I'll be honest, I love almost everything written by L. Neil Smith. I worship the typewriter keys he works upon. I even look forward to the day when the adjective “Smithian” is commonly used to describe any tautly plotted, fast-paced fiction with a definite libertarian bent. If that day should ever come, however, The Wardove will not occupy a leading place in the Smith canon.

Many long-time Smith fans were disappointed with his previous The Gallatin Divergence, a sloppy, plodding attempt to round out his North American Confederacy series. And while The Wardove does mark Smith's return to fast pacing and snappy dialogue, the story itself is weak and does not hang together coherently. Indeed, by the novel's end the book has run out of steam altogether, leaving the reader to wonder what happened.

Like most of Smith's other work, Wardove is a mystery set in another time and place. As other reviewers have mentioned in these pages, this time/place, we have Nathaniel Blackburn, a wounded war hero, who has been assigned to prevent the murder of Chelsie Bradford (the “wardove” of the title). Chelsie is a singer about to embark on an interstellar concert tour to drum up support for the war against the authoritarians.

The SF/mystery combo is quite useful for libertarian writers. It allows the hero to wander around asking questions, thus unobtrusively revealing the utopia s/he has fallen into. The reader is spared the infamous “info-dump” that plagued writers like Mack Reynolds (Q: “How did things get like this? A: Well, in 1999…and then…and so…”). Smith is a past master of this genre, constructing a society and then explaining it within the flow of the story.

Yet in Wardove, he has developed a quasi-libertarian world and a whole cast of characters without telling us a single detail about it or them beyond a few very brief hints. An example: it is suggested that Chelsie is ambivalent about her support for the war effort and yet nothing is done to explore this potentially interesting point. In fact, Chelsie herself is left an enigma; her character remains a cipher. Smith gives us his usual glossary which explains some of the more obscure ideas and terminology, but a glossary can not take the place of solid story development. Even the mystery of who is trying to kill Chelsie, supposedly the centerpiece of the novel, rapidly becomes dull and uninteresting. The story would have benefitted immensely if, just once, the action had slowed down and some basic background been developed.

Not a few libertarian SF fans have suggested that L. Neil Smith is the pamphleteer and popularizer that the movement has been waiting for. This may very well be true, but Smith should understand that not everything that falls out of his word processor is necessarily worth immediate publication.

If his aim is to get as many of his works as possible into print in the shortest time ever recorded, he is succeeding admirably. If he also wants to spread The Word by writing excellent novels, he should take some time off and seriously consider where his work is going.

Quality, after all, does not equal quantity, else Ayn Rand would have been forgotten and Harlequin romances would be considered the world's greatest literature. In the end, of course, the market will decide.

Smith may very well continue along his lackluster course and his books may continue to sell well, but I think that at some point a lot of fans are going to notice that good politics is one thing and good politics combined with a good story line is quite another. I hope that Smith returns to the solid quality that marked his earlier work before that happens.