"How would you feel if you no longer feared your government?"

That provocative question is just the subtitle of the latest collaboration between noted novelist L. Neil Smith and Aaron Zelman, founder and president of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. What follows inside the cover is a visionary scenario about what it would be like if a true libertarian somehow suddenly became the President of the United States, even within the current political context. It is a tale of intrigue, romance, self-defense, hardcore Bill of Rights enforcement and provocative political and social statements and issues.

Alexander Hope is a 50ish ex-businessman, whose high-tech innovations helped launch the information revolution. After the death of his loving wife and partner, he passes his empire on to his only daughter and semi-retires to a small Colorado town, taking up a second career as a history professor in a local private college. Unable to sit still for long, he pens a book, "Looking Forward," intended as a pro-liberty spin on Edward Bellamy's backward-looking socialist screed. It becomes a best-seller, at least among thinking people. (Excerpts from this treatise, which will be quite familiar to Smith fans, appear as header-quotes in each chapter of "Hope.")

The year is now 2008. Several of Hope's students, conspiring with others in the libertarian movement, put his name into the race for the Free Libertarian Party of America's presidential nomination. Through good fortune and just plain politics-as-usual, Alexander Hope wins the nomination and the Presidency. After a moment of breathing-space, punctuated by the expected run of assassination attempts and other battles, Hope takes office and thereupon begins to dismantle the Leviathan of the federal government, to the delight of all freedom-lovers and the horror of the autocrats, lobbyists and other leeches.

That's the overall story, but what lies beneath it is a motherlode of political and philosophical theory, salted in with a shaker, not a pourspout. At times the book is faintly reminiscent of an Ayn Rand novel, where pro-liberty polemic and speechmaking is intermixed with action and plot development. However, given that the story is about the rise of a candidate to the Presidency of the United States, a few speeches and fireside chats are certainly appropriate. Also, unlike Rand, Smith and Zelman had internal self-editors at work; the speeches are straightforward, low on rhetorical padding, and non-repetitive. The only idea that shows up in multiple places is jury nullification, which President Hope acknowledges at the close of each of his speeches, as the overriding issue that makes all the rest either possible or futile. As a result instead of Atlas Shrugged and its 1200 pages girth, Hope checks in at a much more manageable 425.

Those who are up on the political world will find special delight in this book; the preponderance of the characters are based, either loosely or perfectly, on existing real people. Most of the establishment politicians are all but identified by either their caricatures or their actualities. Libertarian Party activists will also recognize many of the major characters. Almost all of the principals are tributes, often thinly disguised; other portrayals, not always so flattering, need only a little imagination (and perhaps a flair for anagrams?) to identify their antecedents.

Meanwhile, "Hope" is a well-crafted and exciting novel—one which promotes page-turning, late night reading and even an eagerness to reread it soon thereafter. This reviewer started the book the first time after a long day, at about 1 in the morning, with the plan of reading a chapter or two over each of the next few nights; the book didn't close until it was finished, at about 7:30 that next morning. Reports from colleagues and associates in the libertarian movement have been about the same; almost nobody has been able to put it down unfinished—

In summary, this book should be a definite consideration for the next Prometheus Awards. If it gets the kind of widespread distribution it truly deserves, there might yet be "Hope" for the people of America.