinlein-esque novel imagines a believable future based on plausible scientific developments but one beset by familiar political divisions between freedom-lovers and power-mongers.
Two groups of colonists sharing the habitat in a 20th of Earth’s gravity come into conflict, one very libertarian and the other communitarian-socialist.
The larger culture is a fully free gun-toting group of rugged individualists who live as they choose – but at their own expense, with strict accountability in “moon-is-a-harsh-mistress” respect for the harsh realities of asteroid existence in the outer solar system.
These colonists represent something of a libertarian utopia based on explicit consent, since all have signed a founding document modeled on the ideas of an Ayn-Rand-style woman philosopher.
Pallas can be read on its own, but is a prequel to Ceres, a 2010 Prometheus Best Novel nominee.
THE FORGE OF THE ELDERS
Smith won the 2001 Prometheus Award for Best Novel for The Forge of the Elders.
Set in the late 21st century within our solar system and beyond, Smith’s fun and suspenseful SF-mystery novel concerns the culture clash and political differences between the human members of an expedition to asteroid 5023 Eris, and the multitude of aliens they find when they arrive.
The humans, sent to the asteroid by a monolithic socialist/communist world government back on Earth, come into conflict with the libertarian aliens over control of the asteroid 5023 Eris, coveted because of valuable minerals.
The culture clash results in a few mysterious deaths, and the investigation of the possible murders reveals much about the motivations of the perpetrators and suspects.
Meanwhile, the different intelligent species – including giant-squid-like aliens with a sophisticated Elders culture and other sentient beings from evolutionary branches as different as mollusks, trilobites, sea scorpions and birds – come from alternate historical realities but share anarcho-capitalist economic practices and basic, peaceful, cooperative and non-violent libertarian values.
THE PROBABILITY BROACH: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL
Smith later won a Special Award, shared with illustrator Scott Bieser, in 2005 for The Probability Broach: The Graphic Novel.
This was the first graphic novel recognized with a Prometheus Award.
Visually colorful and boldly imaginative, this accessible and fun version of one of the most explicitly libertarian sf novels achieves its distinctive style and stirring impact from the fertile collaboration between Smith and Bieser, a libertarian artist and cartoonist (also known for his Quantum Vibe SF graphic-novel series.)
Bieser’s strong eye and hand lend an enhanced sense of color, wit, movement and character to the alternate Gallatin universe of prosperous, peaceful freedom-lovers imagined with such optimistic, gun-toting, frontier spirit by Smith in his seminal 1980 novel.
Especially in the four opening chapters, Bieser’s art and Smith’s condensed story paint a convincing portrait of despotism, decay and decline that Smith extrapolated from socialist-fascist tendencies already worrisome in this world.
The graphic novel may be an excellent place to start, if you haven’t read Smith before – and with its vivid imagery, also might attract younger readers.
A LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT WINNER
Smith, who also created the Prometheus Award in the late 1970s and first presented it with a sizable gold prize in 1979, is one of only four novelists (along with Poul Anderson, Vernor Vinge and F. Paul Wilson), to be honored with the Special Prometheus Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2016.
Smith received the honor in a special ceremony in Denver at that year’s Milehicon, Colorado’s largest annual SF/fantasy convention.
Smith may have passed some years ago, but his legacy remains – and it’s one that helped shape the Prometheus Awards.
ABOUT THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS AND THE LFS:
* Join us! To help sustain the Prometheus Awards and support a cultural and literary strategy to appreciate and honor freedom-loving fiction, join the Libertarian Futurist Society, a non-profit all-volunteer association of freedom-loving sf/fantasy fans.
Libertarian futurists understand that culture matters. We believe that literature and the arts can be vital in envisioning a freer and better future.
In some ways, culture can be even more influential and powerful than politics in the long run, by imagining better visions of the future incorporating peace, prosperity, progress, tolerance, justice, positive social change, and mutual respect for each other’s rights, human dignity, individuality and peaceful choices.
* Prometheus winners: For a full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees – including the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) categories and occasional Special Awards – visit the enhanced Prometheus Awards page on the LFS website. This page includes convenient links to all published essay-reviews in our Appreciation series explaining why each of more than 100 past winners since 1979 fits the awards’ distinctive dual focus on both quality and liberty.
* Watch videos of past Prometheus Awards ceremonies, Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog’s Video page.
* Read “The Libertarian History of Science Fiction,” an essay in the international magazine Quillette that favorably highlights the Prometheus Awards, the Libertarian Futurist Society and the significant element of libertarian sf/fantasy in the evolution of the modern genre.
* Check out the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Facebook page for comments, updates and links to the latest Prometheus Blog posts.
I have fond memories of first reading The Probability Broach in 1985 (and again in 2022). It was a tremendous experience for a young anarcho-capitalist! I appreciate this remembrance. It made me move Pallas up my list of next reads.