In Praise of L. Neil Smith's The Probability Broach

♦ The Probability Broach starts off like street-level Heinlein and then leaps into an alternate America that boggles the mind. There's action, adventure, and a host of interesting characters, but it's the ideas that count. Neil Smith jumps headlong into moral, legal, and social situations that will shock, enrage, and confound a few readers, but will delight, liberate, and enlighten so many more. What a world! Whenever I want to smile, I think of one of the Ayatollah's thugs trying to hijack a plane in Neil's American Confederacy. Good luck!

—F. Paul Wilson
Author of over 14 novels including the first Prometheus Award winner, Wheels Within Wheels

♦ I truly hope you can restore The Probability Broach to print. It's one of those rare ones whose dealing with the future remains sharper and fresher as time goes on. Surely an imaginative publisher could exploit that virtue. How many novels can claim to have a view of the future, or futures, that isn't outdistanced by actual events or made absurd by them? The Probability Broach! I can even imagine it being used in political science classes to get the waterlogged students to shake their minds into activity.

—Karl Hess
Legendary libertarian thinker and activist, speechwriter for Barry Goldwater, and former editor of Libertarian Party News

♦ Every work of libertarian science fiction that has been written since The Probability Broach first exploded on the scene in 1980 owes a debt of gratitude to Neil Smith's trend-setting novel. In time, this book will be seen to have had as profound an influence on the future of liberty as Atlas Shrugged and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

—Brad Linaweaver
Author of Prometheus Award-winning novel Moon of Ice, co-author of four Doom novels, and novelization of the TV show Sliders

♦ There are many special beauties to Broach: its intriguing premise, its carefully thought-out version of society-as-it--could/should-be, its wonderful irreverence toward social norms. Many premises which appear in other novels are thought-out and presented in careful detail in Broach, such as the concepts of self-defense and justice in a free society.
—Carol B. Low
Editor of Nomos

♦ I finally found a copy of Probability Broach. It's a great book. I don't see that it's dated at all. I'd like to see it in print again.

—Robert Adams
Author of the "Horse Clans" series

♦ [TPB is] so full of original, imaginative, intriguing ideas, and many have stuck with me: intelligent apes, and cetaceans fully integrated into society; most people armed in self-defense, etc. Of course, the basic premise—an alternate universe where the good guys triumphed during the Whiskey Rebellion—would have won my heart by itself.

—Jeffrey Rogers Hummel
Noted historian who specializes in the pre- and post-Revolutionary period. Author of Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men

♦ L. Neil Smith's The Probability Broach is a fine first novel, one that still makes me envious...I'm always a sucker for a good combination of SF and mystery and humor. And what a thoroughly worked out alternate history…Smith has an excellent eye for detail. He lets you taste the convincing flavor of a gritty future.

—John E. Stith
Author of Redshift Rendezvous, Scapescope, and others

♦ I think the idea that impressed me about the book was a new respect and understanding fro weapons. I have never owned a gun, nor have I ever shot one. After reading your book, I felt that it was important to learn more about self-defense and weapons, and I attended a seminar demonstrating weapons that women might use.

—Tonie Nathan
First US woman in history to win an electoral vote

♦ I most heartily think that TPB should be kept in print! The combination of a serious societal inquiry with a time-travel plot is loads of fun, and I should think it would sell well and amuse and instruct particularly the younger generation for a long time to come.

—Roger Lea McBride
Constitutional scholar and former Libertarian Party candidate for president, MacBride is co-creator of Little House on the Prairie

♦ The Probability Broach is that rare phenomenon: a book that stands on its own as engrossing fiction and also deals seriously with socio-political ideas. Those with terminally closed minds who shiver in fright at the prospect of having their biases and preconceptions challenged, might do well to avoid it. For everyone else, it's a pure delight.

—Alan W. Bock
Orange County Register, Senior Columnist

♦ I'm delighted you're bringing out a revised edition of The Probability Broach. I never agreed with Del Rey that the deletions were desirable. I look forward to seeing them replaced.

As you can probably guess, my own copy of TPB is long gone, having been loaned out once too often. Good luck with the new version; I'll be watching for it.

—Frank Kelly Freas
Noted painter and illustrator and "most popular sf artist in the history of the field" (Encyclopedia of Science Fiction), winner of 10 Hugo Awards for Best Professional Artist

♦ The Probability Broach is a humorous, adventurous tale of alternate world, showing how much better off America would be today if its history had diverged in a Libertarian direction two centuries ago. Full of surprises, suspense, technological ingenuity and knockabout fun, The Probability Broach combines elements of the classic private-eye yarn, the classic science-fiction alternate-world story and classic utopian novel. I feel certain it, too, is destined to be a classic. While getting across an upbeat message, it never misses a beat at first-rate storytelling.

—Robert Shea
Co-author with Robert Anton Wilson of the Illuminatus! trilogy, as well as many solo novels. Shea presented the Prometheus Award to The Probability Broach at the 1982 Worldcon

♦ I could mention the memorable characters, deft satire, sizzling polemic, and a lot of old fashioned hot damn swashbuckling action. I could say that like all worthwhile works it is uniquely his own, but that it could in justice be compared to a blend of Chandler, vintage Heinlein, and the Marx Brothers. Whoever reprints The Probability Broach has a gem on their hands.

—Victor Milán
Author of over 70 novels, including the Prometheus Award winning, The Cybernetic Samurai

♦ Of course I've read The Probability Broach. I've read it three or four times. Not only that, because of the confusion regarding our names, I've been congratulated for writing it f almost as much as for writing either of my own novels.

I like the way it starts out in our own "world" before it shows us the world of "what might have been." I like the fact that the viewpoint character you chose—a cop—is a representative of the political philosophy of our worlds and as such is a perfect skeptical innocent to learn about the non-political philosophy of the Broach world. I like the detective thriller format of the novel and the way it propels the action forward, the way that we learn about the Broach world not because the author is preaching at us but because the philosophy and alternate history is necessary to understand the action.

—J. Neil Schulman
Author of the Prometheus Award winning novel, The Rainbow Cadenza, the Hall of Fame Award winning novel Alongside Night, and non-fiction books Stopping Power and Self-Control, Not Gun Control

♦ The Probability Broach is one of the sanest, most humorous looks at the dangers of uncontrolled government. His character is a perfect everyman walking the streets of an inflation-ridden society, and then making his way through the surprising of an unregulated parallel universe where people rule their destinies, not government. Broach is without question the finest presentation of a Libertarian society in Science Fiction.

—Melinda Snodgrass
Author of the Circuit Trilogy, and former editor on the TV series Star Trek: the Next Generation.

♦ I read The Probability Broach when it first appeared in 1980. It was one of my favorite books of the year, and more; it contained ideas I wish could be shouted to the world, ideas that come from the American heritage of freedom and which could still bring greater individual liberty, greater technical progress.

—Vernor Vinge
Author of Prometheus Award winning novel, Marooned in Realtime, and Hugo Award winning novel, A Fire Upon the Deep

♦ The Probability Broach was one of the books that I read when I first discovered the libertarian science fiction genre. If for no other reason, as the first in the North American Confederacy series, it deserves to remain in print.

—Carl Watner
Editor of The Voluntaryist, and author of a biography of Robert LeFevre, Truth Is Not a Half-Way Place

♦ The Probability Broach is a darn good story, with lots of interesting details and, more seriously, food for thought.

—Poul Anderson
SF GrandMaster. Nuff said

♦ As a long time science fiction fan, I can say that The Probability Broach is one of the best in that genre I have come across in a long time.

—Dr. Walter Block
Austrian economist and author of Defending the Undefendable

♦ The cameo appearances by John Wayne and others; that wonderful alternate universe; and most especially, crusty-but-simpatico Win Bear—a magical mystery tour, well worth the price of admission and numerous return trips.

The Probability Broach is a book that reminds me a lot of the way Robert Heinlein saw things—the craft of writing and nature of the world alike.

—Brian Daley
Author of the Han Solo trilogy, and The White Ship series

♦ I was disgusted to hear that The Probability Broach has been allowed to go out of print! I enjoyed it and have recommended it—as well as other L. Neil Smith books—to my friends. This book in particular is the first in his alternate-universe series, and hence is supported by other books on the market. That this work should be unavailable for even a short time is amazing.

—K. Eric Drexler
Author of The Engines of Creation, and lectures on nanotechnology at Stanford

♦ I was most impressed by the breadth and depth of vision with which Smith rendered his alternate North American Confederacy. Everything that I had dreamed would be part of my future was here, and a lot more!

Broach began a new direction for science fiction. For the previous two decades, it seemed mired in two camps: the doomcriers who declared that all efforts were futile and only massive enslavement of the human race could prevent us from slaughtering one another; and the "nuke 'em and let God sort it out" macho jingoists who wrote of wars to exterminate Others so that We could have our way. Smith brought back to the sf world the People of Efficacy by answering the question of what would happen if people were free, really free to run our own lives!

Perhaps I'm pouring it on too thick. Here's the bottom line: TPB is a fun, thoughtful, engaging novel. If it were to be published as Smith intended, instead of the shorter version Del Rey put out under a so-so cover, I expect that current fans will buy it to re-live an enriched version of the world they encountered [16] years ago. And, new readers will discover a book just as fresh, as incisively witty as the day I first picked it up. Classics have a way of sticking around.

—Victor Koman
Author of Prometheus Award winning novels, The Jehovah Contract, and Solomon's Knife, and the 1996 Net-published novel, Kings of the High Frontier